Donna Birdsell - Suburban Secrets

“Is Dad coming to my game this afternoon?” Megan asked.

“I’m sure he is, but I’ll ask him when I see him.”

She’d be seeing him this morning. Damned Tom and his damned lawyer. Big Prick and Bigger Prick, as she liked to think of them.

They’d scheduled the fifth meeting in two weeks to discuss the settlement. This divorce was such a joke, all they needed to get it onto network TV was a laugh track.

Grace plucked the molten hot Pop-Tart from the toaster and wrapped it in a paper towel. “Okay, let’s roll. We have seven minutes to get you to school.”

The girls happily dumped the rest of their eggs down the garbage disposal and grabbed their backpacks from the hooks by the door.

Friday, 8:25 a.m.

Foot Powder and the Mouth

The Grocery King piped a Muzak version of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” into the aisles. Grace was just the age to find this both entertaining and disturbing.

She checked her list.

Salmon. Fresh dill. New potatoes. She was going to make herself something special tomorrow night to celebrate her freedom. Her parents were taking the kids for the Columbus Day long weekend and solemnly swore to get them to all extracurricular activities on time and dressed in the correct uniforms.

Maybe it would be good to have a relaxing weekend alone. Completely alone. She could think about what she was going to do with her life when she was the ex–Mrs. Thomas Becker.

The thought made her break into hives.

She hung a left into the pharmacy aisle and threw things into her cart.

She stopped in front of the Dr. Scholl’s display. A lump crept up her throat, and before she could stop them, the tears came. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t had to buy foot powder in ten months.

Tom had notoriously damp feet. And it wasn’t as though she missed his feet—they really were gross—but she’d loved him so much, she’d been able to overlook the grossness. Would she ever feel that way about someone’s feet again?

As she fished through her purse for a tissue, she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Lorraine Dobbs, otherwise known as the Mouth of South Whitpain.

“Grace? Are you alright?”

Grace nodded. Her blouse, now soaked with tears, stuck to her chest. “I think I’m allergic to foot powder.”

Lorraine gave her a funny look. “O-kay, then. Are you going to Misty’s later?”

Grace nodded again.

“Alrighty. See you there.” Lorraine hurried off, one of the wheels on her cart shuddering in time with the Muzak version of “Rock the Casbah.”

Grace checked her watch. Already nine minutes over her scheduled grocery shopping time.

Friday, 9:33 a.m.

Poster Girl

“We were about to send out the National Guard,” said Tammy Lynn. “You’re three minutes late.”

“I know. I’m so sorry.” Grace threw her coat and purse on a hook in the closet and rushed over to the chair at Tammy Lynn’s station at Beautific, the salon where Grace had been getting her hair done for the past ten years.

“Grace, I’m only kidding,” Tammy Lynn said, laughing, as she fastened the black polyester cape around Grace’s neck.

“Right.” Grace laughed with her.

But the thing was, she didn’t really think it was funny. Punctuality was important. A minute here, two minutes there. They all added up. When you had three kids you learned how to manage your time, or else dinner was chronically late, homework time was chronically late, and you ended up cleaning the bathroom at ten-thirty at night instead of watching the rerun of Murphy Brown on Lifetime you’d been looking forward to all day.

Her shoulder muscles bunched painfully. She had to relax. Maybe she could squeeze a few minutes of meditation in before lunch.

“Cover the gray and trim the ends?” Tammy Lynn asked, plucking the barrette from Grace’s shoulder-length, brown hair.

“Mmm-hmm.”

Tammy Lynn spun the chair around to face a poster of a slender, sophisticated woman with a soft, blond, bouncy cut that looked like at least twenty minutes worth of work every morning.

“Wait,” Grace said. “I want that.”

Tammy Lynn stopped the color bottle in midair. “What? The do on the poster?”

Grace nodded.

“Really? You sure? You gotta blow it out with a brush and curl it. You can’t just put it back in a barrette.”

Grace studied the poster again.

It wouldn’t be a completely off-the-wall thing to do. She’d been blond once, a long, long time ago. Before Tom had hinted it wasn’t quite sophisticated. Not quite who he thought she should be.

Maybe Megan was right. Maybe she needed to shake up her life a little. Hell, she could get up a few minutes earlier.

“Do it,” she said.

Friday, 10:58 a.m.

Big and Bigger

As Grace waited for the elevator in the four-story, brick-and-tinted-window building that served as suburban Philadelphia’s answer to the high-rise, she raked the wispy hairs at her neck with her fingernails.

What had she been thinking? She felt naked without her ponytail. And the last thing she wanted to feel around the man who was almost her ex-husband was naked.

She hadn’t actually wanted to be naked around him, either, for a long time.

She supposed she had a sixth sense that he’d been cheating on her, which was probably why she’d skipped the meeting with the decorator that day and gone straight home, only to find Tom stretched out on their bed, covered with peanut butter. His assistant, Marlene, was on top of him, wearing nothing but a Smucker’s negligee. A nauseating sight, considering that on her best day, wearing her best Donna Karan power suit, Marlene looked a lot like a broomstick in a red wig.

Grace had been angry as hell. In retrospect, she realized it was mostly because they’d ruined a pair of really good sheets, but also a little bit because she’d been married to Tom for thirteen years and they’d never made a PB&J sandwich together. The most creative thing they’d ever done in bed was fill out their taxes.

She supposed part of it was her own fault. Tom knew she lived and died by her Day-Timer, and if the Day-Timer said she’d be at the decorator’s at two o’clock, then that’s where she’d be.

If she’d been a tad more unpredictable, maybe they’d have had “lunch” at Marlene’s place instead, and ruined her good sheets.

Grace stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor at Kemper Ivy Kemper, where Tom’s lawyer, aka Bigger Prick, practiced. The receptionist directed her to the conference room, where Big Prick, Bigger Prick and Grace’s own lawyer, Debra Coyle, waited.

Tom raked his long fingers through salt-and-pepper hair. She could see the tension in his squared jaw. His bone structure was impeccable, really. He would undoubtedly age like Sean Connery, remaining breathtakingly handsome well into his retirement days.

She took a deep breath and pushed the door open.

Big Prick’s eyes bugged. “You cut your hair. And it’s blond.”

Bigger Prick flashed his client a look.

Grace felt a moment of grateful relief before she considered where the compliment had come from. She gave Tom a bitchy look. “I’m getting the kids’ hair cut, too. I figure we’ll save money on shampoo.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Grace. You know the children will be well taken care of, and—”

“Just hold on, Tom,” his lawyer interrupted. “Debra, will you keep your client quiet for a few minutes?”

“I think she has every right to be pissed, David. Don’t you?” Debra motioned to the chair next to hers, and Grace took a seat. “How many times are we going to rehash this pathetic settlement?”

“She signed a prenup, Debra.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“My client just wants to be fair. He wants to do what’s right.”