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

No more. Now, he idly plucked at the meager assortment of shirts and pants hanging limply on the wire hangers. “Dude,” he muttered under his breath, “you are really, really lame.” Finally, he found a pair of presentable navy blue Dockers and a short-sleeved plaid dress shirt that had been a Father’s Day gift from Callie. The J.C. Penney price tag still hung from the sleeve.

The pants fit reasonably well, but they were wrinkled. He put on the shirt, then padded out to the living area, where Nelson was eating a chicken potpie at the dinette and reading the sports section. “Dad, do we own an iron?”

“Dunno,” Nelson mumbled, his fingers poised over the box scores. “Your mother always handled that.” He glanced up, looked surprised. “Since when do you iron?”

“Since now,” Wyatt said. He checked under the kitchen sink, then on the top shelf of the hall closet, to no avail. “Screw it,” he said, tossing the pants into the dryer.

While he was waiting for his pants, Wyatt went back to the bathroom. Feeling foolish, but somehow lighthearted, he brushed his teeth, again, and flossed. Back in the bedroom, with the door closed, he checked himself out in the cloudy mirror on the back of the closet door.

He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. His teeth were straight, he was clean-shaven. After that crack Callie had made about his baldness he’d thought about letting his hair grow out again, just to prove he had plenty, but later he’d changed his mind. Screw Callie. He worked outside in the blazing Florida sun all day, and it was just much cooler without hair. Obviously, she liked a guy with hair. Luke wore his hair deliberately shaggy, like a surfer dude, although the guy had clearly never been anywhere near a surfboard. And Wyatt had always secretly suspected Luke of being a bottle blond.

Luke, Wyatt thought, had a body like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Big, pillowy hips, blobby butt. He was a desk jockey and looked it. But a successful desk jockey.

Now Wyatt turned and surveyed his own body, sucking in his gut—okay, just a little. He had wide shoulders, and all those years of hard labor at the park left him with the pects and abs to prove it. He was just a shade over six feet tall.

Callie’d always claimed his eyes were what made her start flirting with him at that bar back in Clemson, all those years ago. That and the dimples. His eyes were a mud color, he’d always thought, but he had his mother’s eyelashes, thick, black, Bambi lashes, as she called them.

A lot of good they’d done him lately.

What the hell. He fetched the pants, got dressed, put on his grandfather’s gold watch. For maybe the millionth time, he looked at the plain gold wedding band on the ring finger of his left hand. He’d taken it off dozens of times, put it back on again the same number of times. He couldn’t say why. Callie had replaced her wedding rings with the flashy diamond “engagement” ring Luke had bought her. Was it technically possible to be engaged while you were still married? Maybe he’d remove his own ring once the divorce was final. He only knew it wasn’t time. Yet. Probably this made him a double loser. He took a deep breath and picked up the truck keys from the dresser.

“You goin’ to church?” Nelson asked. He’d moved to the recliner in front of the television and found the Braves game. He was dressed in an old T-shirt and a pair of faded pajama bottoms. Geezus H., Wyatt thought. Save me from ever wearing pajama bottoms.

“Church? No. Remember, Dad? I told you. I’ve got to go to that divorce therapy session.”

“Oh, right,” Nelson said vaguely. “And Bo’s at his mom’s?”

“Yes,” Wyatt said patiently. “Bo is with Callie tonight. “I’ll pick him up Thursday. Remember?”

Every night he replayed this same scene. Nelson would ask where Bo was, and Wyatt would tell him. Most of the time, his father seemed perfectly with it, lucid, same old Nelson. But in the evenings, he got … vague. Wyatt told himself his father was fine. He was still physically fit, strong as an ox. He ran the concession stand in the park, took tickets, helped out with the never-ending landscaping and maintenance. But in the past year, Nelson had begun a slow, almost indefinable slide. Sometimes, he needed help with the bank deposits. He got aggravated if there was even the slightest deviation in his carefully mapped daily routine.

Wyatt worried. But hell, he worried about everything. Like now. He doubled back to the bedroom, hung up the dress pants and the plaid shirt. He rolled up the sleeves of the white dress shirt he’d worn to court and put on his nicest pair of shorts. And what he thought of as his dress shoes, a pair of leather flip-flops. At least he felt like some version of himself.

*   *   *

Paula Talbott-Sinclair greeted them all in the reception area. Her usually flyaway hair had been tamed and twisted into a sleek, artful chignon. She wore a long wispy yellow and green flowered dress with bell sleeves that made her look like a butterfly, bright coral lipstick, and her usual dozen or so bracelets. She wore gold gladiator-style sandals, and tonight she seemed lucid and bright-eyed. She was, Grace thought, a woman transformed. Which made Grace immediately suspicious.

“Hello, friends,” she said, grasping the hand of each group member as they arrived at the office. She made a show of having them all sign in, inviting them to have coffee, asking them how their week had gone.

Grace was surprised when the first person she saw was Wyatt. He’d obviously taken pains with his appearance tonight. “Hey,” she said, sidling over to him at the coffee machine. “You look nice tonight.”

“No parrot poop, right?” He looked embarrassed. “You look nice, too. But unlike me, you always look good.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen me a