Ladies' Night Andrews, Kay (great novels .txt) 📖

Rochelle opened the ledger again. “Some things are best left unsaid, you know? And this is one of them.”

“Just tell me, please? So, he had an affair? Was it somebody I knew?”

“It was nobody. A snowbird from Buffalo whose husband used to keep a boat here in the marina during the winter. Her husband died the summer before, and she was down here by herself, and I guess … she got lonely.”

“Oh, God.” Grace felt physically sick. Her father? Butch? The same guy who wore loud Hawaiian shirts and loved country music? The man who gave both Rochelle and Grace the same Whitman Sampler of chocolates every Valentine’s Day? Butch had a girlfriend?

“It didn’t last very long,” Rochelle said quietly. “Your dad was a lousy sneak.”

Grace swallowed hard. “How … how did you figure it out?”

“He was acting funny. Not like himself. You know how Butch was; he liked his set routine. But that January, he switched barbers. After twenty years of the same haircut, he grows sideburns, for God’s sake. He started taking an extra shower, in the middle of the day. You know how I always went to the wholesale house for supplies, right? Well, suddenly, he insisted he should be the one to go pick up our order. He’d be gone two, three hours. One time, he came back without the paper napkins and take-out containers. He had some lame excuse that they were out. Of paper napkins?” She shook her head. “He never did have much of an imagination.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Grace said. “You must have been devastated.”

“Mad as hell, more like. Because he’d promised—promised on his mother’s grave—he wouldn’t put me through that crap again.”

“Again? It wasn’t the first time?” Grace found herself staring into her own image in the mirror behind the bar, and then at herself, and then at Rochelle, and at Rochelle’s image. Who were these strangers?

“No. Not the first time.” Rochelle’s lips were set in a grim smile. “You were only three the first time he cheated. I found out then, and I left. I took you to my cousin’s house in Jacksonville, and we stayed three weeks. Butch was heartbroken. He couldn’t stand the idea of not having his baby girl around. He knew he’d messed up. He begged me to take him back, said he’d be a different man. And he was, for a long time.”

“I just…” Grace swallowed hard. “I don’t know what to think. You never said a word. The two of you never fought. My friends’ parents were splitting up while we were in high school, and they used to tell me they envied me, because Butch and Rochelle—you know, Butch and Rochelle were solid.”

Rochelle reached out and stroked Grace’s hair. “Maybe I should have divorced him back then, after the first time. But where would I have gone with a little kid in tow? I had no real job skills; certainly I didn’t have any money. And I was too proud to admit to my parents that I’d made a mistake. So I did the easy thing. I went back to Butch. And I stayed.”

“All those years? When I thought you guys had the model marriage? That was all a lie? You only stayed together because of me?”

“It wasn’t all a lie,” Rochelle said. “We had some good times. We made a life here, had friends. Had you. I don’t want you to think it was a bad life, Grace, which is why I never told any of this to you.”

“You could have told me. Especially once I was an adult. I would have understood,” Grace said. “It makes me sad to think that you were that unhappy, and I was just … oblivious.”

“You weren’t oblivious. You were busy, spreading your wings, starting a career. A marriage. But now I think, I wonder, if I didn’t set you up for failure by giving you unrealistic expectations of your own marriage. Does it make me pathetic, how much vicarious pleasure I got seeing what an amazing woman you were becoming?”

“You’ve never been pathetic,” Grace said. “But what made you finally decide to leave?”

Rochelle fidgeted with her glasses. “Besides Edwina? That was her name. Edwina! I’d say it was just a slow build. One morning, Butch was fussing at me, because I’d bought Chock full o’Nuts instead of Folgers without consulting him.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “God. Dad and his coffee.”

“I picked up the whole bag of beans and dumped it in the trash. I walked upstairs, packed a bag. When I got downstairs, he looked at me like I’d lost my mind. ‘You’re leaving over a bag of coffee?’ So I looked at him and I said, ‘It’s not about coffee. It’s about Edwina.’”

“Did you think about going to counseling?” Grace asked.

“I went to counseling. Your dad refused to go. He thought it was a waste of his hard-earned money.”

“That sounds like Dad,” Grace said with a sigh. “I still can’t believe you got as far as hiring a divorce lawyer without telling me. Wait a minute. Mitzi? Mitzi was the lawyer you hired?”

Rochelle nodded. “You and Ben hadn’t been married that long at the time. You were deliriously happy. I didn’t want to upset you. And then, of course, we found out how sick Butch was. I wasn’t even gone a week.”

“Did he beg you to come back?” Grace asked, teary-eyed now, thinking about her father’s last months of life, growing thinner, using a walker, and then, finally, a wheelchair.

“Butch? Never. He didn’t have to ask. I knew he needed me, so I came. We never even discussed that week. It was like it never happened.” Rochelle got a glint in her eye. She laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Grace asked.

“Nothing. I was just thinking about the coffee. When I moved back here, that first morning, I went out to the kitchen to make coffee. There sat a brandnew bag of Chock full o’Nuts. That was Butch’s idea of an apology.”

Grace laughed until the tears were rolling down