Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

Finally, he cleared his throat and asked, “Honey, did Cherry Click stop by here with some flowers a few days ago?”

So that’s why he was wound so tight, I mused. He’d been stewing for days, wondering where Beebee’s anniversary flowers had ended up. “No.” I said, concentrating on every muscle and nerve in my face to keep it a pleasant, blank mask. “You sweet thing, did you order me flowers?”

He paled ever so slightly as he stammered, “N - no, one of my clients lost his mama. I sent an arrangement, but I don’t think it arrived at the funeral service in time.”

Well, that was a far more interesting lie than I would have previously given him credit for. I gave a breathy little gasp. “Oh, no, whose mother died?”

I watched him squirm as he searched for the right answer. “Oh, nobody you know,” he said, picking at his plate. “It’s a client over in Quincy.”

“Oh, well, it was so thoughtful of you to send something. I can call Cherry and double-check whether it arrived.”

“No! No, I’ll take care of it,” he said, far too quickly.

“I don’t mind,” I told him, willing my lips not to curve upward.

“It’s okay, really. Don’t worry about it,” he assured me.

“All right,” I said, shrugging blithely.

His shoulders relaxed and the tense little lines around his mouth disappeared. He was comfortable again, sure that I was still in the dark. My fingers gripped my fork, my teeth grinding ever so slightly as I imagined jabbing the tines right into his forehead.

“So, um, how’s the old monthly report coming?” he asked around a mouthful of catfish. “Remember, we have to get it out by next week. You only have a few days left to mail it out.”

I hadn’t looked at it in a week. And somehow I just didn’t think descriptions of Mike’s golf game and repainting the office were going to cut it this month.

“It’s fine,” I lied.

“Be sure to mention the condo. And call down to the office and talk to Beebee,” he added before downing half of his glass of water.

I dropped my fork. But considering my usual level of clumsiness, he didn’t notice. “What?”

“It might be nice to put sort of a getting to know you interview thing in this month’s letter,” he told me. “She’s been with us for a while, but some of the clients haven’t met her yet.”

My mouth dried up. He actually wanted me to talk to the woman he was screwing behind my back? Did he have no shame? Didn’t that make him the least bit nervous at all? Apparently he trusted Beebee enough not to spill everything to me. Or he trusted me to be dumb enough not to pick up on any hints Beebee might drop.

“What do you want me to ask her?”

“Oh, the usual stuff,” he said, shrugging and returning his attention to his food. “You’ll figure it out.”

I smiled, my lips stretched so tight, I sensed the coppery sting of blood welling up into my mouth. “Oh, sure, just let us girls sort it out.”

I sat in the lobby of Mike’s office, peering over the top of a year-old copy of Redbook and watching Beebee make appointments over the phone. And trying to make her head explode though telekinesis.

I’d waited until Mike had gone to lunch to come by the office for her “interview.” Oh, I had a whole list of questions for her, like, “Who the hell do you think you are?” and “Do you have a history of sexually transmitted diseases?” But I doubted I would be able to use the newsletter as an excuse for those.

Watching her, I bounced between wondering how I was expected to compete with someone as outrageously sexy as Mike’s secretary and thrilling at every little fault I could find, like a weirdly shaped mole at the base of her neck or the fact that one of her eyebrows was slightly longer than the other. How could Mike cheat on me with someone who drew her eyebrows on and still got them asymmetrical? I knew that when it came down to it, a man didn’t give a damn about eyebrows when you had a butt they could bounce a quarter off of, but it helped me cling to a shred of superiority.

Beebee had caused quite the stir when she arrived in town. The fact that Mike had hired an unknown was highly unusual in the first place, as knowing someone who knows someone is half the battle of the Singletree employment market. The only reason Singletree parents joined churches and bridge clubs was to guarantee that their children could move out of the house one day.

Beebee had charisma, this aura of intimidation that had the local women talking about her at the gym, at the grocery, at our club meetings. Because, basically, the people I know never left high school and Beebee was the cool new girl that scared us. At the office she dressed in pencil skirts, leopard prints, and Mamie Van Doren sweaters. It was edgy and sexy but managed to keep her just outside kissing distance of tacky. It was like someone had told her “Leave them wanting more.” Tragically, that person failed to tell her “less is more” when it came to tanning and tooth whitening.

My first face-to-face interaction with Beebee was about two weeks after Mike hired her. I finally worked up the nerve to see if she lived up to the hype and made an excuse to visit Mike at the office. When I walked in the front door, she was facing away from me and she was lecturing someone named Leslie about dating the wrong kind of man.

“Sweetie, you’re never going to move out of that double-wide if you don’t start thinking with parts of your body above the waist,” Beebee snorted as I walked through the door. Her back was turned to me as she twisted the phone cord around her fingers. It was the first time I’d heard Beebee’s real accent, a far cry from the melted sugar tones she used when I called the office. Her natural voice was lower and sort of harsh, like crinkling aluminum foil. “You can’t keep dating these guys. They’re no good for you. They don’t take you any place nice and then they always expect you to put out at the end of the night… I don’t care that you would do that anyway. You could at least go after someone with a nice clean office job. Someone who will spring for a place with cloth napkins. I mean, at the rate you’re going, why not just marry a carny and be done with it?”

“No. No, you can’t date both.” She grunted. “That’s the thing with these white-collar, middle-class guys, they need to think that they’re the only ones or it’s no fun for them. And if you’re going to get knocked up -”

Unfortunately, this was the moment Beebee checked over her shoulder and saw me standing there listening. She dropped the phone in the cradle and greeted me in that sweet, fake voice. That was the first time I realized Beebee was not nearly as dumb as she looked.

What really killed me about this whole situation is that the affair was the second thing Mike and Beebee had pulled over on me. On August 23 of the previous year, I’d turned thirty. When Mike asked what kind of party I wanted, I suggested something low-key; maybe going up to our little cabin at Lake Lockwood with friends and family and having a nice weekend together. But while my brother sent a dozen candy-pink roses and a gift certificate for a seaweed wrap, my birthday came and went without so much as a card from my husband.

So I held a twenty-minute pity party, ate half a fat-free cheesecake, and allowed spa technicians to wrap me in a detoxifying kelp burrito. That Friday, Mike said he wanted to take me out to a nice dinner to make up for not having time to get me a present.

He took me to the Singletree Country Club, where about one hundred fifty people jumped out at me and yelled “Surprise!” I was surprised, all right. I didn’t know who the hell these people were. I recognized my parents and Mike’s parents, and that was about it.