“Why does Janey need to be involved? Are you asking her to invest in your business?” Ivy gave Ron a horrified look. Family didn’t lend family money. It caused rifts, problems that haunted subsequent generations. She’d never just flat-out ask Janey for money, even though she knew she could spare it.
“The owners of SoarBarre offered me some money. Kind of a bonus, see? They’re all scared of this new class people are doing. It’s called The Workout and it’s super secret and now all the rich ladies who spent all their time at SoarBarre are going there. So Ally and Lemon want to know more about it. They want to shut it down. And they asked me if I could help them. So I’m like their private detective.”
“Where does Janey fit into all this?” Summer asked, genuinely interested.
“She’s like friends with the owner of it. She’s going to an island with her on a retreat and she has the super secret invite. So I asked her to bring me along to a Workout and she said she would, but at the last minute she texted me last night and canceled. That’s one of the reasons I’m so pissed off today. Isn’t that the shit? It sucks, right? And I need this money from Ally and Lemon. If they really give it to me maybe I could quit and do something new, and I think that’s what would make me happy. But then Janey had to go and ruin it all!”
· · ·
Ivy had told Ally and Lemon yesterday that she’d be going to a Workout today, and now she had to make up a story about what it was like. She couldn’t tell them she didn’t go. She’d already told them what she knew, starting with the fact that Sara Strong made everyone in The Workout wear grey. That was weird enough, but it made both Ally and Lemon pause for a second.
“We could institute a uniform policy,” Lemon said.
Ally chimed in. “Do you think people want to wear uniforms? We can give them uniforms.” Then they went all hive mind, acting for a moment as though Ivy weren’t even there. Yellow tanks and shorts, they decided. Everyone would wear yellow. And they could sell the uniforms for $150 a pop.
And then Ivy told them about St. Lucia, embellishing it to make it seem as if she knew more than she did. By the end of their conversation she had them convinced she knew everything about this luxurious Workout retreat, so much so that Lemon told her SoarBarre would buy her a plane ticket to go spy on it. They were going to fly her to the Caribbean. She’d never even left the country except for that one time Janey’s mom and dad brought the whole extended family to Mexico for Lorna’s fiftieth birthday party. But now Janey was acting all cagey about everything. And if she kept this up then Ivy wouldn’t get the bonus and she could even lose her job, because her bosses had already bought her a really expensive plane ticket.
“Maybe I can help,” Summer said. “I do yoga for Kate Wells.”
Ron’s eyebrows knit together with consternation. “That’s a sidebar, ladies. Take it outside of the circle. Now we have about five more minutes left. Does anyone want to talk about anything else?”
Seth, the BRO-th guy, tentatively raised his hand.
“I hate soup.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Janey was distracted by what Anna told her at the twins’ birthday party. Beau didn’t just want her to take some time off. He was lying about her to the entire company.
She’d also gotten seven emails from Anna since that birthday party. Her daughter, the one who did resemble Joan Rivers, came down with what Anna was referring to as the swine flu, so Anna had been working from home. She’d been forwarding Janey two months of memos from Beau, each of them more erratic than the last. Now Janey needed to figure out exactly what to do with them.
There was a memo sent the afternoon of the doomsday breakfast that informed her coworkers Janey was “taking a lovely vacation to Sweden for the next two weeks.” It explicitly instructed the staff not to “bother her” since she was “dealing with her own personal issues.”
What the fuck, Janey thought.
From there Beau concocted even more elaborate stories for her. She’d fallen love with a Swedish furniture designer and decided to stay even longer. According to Beau, Janey was learning Swedish and taking to life in Stockholm. Again, the staff were instructed to avoid contacting her.
A final email from Beau claimed that Janey would no longer be involved in the day-to-day workings of the company and that all business decisions would be made by him personally with the help of a to-be-named board of directors. It was becoming clear that Beau never cared about her weight, not really. He wanted the company all for himself and he was willing to humiliate her to get it.
She began leaving voicemails for the Sweet family attorney, but she worried that the absurdity of the situation made her seem ridiculous, so she tried to keep them as vague as possible until she could actually speak to him. What Beau was doing had to be illegal. But she had no idea what laws he was breaking. He had something up his sleeve.
She was so preoccupied with figuring out what was going on that she nearly forgot all about her date with Hugh Albermarle. He had tickets to the opening night of the New York City Ballet, a presumptuous first date but one Janey couldn’t possibly refuse. Maybe Stella had advised him he had to do something spectacular to woo her from her juice date.
Never in her life had Janey juggled more than one guy at a time. It was hard enough keeping track of one, his likes and his dislikes, his friends, his jobs, whether he had a crazy mother or an overbearing father. CJ had become an expert at it, and when she was hooking up with a handful of guys all at once back in her twenties, Janey once asked her how she managed to keep track.
“Excel,” CJ told her very matter-of-factly. “I keep a spreadsheet of all the information. Basic stuff. How many siblings, what restaurants they take me to, whether they like to go down on me or not.”
Janey hadn’t even been on a date with Hugh Albermarle yet, and she didn’t know how she’d keep things straight. For the past three weeks she’d been texting with Jacob nearly nonstop (even though half those texts were in emoji), and she had even missed this morning’s Workout because Allison was back in town and had taken Sunny out to Fire Island. She felt awful canceling on Ivy, but the opportunity to spend the morning in bed with Jacob was more appealing than curling into the fetal position and crying with Sara Strong.
The sex with Jacob was phenomenal. He was attentive and kind and had so much energy, which Janey chalked up to the fact that juice really was the natural Viagra. Thinking about Viagra made her think again about Hugh Albermarle, who was at least thirty years older than Jacob. She’d never had sex with someone that much older than she was. What would his body be like? Would his skin be all loose and droopy? She would’ve canceled if the setup hadn’t been made by Stella. She didn’t want to hurt the shaman’s feelings, especially not before they set off for eight days in St. Lucia together. Janey tried to conjure memories of the hand-holding with Hugh and the excitement she felt after the cactus ceremony, but all she could think of was how hot Jacob looked with his shirt off.