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

hospital operating room, for God’s sake. Who wants to grab a beer and a burger in a hospital?”

“There’s a difference between shabby gentility and run-down and decrepit, and it’s really not so fine a line,” Grace said. “Our regulars may grouse at first, but you wait, they’re gonna appreciate pouring beer from a pitcher without a busted spout or eating with a fork without bent tines.”

“My regulars don’t know what a fork tine is,” Rochelle said.

Maybe, Grace wanted to tell her, if we clean this place up, change the menu, and raise our standards a little, maybe we’ll attract a clientele that actually will pay $15 for a decent dinner entrée.

But before she could lob another useless argument into Rochelle’s court, she happened to glance up at the television and stopped, midsentence.

Rochelle followed her gaze. “Aw shit. Here we go again.”

The morning news hour had segued into Sunrise Sarasota, one of those chatty, morning-magazine-format shows. The cohosts, an unbearably perky husband-and-wife team named Charley and Joe, were doing an “In the Kitchen” segment that had the wife, Charley, attempting to crack a Florida lobster shell while the husband, Joe, was being tutored in the finer points of crafting a table setting.

When Grace heard an all-too-familiar voice, a high-pitched nasal twang, she turned around to stare at the wall-mounted television above the bar.

The guest coaching Charley and Joe through their cooking segment was none other than J’Aimee. Her J’Aimee, or rather, Ben’s J’Aimee.

Rochelle grabbed for the remote to change the channel, but Grace was faster, snatching it up from beneath her mother’s fingers, then staring, dumbfounded, at the television.

“Don’t go away!” Charley was saying. “We’ll be right back with Gracenotes-style blogger J’Aimee.

“What?” Grace shrieked. “Gracenotes-style blogger? Seriously?”

“Just turn it off,” Rochelle said soothingly. “Tune it out. This means nothing. You’re just going to get yourself all worked up for nothing.”

“It’s not for nothing,” Grace said, still staring up at the television. “This is all Ben’s doing.” She scrabbled around on the bar, looking for her phone.

“I’m calling my lawyer,” Grace said, scrolling through the numbers on her contact list. “He can’t do this. He can’t promote her as a Gracenotes blogger. He can’t turn her into me!”

“Looks like he already did,” Rochelle said, under her breath.

Grace got Mitzi Stillwell’s voice mail. “Mitzi! This is Grace. Turn on Sunrise Sarasota right now! Ben has J’Aimee on there, promoting herself as the Gracenotes-style blogger. You’ve got to do something, Mitzi. Call the judge, get an injunction or something. Call me back, okay?”

The commercial break was over, and Charley and Joe were back with their guest.

“Look at that whore!” Grace ranted. “See how good she looks? I swear, Ben’s gotten her a makeover. She looks almost classy.”

J’Aimee was wearing a sleeveless hot-pink dress, her newly dyed dark locks worn in a simple upsweep.

“They must have put some kind of concealer on that barbed-wire tattoo she has on her right bicep,” Grace muttered. “And I think maybe she got Botox on her lips. You see how full they are now?”

Rochelle shrugged. “I never paid that much attention to the girl, to tell you the truth.”

J’Aimee was now openly flirting with Joe, batting her artificial lashes at him, giggling and playfully flicking a dinner napkin at him …

“Hey! That’s my damned napkin.” Grace scrambled up on one of the barstools to get a closer look at the television. She pointed at the screen. “Those are my hand-blown Mexican wineglasses.” She felt tears welling up in her eyes. “I carried those all the way back from Puerto Vallarta on my lap.

“And look. She’s using that fugly damned pottery from my Gracenotes sponsor. That’s strictly a Ben move.”

She sank back down on the barstool, unable to take her eyes off the television. Now J’Aimee was placing a centerpiece in the middle of the table. It was a large, shallow glass bowl, heaped with shiny green Haas avocados.

“I always like to use fresh local fruits and vegetables in my table settings,” she told Charley, adjusting one of the avocados. “It gives a party a sense of authenticity, don’t you think?”

“Authenticity?” Grace howled. “She didn’t know an avocado from an orange before I hired her.”

Rochelle quietly removed the remote control from Grace’s clutch. She aimed it at the television and clicked.

“You’re getting yourself all worked up for nothing,” she said. “So what if she’s on television? So what if Ben has her writing a blog with your name on it? She’s not you. She’s just a cheap little floozie. You are the real thing. You’re butter and she’s … she’s not even Parkay. Ben will figure that out soon enough. Your readers will figure it out. Everything will work itself out.”

“No, it won’t,” Grace said tearfully. “She’s stolen everything from me. My house, my husband, my napkins. That was my wedding silver she was setting the table with. My Repoussé silver, Mom.”

Rochelle sighed and folded her weeping daughter into her arms. “It’ll be okay, Grace. Really it will. I know it hurts right now, but you’ll get through this. You will. I’ll help you.”

Grace looked up at her. Tears streamed down her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose was snotty. She sniffed loudly. “How, Mom?”

“I just will,” Rochelle vowed. She grabbed the bottle of spray cleaner Grace had left behind the bar. “Look. I’ll let you clean the office next, okay? You can throw out whatever you want, and I won’t say a word.”

*   *   *

After the judge refused to give her back her blog, Grace promised herself she would not look at Gracenotes. But that afternoon, once she’d filled the Sandbox’s Dumpster with dusty files and years’ and years’ worth of old Sports Illustrated and Florida Sportsman magazines, Grace opened her laptop and clicked on the icon for her blog.

“Oh no she didn’t,” she murmured, looking at the home page. Everything had changed. Including the name. It was now Gracenotes for Living, with J’Aimee! The new banner was in a nearly unreadable font, in a garish orange and teal color combination.