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

“We alternate days. I pick him up after school tomorrow,” Wyatt admitted.

Camryn was steering him back toward the table. “What about you?” she asked, after he’d sat down again. “You’ve got a kid. Did you ever resent your wife spending more time with your son than with you?”

Wyatt took a sip of his beer. “Maybe when Bo was just a baby, yeah, I probably felt a little left out, especially when Callie was nursing him. Things got better after the pediatrician convinced her she could pump breast milk and let me take the early-morning feedings so she could get some sleep.”

“You did that?” Grace turned to him in surprise.

“Sure,” Wyatt said, shrugging. “It was kind of cool. I’d take Bo out to the living room, give him his bottle, and we’d watch cartoons until we both fell back asleep. I swear, he loved Phineas and Ferb when he was only six weeks old. He’d laugh his little ass off.”

Camryn shook her head. “Dexter Nobles used to sleep right through those midnight feedings. And I don’t remember him changing all that many diapers either.”

“Eric changed a lot of diapers, and sometimes he’d sit up and read aloud to me while I nursed Darby,” Suzanne said wistfully. “I kind of miss those days.”

“He read to you? That’s so sweet,” Ashleigh said. “What did he read?”

“Harry Potter, actually,” Suzanne said. “A college classmate who was living in the U.K. sent us the first book as a baby gift for Darby. Another nice memory I’d completely forgotten about.”

“How about you all? Suzanne asked, polling the others. “Did anybody else come up with any deeply repressed happy moments?”

Ashleigh wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t really get that question when Paula asked it. See, I was happy right up until Boyce started up with that Suchita chick.”

“Any one, particular memory?” Suzanne queried.

“Oh yeah,” Ashleigh said, dreamy-eyed. “One of the drug companies had a ‘seminar’ for plastic surgeons in the Napa Valley back in the fall. They put us up in this fabulous old inn in the wine country. Boyce and I drove over to Calistoga and did a couples-only mud bath and massage…” She giggled. “We got pretty naughty. I ended up with mud in the most interesting places…”

“Spare us any more smutty details,” Camryn said drily. “We get the picture.”

“Your turn,” Ashleigh said, pointing right back at her. “And don’t try telling us you were never happy. You were married longer than any of us, right? There must be some reason you stayed with your husband all those years.”

Camryn sighed. “The last really happy time? I’d have to say it was that first Christmas Jana was old enough to understand about Santa Claus. Dexter bought her this ridiculously expensive Victorian dollhouse with about a million itty-bitty pieces to it. That night, after we put her to bed, we put on my Johnny Mathis CD, and he popped a bottle of champagne he’d been saving for a special occasion. We stayed up drinking and laughing and dancing to Johnny Mathis. “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” came on, and the next thing you know, we’d forgotten all about that dollhouse…” She blushed. “I sound like Ashleigh now, spilling about our sex life. Of course, that was fifteen years ago.”

“You’ve really been that unhappy all this time?” Grace asked.

Camryn rested her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her hands while she thought about it.

“I guess I was going with the flow. At one point, when Jana was about eight, I realized things weren’t great. But then Dexter made partner at his law firm, and I finally got hired on at News Four. We bought the new house with the pool and we put Jana in private school at Saint Stephen’s, which was not cheap. And I thought, why rock the boat? Things will get better. But they never did. I should’ve ended it a long time ago. Before things turned ugly like this.”

“Graaaaccce?” Ashleigh tilted her nearly empty glass. “Is your mom coming back? ’Cause I could use another of her ’ritas.”

“I’ll get it,” Grace stood.

“And then it’s your turn to share,” Camryn said, making quote marks with the fingertips of both hands. “So don’t think we’re going to forget.”

Rochelle deliberately turned her back to Grace when she walked behind the bar. “I’m fixing Ashleigh another fake margarita,” she told her mother. “Could you add it to our tab?”

“Is the dog locked up?” she asked pointedly.

“She’s in the bathroom, taking a nap,” Grace assured her. “It won’t happen again.”

*   *   *

“We’re waiting,” Wyatt said pointedly, when Grace returned to the table with Ashleigh’s drink.

She stuck her tongue out at him. “I notice you haven’t read from your journal tonight.”

“But I shared. And it was honest and it was meaningful,” he taunted. “Right, ladies?”

“Come on, Grace. Your turn.” Ashleigh noisily sipped her fakearita.

“Okay, okay,” Grace grumbled. She pulled her notebook from her bag and skimmed what she’d written.

“I’d never lived in a real house, until Ben and I bought our first little place in Bradenton. It was the worst house on the street. Concrete-block and less than a thousand square feet. Two tiny bedrooms, one miserable bath that didn’t even have a shower, a galley kitchen so narrow that when you opened the oven door it almost touched the cabinet on the opposite wall. The countertops were plywood covered with plastic tile.”

“Sounds dreamy,” Camryn said.

“I knew we could make it dreamy. But we had zero money to work with.”

Ashleigh waved her hand in the air. “Excuse me, Grace, but when does the happy-memory part come in? Because, so far, this is all sounding pretty grim to me.”

“That was just the setup. The prologue,” Grace said. She flipped through the pages of her notebook and began reading.

“I was working for a big developer in Sarasota, designing their model-home interiors. This was before the economy tanked, when condos were selling as fast as they could put them up. Ben was an account