April 2012
Cori's Picks
Overview
Have you ever wanted to rewrite your past?
Three best friends, all with the same birthday, are about to turn forty. Celebrating at a summerhouse in Maine, Leslie Headrick, Madison Appleby, and Ellie Abbott are taking stock of their lives and loves, their wishes and choices. But none of them expect the gift that awaits them at the summerhouse: the chance for each of them to turn their "what-might-have-beens" into reality...
Leslie, a suburban wife and mother, follows the career of a boy who pursued her in college wonders: what if she had chosen differently? Madison dropped a modeling career to help her high school boyfriend recover from an accident, even though he'd jilted her. But what if she had said "no" when her old boyfriend had called? Ellie became a famous novelist, but a bitter divorce wiped out her earnings — and shattered her belief in herself. Why had the "justice" system failed her? And could she prevent its happening the second time around?
Now, a mysterious "Madame Zoya," offers each of them a chance to relive any three weeks from the past. Will the road not taken prove a better path? Each woman will have to decide for herself as she follows the dream that got away...and each must choose the life that will truly satisfy the heart's deepest longings.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Leslie Headrick looked out her kitchen window at the old summerhouse in the back. Now, in early fall, the vines and twisted stems of the old roses nearly covered the building, but in the winter you could see the glassed-in porch well. You could see the peeling paint and the cracked glass in the little round window above the front door. One of the side doors was hanging on one hinge, and Alan said it was a danger to anyone who walked past the place. In fact, Alan said that the whole structure was a danger and should be torn down.
At that thought, Leslie turned away from the window and looked back at her beautiful, perfect kitchen. Just last year Alan had gutted her old kitchen and put in this one. "It's the best that money can buy," he'd said about the maple cabinets and the solid- surface countertops. And Leslie was sure that it was the best, but she missed her ratty old Welsh dresser and the little breakfast nook in the corner. "That table and those chairs look like something kids made in a shop class," Alan had said, and Leslie had agreed — but their perspective of what was beautiful differed.
As always, Leslie had given in to her husband and let him put in this showplace of a kitchen, and now she felt that she was ruining a piece of art when she baked cookies and messed up the perfect surfaces that scratched so easily.
She poured herself another cup of tea from the pot, strong, black English tea, loose tea, no wimpy tea bags for her, then turned back to again look out at the summerhouse. This was a day for reflecting because in three more days she was going to be forty years old — and she was going to celebrate her birthday with two women she hadn't seen or heard from in nineteen years.
Behind her, in the hallway, her two suitcases were packed and waiting. She was taking a lot of clothing because she didn't know what the other two women were going to be wearing, and Ellie's letter had been vague. "For a famous writer, she doesn't say much," Alan had said in an unpleasant tone of voice. He had been quite annoyed to find out that his wife was friends with a best-selling author.
"But I didn't know that Ellie was Alexandria Farrell," Leslie had said, looking at the letter in wonder. "The last time I saw Ellie she wanted to be an artist. She was — "
But Alan wasn't listening. "You could have asked her to speak at the Masons," he was saying. "Just last year, one of my clients said that his wife was a devotee of Jordan Neale." Everyone in America knew that Jordan Neale was the lead character that Ellie, under the pen name of Alexandria Farrell, had created. Jordan Neale was someone women wanted to imitate and men wanted to...Well, the series of romantic mysteries had done very well. Leslie had read all of them, having no idea that the writer was the cute young woman she'd met so long ago.
So now, in the quiet of the early morning, before Alan and the kids came downstairs, Leslie was thinking about what had happened to her in the last nineteen years. Not much, she thought. She'd married the boy next door, literally, and they'd had two children, Joe and Rebecca, now fourteen and fifteen years old. They weren't babies any longer, she thought, sipping her tea and still staring out the window at the summerhouse.
Maybe it was the letter and the invitation from Ellie, a woman she hadn't seen in so very many years, that was making Leslie think about the past so hard. But, as Ellie had written, their one and only meeting had had an impact on Ellie's life and she wanted to see both Leslie and Madison again.
Yes, Leslie thought, that meeting had had an impact on her life too. Since that afternoon nineteen years ago, she'd often thought of Ellie and Madison. And now she was going to fly all the way from Columbus, Ohio, to a tiny town in Maine to spend a long weekend with the other two women.
But what was it about the summerhouse that was holding her attention this morning? She'd been so restless that she hadn't been able to sleep much last night, so, at four A.M., she'd got out of bed, dressed, then tiptoed downstairs to put together the ingredients for apple pancakes. Not that anyone would eat any of them, she thought with a sigh. Rebecca would be horrified at the calories, Joe would come down with only seconds to spare before he made the school bus, and Alan would only want cereal, something high- fiber, low-calorie, low-cholesterol, low...Well, low-flavor, Leslie thought. Attempts at gourmet cooking were wasted on her family.
With another sigh, Leslie picked up a warm pancake, folded it, and ate it with pleasure. Last week when she'd received Ellie's letter, she wished she'd received it six months earlier so she would have had time to get rid of the extra fifteen pounds she was carrying. Everyone at the Garden Club said they envied Leslie her figure and how she'd been able to keep it all these years, but Leslie knew better. Nineteen years ago she'd been a dancer and she'd had a body that was supple, muscular, and hard. Now, she thought, she was soft, not fat really, but her muscles were soft. She hadn't thrown her leg up on a ballet bar in years.
Overhead she could hear Rebecca's quick step. She'd be the first one down, the first one to ask why her mother had made something that was guaranteed to clog all their arteries with one bite. Leslie sighed. Rebecca was so very much like her father.
Joe was more like his mother, and if Leslie could get him away from his friends long enough, they could sit and talk and "smell the roses," as she used to tell him. "Like your wallpaper," he'd said when he was just nine years old. It had taken Leslie a moment to figure out what he was talking about, then she'd smiled warmly. In the summerhouse. She'd put up wallpaper with roses on it in the summerhouse.
Now she remembered looking at her son on that long ago day and seeing his freckled face as they sat across from each other in the old inglenook at one side of the sunny kitchen. Joe had been such an easygoing child, sleeping through the night when he was just weeks old, so unlike Rebecca, who seemed to cause chaos and confusion wherever she was. Leslie wasn't sure if Rebecca had yet slept through a night of her life. Even now, when she was fifteen, she thought nothing of barging into her parents' bedroom at three A.M. to announce that she'd heard a "funny noise" on the roof. Leslie would tell her to go back to bed and get some sleep, but Alan took "funny noises" seriously. The neighbors were used to seeing Alan and his daughter outside with flashlights.
Leslie looked back at the summerhouse. She could still see some of the pink paint on it. Fifteen years later and remnants of the paint were still there.
Smiling, she remembered Alan's expression when she'd bought the paint. "I can understand if you want to paint the place pink, but, sweetheart, you've bought five different shades of pink. Didn't those men at the store help you?"
Alan was a great believer in men taking care of women, whether it was at home or in a paint store.
At that time Leslie had been five months pregnant with Rebecca and she was already showing. She didn't know it then, but Rebecca was going to be early in everything, from letting her mother know she was there to...well, letting the world know she was there.
Laughing, Leslie had told Alan that she planned to paint the summerhouse using all five shades of pink. Now, fifteen and a half years later, she could still remember the look on his face. Leslie's mother had said that Alan didn't have a creative bone in his body, and, over the years, Leslie had found out that that was true. But, back then, when they were both so young and so happy to be on their own, the colors she wanted to paint the falling down old summerhouse had been cause for laughter.
It had been Leslie who'd persuaded Alan to buy the big Victorian house that was in an old, unfashionable neighborhood. Alan had wanted something new, something that was white on the outside and white on the inside. But Leslie couldn't stand any of the houses that Alan had liked: perfectly square boxes set inside a bigger perfectly square box. "But that's what I like about them," Alan had said, not understanding her complaint.
It was Leslie's mother who had given her the strength to stand up to her new husband. "The house belongs to the woman," her mother had said. "It's where you spend most of your time and it's where you raise your children. It's worth a fight." In her family, her mother had been the fighter. Leslie was like her father and liked to let things find their own solutions.
Later Leslie said that it was having Rebecca's fierce spirit inside her that had given her the courage. She played her trump card: "Alan, dear, we are buying the house with money my father left to me." Alan didn't say anything, but the look on his face made her never, ever again say anything like that.
But then she'd never before or since wanted anything as much as she'd wanted that big, rambling old house that needed so very much work. Since her father had been a building contractor, she knew what needed to be done and how to go about getting it done.
"That has to go," Alan had said when he'd seen the old summerhouse, hidden under fifty-year-old trees, nearly obscured by wisteria vines.
"But that's the most beautiful part of the house," Leslie had said.
Alan had opened his mouth to say something, but Rebecca had chosen that moment to give her first kick, and the argument about the fate of the summerhouse was never completed. Later, whenever Alan had said anything about the house, Leslie had said, "Trust me," so he'd left it to her. After all, Alan had just started selling insurance and he was ambitious, very, very ambitious. He worked from early to late. He joined clubs and attended meetings. He was quite happy when he found out that the most fashionable church in town was within walking distance of the horrible old house that Leslie had persuaded him to purchase.
And it was at church that he found out that people were pleased with him for having the foresight to buy "the old Belville place" and restore it. "Sound invest, that," some old man said as he clapped Alan on the shoulder. "It's unusual that a man as young as you would have that much wisdom." Later the man bought a big policy from Alan. After that, Alan took as much interest in the house as Leslie did. And when Leslie had her hands full with two babies under the age of three, Alan took over supervising the restoration of the house.
At first there had been fights. "It isn't a museum!" Leslie had said in exasperation. "It's a home and it should look like one. Joe's going to ruin that expensive table with his trucks. And Rebecca will draw on that silk wallpaper."
"Then you'll just have to keep them under control," Alan had snapped.
And Leslie had backed down, as she always did at a confrontation. Like her father, she'd rather retreat than fight. Which is why her mother had ruled her childhood home and Alan ruled their home. So Alan had filled the wonderful old house with too many antiques that no one could sit on or even touch. There were three rooms in the house that were kept tightly closed all year, only being opened for cleaning and for Alan's huge Christmas party for all his clients.
The kitchen had been the final holdout, but last year Alan had had his way on that room too.
Leslie finished her tea, rinsed out her cup, then looked back at the summerhouse. That was to have been hers. It was to have been her retreat from the world, a place where she could keep up with her dancing, or curl up and read on rainy afternoons.
Now, looking at the building, she smiled. Before she had children, a woman thought of what she wanted to do on rainy afternoons, but afterward, her hours filled with "must" instead of "want." She must do the laundry, must get the groceries, must pull Rebecca back from the heater.
Somehow, Leslie had lost the summerhouse. Somehow, it had gone from being hers to being "theirs." She knew exactly when it had started. She had been eight months pregnant and so big she'd had to walk with her hand under her belly to support Rebecca's constant kicks and punches.
They'd just torn out the living room in the house and there was a leak in the roof. Alan had invited his brother and three college friends over for beer and football but it was raining that day, so there was nowhere for them to sit and watch the game on TV. When Alan had suggested that he set the TV up in the summerhouse for "this one afternoon," she'd been too grateful for the peace and quiet to protest. She'd been dreading a house full of men and smoke and the smell of beer, so she was glad when he said he'd take the men elsewhere.
On the next weekend, Alan had taken two clients into the summerhouse to discuss new life policies. It made sense, as the living room was still torn up. "We need a place to sit and talk," he'd said, looking at Leslie as though it were her fault that the roofing materials still hadn't arrived.
Two weeks after that, Rebecca was born, and for the next year, Leslie hadn't been able to take a breath. Rebecca was insatiable in her demands for attention from her tired mother. It was three months before Leslie could get herself together enough to get her squalling baby out of her pajamas. By the time Rebecca started walking at ten months, Leslie was pregnant again.
When she was three months pregnant with Joe, Leslie made the trek out to the summerhouse. In the months since Alan had first set up a TV in the place, Leslie had almost forgotten that her retreat still existed. But from the first day, Joe was an easier pregnancy than Rebecca, and Leslie's mother had started taking her granddaughter on short jaunts about town. "There's nothing more uninteresting than a nursing baby," her mother had said in her usual forthright style. "When she starts walking and looking at something besides her mother's bosom, then I'll take an interest in her."
So, on her first afternoon of freedom, for that's the way it felt, Leslie had made her way out to the summerhouse. Maybe this time, she'd be able to stretch out on the wicker chaise lounge she'd found in an antique shop and read a book.
But when Leslie pushed open the door, her breath stopped. Vaguely, she'd wondered why Alan had used the summerhouse only a few times, then never said anything about it again.
Someone had left the doors open and it had rained in on her furniture. Before she was first pregnant, she'd made the slipcovers for the little couch and the two chairs. She'd made the matching curtains and hung them herself. But now mice were nesting in the stuffing of the couch, and it looked as if a neighboring cat had clawed the arms of the chairs.
Turning away, she felt tears come to her eyes. She didn't even bother to close the door as she ran back to the house.
Later, she'd tried to have a confrontation with Alan, but he'd expressed such concern that her anger was going to harm the baby, that Leslie had calmed down. "We'll fix it up after you've had the baby," he said. "I promise. Scout's honor." He'd kissed her then and helped her with Rebecca and later, he'd made sweet love to her. But he didn't fix the summerhouse.
After that, Leslie had been so busy with children and helping Alan establish himself within the community that she wouldn't have had time to get away even if she'd had a place to go. And as the years followed each other, the summerhouse became a storage shed.
"So how's my old girl this morning?" Alan asked from behind her. He was two months younger than Leslie and he'd always found jokes about their age difference to be amusing. Needless to say, Leslie didn't see the humor.
"I made pancakes," she said, keeping her face turned away to hide her frown. She hadn't yet come to terms with the idea of turning forty. Hadn't it been only last week when she'd boarded a bus and headed to big, bad New York City, where she was going to turn the town on its ear with her dancing?
"Mmm," Alan said. "Wish I had time, but I have a full schedule today.
When she turned around, he was looking down at the newspaper, absorbed with the financial section. In the seventeen years that they'd been married, Alan hadn't changed much. Not physically anyway. His hair was now gray, but on him it looked good. He said that an insurance agent was considered more trustworthy if he looked older. And he kept in shape by going to the gym regularly.
What had changed about him was that he no longer seemed to actually see any of them, not his wife, not his two children. Oh, Rebecca could throw one of her look-at-me fits and she could get his attention, but Joe and Leslie, with their easygoing ways, were mostly ignored by him.
"You ought to leave him," Leslie's mother said, even more outspoken now than she had been when her husband was alive. Widowhood agreed with her. "If you left him, he'd find out how much he needs you. You need to shake up his perfect little world. Show him what matters."
But Leslie had seen what happened to women her age who left their handsome, successful husbands, and Leslie had no desire to live in some dreary little apartment and work at the local discount store. "Mother," Leslie often said in exasperation, "I have no skills to make my own way in the world. What would I do? Go back to dancing?" That she had failed at her one and only attempt at success in the world still haunted her.
"Where did I go wrong with you?" her mother would moan. "If you left him, he'd fall apart. You're the man's entire life. You do everything for him. If you left, he'd — "
"Run off with Bambi," Leslie said quickly.
"You were a fool to let him hire that little tart," her mother had snapped.
Leslie looked away. She didn't want her mother to know how she'd fought her husband's hiring the beautiful, young girl. "You hired a girl named Bambi?" Leslie had said, laughing in disbelief, at the dinner table the first night he'd told her. "Is she over twelve?"
To Leslie, it had been a joke, but when she looked at Alan's face, she could see that he didn't think his new secretary was a joke. "She is very competent at her job," he'd snapped, his eyes drilling into his wife's.
As always, Joe had been sensitive to any disagreement and he'd pushed his plate away. "I got some homework to do," he'd mumbled, then left the table.
Rebecca never seemed to see anything outside her own realm. "Did I tell you what that dreadful Margaret said to me today? We were in chemistry class, and — "
Leslie had at last looked away from her husband's eyes, and she'd never again made a snide remark about Bambi. But Leslie had been curious, so she'd called a woman she'd gone to high school with who worked in Alan's office and invited her to lunch. After lunch, Leslie had gone home and made herself a strong gin and tonic and taken it to the bathtub with her. She'd been told that Alan had hired Bambi six months earlier and that she was more than just his secretary, she was his "personal assistant." Paula, who'd been on the cheerleading squad with Leslie in high school, warmed to her story and seemed to enjoy "warning" Leslie. "If he were my husband, I'd put an end to it, I can tell you that," Paula had said with emphasis. "That girl goes everywhere with Alan. All I can say is that it's a good thing we don't have one of those unisex bathrooms or she'd — "
"Would you like to have some dessert?" Leslie had said rather loudly.
Now Bambi had worked for, with, "under," if the gossip were to be believed, Alan for over a year. And, quite frankly, Leslie didn't know what to do about it. Every friend she had had an opinion and freely gave it to Leslie.
One day Rebecca had overheard some women giving Leslie advice about this young woman who worked so closely with Alan, and later, Rebecca had said, "Mother, you ought to tell them to go to hell."
"Rebecca!" Leslie had said sternly, "I don't like that kind of language."
"It's possible that your husband is having an affair with his over endowed secretary and you're worried about bad language?"
Leslie could only stand there and blink at her daughter. Who was the adult? How did her daughter know — ?
"It's all over the church and at the club," Rebecca said, sounding as though she were thirty-five instead of just fifteen. "Look, Mom, men stray. They get itchy pants. It's normal. What you ought to do is tie a knot in his — "
Leslie gasped.
"All right, go ahead and live in the nineteenth century. But that Bambi is a bitch and she's after Dad and I think you should fight!"
At that Rebecca had left the room, and all Leslie could do was stare after her. Leslie hadn't the least idea of how to deal with a child who had just said what her daughter had, so Leslie pretended that it hadn't been said.
In fact, that's what Leslie seemed to be doing a lot of lately: pretending that nothing was wrong, that nothing bad had happened. She couldn't go so far as to, say, call Alan's office and tell his assistant to remind him of so and so party. No, instead, Leslie just worked around the whole idea of Bambi by pretending that the young woman didn't exist. And when the women at church or the club tried to warn her, Leslie perfected a little smile that let them know that she was above such low suspicions.
But now, looking at Alan as he bent over the newspaper, she wondered if he wasn't eating her pancakes for fear that he'd put on weight and Bambi wouldn't like that.
"So, Mom!" Rebecca said as she came into the room, "what are you old ladies going to get up to this weekend? Think you'll have an orgy with lots of bronzed young men?"
Part of Leslie wanted to reprimand her smart-mouthed daughter, but another part, the woman part that was separate from being someone's mother, wanted to joke with her daughter. "Ellie is bringing Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford," Leslie said as she glanced at her husband.
But Alan didn't seem to hear. Instead, he looked at his watch. Even though it was only seven A.M., he said, "Gotta go."
"Are you sure you wouldn't like a pancake or two?" Leslie asked, knowing that she sounded whiny. What she wanted to say was, "You can damned well spend an hour with your family before rushing off to your bimbo."
But Leslie didn't say that. Instead, she tried to smile invitingly.
"Sounds good, but I'm meeting some clients this afternoon and we have lots of paperwork to go over before the big meeting."
Even though the name was hardly ever said, all of them knew that "we" was Alan and Bambi.
Alan walked over to Leslie and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "I hope you have a good time," he said. "And, about your birthday..." He gave her a little-boy look that years ago she'd found irresistible.
"I know," she said with a forced smile. "You'll get me something later. It's all right. My birthday isn't for three days anyway."
"Thanks, hon," he said, kissing her cheek again. "You're a brick." Grabbing his jacket off the back of a chair, he left the house.
"'You're a brick,'" Rebecca mimicked as she ate a spoonful of some cereal that looked like extruded sawdust. "You're a chump."
"I won't have you talk about your father like that," Leslie said, glaring down at her daughter. "Or me."
"Nice!" Rebecca said, coming out of her chair. She was as tall as her mother, so they were eye to eye across the breakfast table. "All you care about is nice! Nice words, nice manners, nice thoughts. But the world isn't nice, and what Dad is doing with that leech isn't nice."
Suddenly, there were tears in Rebecca's eyes. "Don't you know what's going to happen? That woman is going to break us up. She wants what we have, not the family, but the money. She wants the silver tea set and the...and the fifty-thousand-dollar kitchen that you hate but were too cowardly to tell Dad that you didn't want. We're going to lose everything because you're so damned nice." With that, Rebecca ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
And in the next moment, a car horn blew outside and Leslie knew that the shuttle bus that would take her to the airport was there. For a moment, she hesitated. She should go to her daughter. Her daughter was upset and needed her, and a mother always gave, didn't she? A good mother was always there for her children, wasn't she? A good mother — And a good wife, Leslie thought. That's what she was: a mother and a wife.
Suddenly, Leslie didn't want to be anyone's wife or anyone's mother. She wanted to get on a plane and go see two women she hadn't seen since she was very young, since before she was anyone's wife or mother.
Leslie practically ran out of the kitchen, grabbed her handbag off the hall table and her two suitcases from the floor, then opened the front door. She yelled, "Good-bye. See you on Tuesday," up the stairs to her two children, but she didn't wait for an answer. A minute later and she was in the van, the driver was pulling away, and it was then that Leslie realized that she hadn't brushed her teeth. She doubted if she'd missed an after-meal brushing of her teeth since she was three years old, and she almost told the driver to stop and go back.
But then Leslie leaned back against the seat and smiled. Not brushing her teeth seemed to be a sign that she was about to start on an adventure. In front of her were three whole days that were hers and no one else's. Freedom. She hadn't been on a trip by herself since she'd gone to New York nineteen years ago. What was it going to be like to not have people asking, "Where's my tie?" "Where's my other shoe?" "Hon, could you call down and order me something to eat?" "Mom! What do you mean that you didn't bring my red shorts? How can I have any fun without those shorts."
For a moment Leslie closed her eyes and thought of three days of freedom; then a laugh escaped her. Startled, she opened her eyes to see the driver looking at her in the mirror, and he was smiling.
"Glad to get away?" he asked. They were the only people in the van.
"You can't imagine," Leslie said with feeling.
"Whoever takes care of you better not leave you alone too long," the man said, still looking at her, his eyes flirting.
Leslie knew that she should give him her best "Mrs. Church-Lady look," as Rebecca called it, after the comedian on TV. But right now Leslie didn't feel like giving that look. The driver was a good-looking young man and he'd just paid her a compliment. She smiled at him, then leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, feeling the best she'd felt in a long, long time.
Overview
She had a perfect life. Then she got a real life....
For nearly twenty years, quiet, unassuming Lillian Manville has devoted herself to her self-made billionaire husband — and enjoyed a luxurious life of splendid homes, trips, jewels, and clothes. But when James Manville dies in a plane crash, Lillian's grief is compounded by a shocking mystery: all that Jimmie has left to her is an old farmhouse in tiny Calburn, Virginia. Now, Lillian's unexpected circumstances are leading her to a made-over life in Calburn, an exciting business—and a sweet new love with a handsome local man. But will she have the courage to unveil the truth surrounding a past scandal and the loss of her husband? The answers may be as close as the mulberry tree in her yard — and Lillian must dig deep within herself to Wght the secrets and lies that threaten to uproot the past she cherished and the future she treasures....This lush bestseller shines with the passion, intrigue, and warmth that is Jude Deveraux at her best.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
He needed me.
Whenever anyone — usually a reporter — asked me how I coped with a man like Jimmie, I smiled and said nothing. I'd learned that whatever I said would be misquoted, so I simply kept quiet. Once, I made the mistake of telling the truth to a female reporter. She'd looked so young and so in need herself that for a moment I let my guard down. I said, "He needs me." That's all. Just those three words.
Who would have thought that a second of unguarded honesty could cause so much turmoil? The girl — she had certainly not attained the maturity of womanhood — parlayed my small sentence into international turmoil.
I was right in thinking she herself was needy. Oh, yes, very needy. She needed a story, so she fabricated one. Never mind that she had nothing on which to base her fable.
I must say that she was good at research. She couldn't have slept during the two weeks between my remark and the publication of her story. She consulted psychiatrists, self-help gurus, and clergy. She interviewed hordes of rampant feminists. Every famous woman who had ever hinted that she hated men was interviewed and quoted.
In the end Jimmie and I were portrayed as one sick couple. He was the domineering tyrant in public, but a whimpering child at home. And I was shown to be a cross between steel and an ever-flowing breast.
When the article came out and caused a sensation, I wanted to hide from the world. I wanted to retreat to the most remote of Jimmie's twelve houses and never leave. But Jimmie was afraid of nothing — which was the true secret of his success — and he met the questions, the derisive laughter, and worse, the pseudo-therapists who felt it was our "duty" to expose every private thought and feeling to the world, head-on.
Jimmie just put his arm around me, smiled into the cameras, and laughed in answer to all of their questions. Whatever they asked, he had a joke for a reply.
"Is it true, Mr. Manville, that your wife is the power behind the throne?" The reporter asking this was smiling at me in a nasty way. Jimmie was six foot two and built like the bull some people said he was, and I am five foot two and round. I've never looked like the power behind anyone.
"She makes all the decisions. I'm just her front man," Jimmie said, his smile showing his famous teeth. But those of us who knew him saw the coldness in his eyes. Jimmie didn't like any disparagement of what he considered his. "I couldn't have done it without her," he said in that teasing way of his. Few people knew him well enough to know whether or not he was joking.
Three weeks later, by chance, I saw the cameraman who'd been with the reporter that day. He was a favorite of mine because he didn't delight in sending his editor the pictures of me that showed off my double chin at its most unflattering angle. "What happened to your friend who was so interested in my marriage?" I asked, trying to sound friendly. "Fired," the photographer said. "I beg your pardon?" He was pushing new batteries into his camera and didn't look up. "Fired," he said again, then looked up, not at me, but at Jimmie.
Wisely, the photographer said no more. And just as wisely, I didn't ask any more questions.
Jimmie and I had an unwritten, unspoken law: I didn't interfere in whatever Jimmie was doing.
"Like a Mafia wife," my sister said to me about a year after Jimmie and I were married.
"Jimmie doesn't murder people," I replied in anger.
That night I told Jimmie of the exchange with my sister, and for a moment his eyes glittered in a way that, back then, I hadn't yet learned to be wary of.
A month later, my sister's husband received a fabulous job offer: double his salary; free housing; free cars. A full-time nanny for their daughter, three maids, and a country club membership were included. It was a job they couldn't refuse. It was in Morocco.
After Jimmie's plane crashed and left me a widow at thirty-two, all the media around the world wrote of only one thing: that Jimmie had willed me "nothing." None of his billions — two or twenty of them, I never could remember how many — none of it was left to me.
"Are we broke or rich today?" I'd often ask him, because his net worth fluctuated from day to day, depending on what Jimmie was trying at the moment.
"Today we're broke," he'd say, and he would laugh in the same way as when he'd tell me he'd made so many millions that day.
The money never mattered to Jimmie. No one understood that. To him, it was just a by-product of the game. "It's like all those peels you throw away after you've made jam," he'd say. "Only in this case the world values the peel and not the jam." "Poor world," I said, then Jimmie laughed hard and carried me upstairs, where he made sweet love to me.
It's my opinion that Jimmie knew he wasn't going to live to be an old man. "I've got to do what I can as fast as I can. You with me, Frecks?" he'd ask.
"Always," I'd answer, and I meant it. "Always."
But I didn't follow him to the grave. I was left behind, just as Jimmie said I would be.
"I'll take care of you, Frecks," he said more than once. When he talked of such things, he always called me by the name he'd given me the first time we met: Frecks for the freckles across my nose.
When he said, "I'll take care of you," I didn't give the words much thought. Jimmie had always "taken care" of me. Whatever I wanted, he gave me long before I knew I wanted it. Jimmie said, "I know you better than you know yourself."
And he did. But then, to be fair, I never had time to get to know much about myself. Following Jimmie all over the world didn't leave a person much time to sit and contemplate.
Jimmie knew me, and he did take care of me. Not in the way the world thought was right, but in the way he knew Ineeded. He didn't leave me a rich widow with half the world's bachelors clamoring to profess love for me. No, he left the money and all twelve of the expensive houses to the only two people in the world he truly hated: his older sister and brother.
To me, Jimmie left a run-down, overgrown farm in the backwoods of Virginia, a place I didn't even know he owned, and a note. It said:
Find out the truth about what happened, will you, Frecks? Do it for me. And remember that I love you. Wherever you are, whatever you do, remember that I love you.
J.
When I saw the farmhouse, I burst into tears. What had enabled me to survive the past six weeks was the image of that farmhouse. I'd imagined something charming, made of logs, with a stone chimney at one end. I'd imagined a deep porch with hand-hewn rocking chairs on it, and a lawn in front, with pink roses spilling petals in the breeze.
I'd envisioned acres of gently rolling land covered with fruit trees and raspberry bushes — all of them pruned and healthy and dripping ripe fruit.
But what I saw was 1960s hideous. It was a two-story house covered in some sort of green siding — the kind that never changes over the years. Storms, sun, snow, time, none of it had any effect on that kind of siding. It had been a pale, sickly green when it was installed, and now, many years later, it was the same color.
There were vines growing up one side of the house, but not the kind of vines that make a place look quaint and cozy. These were vines that looked as though they were going to engulf the house, eat it raw, digest it, then regurgitate it in the same ghastly green.
"It can be fixed," Phillip said softly from beside me.
In the weeks since Jimmie's death, "hell" could not begin to describe what I had been through.
It was Phillip who woke me in the middle of the night when Jimmie's plane went down. I must say that I was shocked to see him. As Jimmie's wife, I was sacrosanct. The men he surrounded himself with knew what would happen if they made any advances toward me. I don't mean just sexually, but in any other way. No man or woman in Jimmie's employ ever asked me to intercede for him or her with my husband. If he had been fired, he knew that to approach me and ask that I try to "reason" with Jimmie would likely earn him something far worse than a mere dismissal.
So when I awoke to Jimmie's top lawyer's hand on my shoulder, telling me that I had to get up, I immediately knew what had happened. Only if Jimmie were dead would anyone dare enter my bedroom and think that he'd live to see the dawn.
"How?" I asked, immediately wide awake and trying to be mature. Inside, I was shaking. Of course it couldn't be true, I told myself. Jimmie was too big, too alive, to be...to be...I couldn't form the word in my mind.
"You have to get dressed now," Phillip was saying. "We have to keep this secret for as long as we can."
"Is Jimmie hurt?" I asked, my voice full of hope. Maybe he was in a hospital bed and calling for me. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn't true. Jimmie knew how I worried about him. "I'd rather have my foot cut off than have to deal with your fretting," he'd said more than once. He hated my nagging about his smoking, about his drinking, about his days without sleep.
"No," Phillip said, his voice cold and hard. His eyes looked into mine. "James is not alive."
I wanted to collapse. I wanted to dive back under the warm bedcovers and go back to sleep. And when I awoke again, I wanted Jimmie to be there, slipping his big hand under my nightgown and making those little growling sounds that made me giggle.
"You don't have time for grief right now," Phillip said. "We have to go shopping."
That brought me out of my shock. "Are you mad?" I asked him. "It's four o'clock in the morning."
"I've arranged for a store to open. Now get dressed!" he ordered. "We have no time to lose."
His tone didn't scare me in the least. I sat down on the bed, my big nightgown billowing out around me, and I pulled my braid out from under me. Jimmie liked for me to wear old-fashioned clothes, and he liked for my hair to be long. After sixteen years of marriage, I could sit on my braid. "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on."
"I don't have time now — " Phillip began, but then he stopped, took a deep breath, and looked at me. "I could be disbarred for this, but I made out James's will, and I know what's coming to you. I can hold off the vultures for a few days but no more. Until the will is read, you're still James's wife."
"I will always be Jimmie's wife," I said proudly, holding all my chins aloft in the bravest stance I could muster. Jimmie! my heart was crying. Not Jimmie. Anyone on earth could die, but not Jimmie.
"Lillian," Phillip said softly, his eyes full of pity, "there was only one man like James Manville ever made on this earth. He played by his own rules and no one else's."
I waited for him to tell me something that I didn't already know. What was he leading up to?
Phillip ran his hand over his eyes and glanced at the clock on the bed. "By the law of ethics, I can't tell you — " he began, then he let out his breath and sat down heavily on the bed beside me. If I'd needed any further proof that Jimmie was no longer alive, that would have been it. If there was a chance that Jimmie would walk through the door and see another man sitting on the bed beside his wife, Phillip would never have dared such a familiarity.
"Who can understand what James did or why? I worked with him for over twenty years, but I never knew him. Lillian, he — " Phillip had to take a few breaths, then he picked up my hand and held it in his. "He left you nothing. He willed everything to his brother and sister."
I couldn't understand what he meant. "But he hates them," I said, pulling my hand from his grasp. Atlanta and Ray were Jimmie's only living relatives, and Jimmie despised them. He took care of them financially, always bailing one or the other of them out of some mess, but he detested them. No, worse, he had contempt for them. One time Jimmie was looking at me strangely, and I asked what was going on in his mind. "They'll eat you alive," he said. "That sounds interesting," I replied, smiling at him. But Jimmie didn't smile back. "When I die, Atlanta and Ray will go after you with everything they have. And they'll find lawyers to work on a contingency basis."
I didn't like what had become Jimmie's frequent references to his demise. "Contingent upon what?" I asked, still smiling. "How much money they get when they sue you to hell and back," Jimmie said, frowning. I didn't want to hear any more, so I waved my hand in dismissal and said, "Phillip will take care of them." "Phillip is no match for greed of that scale." I had no reply for that, because I agreed with him. No matter how much Jimmie gave Atlanta and Ray, they wanted more. One time when Jimmie was called away unexpectedly, I found Atlanta in my closet, counting my shoes. She wasn't the least embarrassed when I found her there. She looked up at me and said, "You have three more pairs than I do." The look on her face frightened me so much that I turned and ran from my own bedroom.
"What do you mean that he's left it all to them? All what?" I asked Phillip. I wanted to think about anything other than what my life was going to be like without Jimmie.
"I mean that James willed all his stocks, his houses, real estate around the world, the airlines, all of it to your brother and sister-in-law."
Since I hated each and every one of the houses that Jimmie had purchased, I couldn't comprehend what was so bad about this. "Too much glass and steel for my taste," I said, giving Phillip a bit of a smile.
Phillip glared at me. "Lillian, this is serious, and James is no longer here to protect you — and I don't have the power to do anything. I don't know why he did it, Lord knows I tried to talk him out of it, but he said that he was giving you what you needed. That's all I could get out of him."
Phillip stood up, then took a moment to regain his calm. Jimmie said that what he liked about Phillip was that nothing on earth could upset him. But this had.
I tried to get the picture of my future out of my head, tried to stop thinking about a life without Jimmie's laughter and his big shoulders to protect me, and looked up at Phillip expectantly. "Are you saying that I'm destitute?" I tried not to smile. The jewelry that Jimmie had given me over the years was worth millions.
Phillip took a deep breath. "More or less. He's left you a farm in Virginia."
"There, then, that's something," I said, then I took the humor out of my voice and waited for him to continue.
"It was a breach of ethics, but after I wrote the will for him, I sent someone down to Virginia to look at the place. It's...not much. It's — " He turned away for a moment, and I thought I heard him mutter, "Bastard," but I didn't want to hear that, so I ignored him. When he turned back to me, his face was businesslike. He looked at his watch, a watch that I knew Jimmie had given him; it cost over twenty thousand dollars. I owned a smaller version of it.
"Did you do anything to him?" Phillip asked softly. "Another man maybe?"
I couldn't stop my little snort of derision, and my answer was just to look at Phillip. Women in harems weren't kept under tighter lock and key than James Manville's wife.
"All right," Phillip said, "I've had months to try to figure this out, and I haven't come close, so I'm going to give up. When James's will is read, all hell is going to break loose. Atlanta and Ray are going to get it all, and what you get is a farmhouse in Virginia and fifty grand — -a pittance." He narrowed his eyes at me. "But the one thing I can do is see that you receive as much as you and I can buy between now and the moment that James's death is announced to the public."
It was hearing those words, "James's death," that almost did me in.
"No, you don't," Phillip said as he grabbed my arm and pulled me upright. "You don't have time for grief or self-pity right now. You have to get dressed. The store manager is waiting."
At five-thirty on that cold spring morning, I was pushed inside a huge department store and told that I was to buy what I needed for a farmhouse in Virginia. Phillip said the man he sent couldn't see inside the house, so I didn't even know how many bedrooms it had. The sleepy store manager who'd been roused from bed to open the store for James Manville's wife dutifully followed Phillip and me about and noted down what I pointed at.
It all seemed so unreal. I couldn't believe any of it was happening, and a part of me, the still-in-shock part, couldn't wait to tell Jimmie this story. How he'd laugh at it! I'd exaggerate every moment of it, and the more he'd laugh, the more flamboyant my story would become. "So there I was, half asleep, being asked which couch I wanted to buy," I'd say. " 'Couch?' the little man asked, yawning. 'What's a couch?' "
But there was not going to be any storytelling with Jimmie, for I was never going to see Jimmie alive again.
I did as I was told, though, and I chose furniture, cookware, linens, and even appliances for a house that I had never seen. But it all seemed so ridiculous. Jimmie had houses full of furniture, most of it custom-made, and there were great, enormous kitchens full of every imaginable piece of cooking gear.
At seven, when Phillip was driving me back to the house, he reached into the back of his car and picked up a brochure. "I bought you a car," he said, handing me a glossy photo of a four-wheel-drive Toyota.
I was beginning to wake up, and I was beginning to feel pain. Everything seemed so odd; my world was turning upside down. Why was Phillip driving a car himself? He usually used one of Jimmie's cars and a driver.
"You can't take the jewelry," Phillip was saying. "Each piece has been itemized and insured. You may take your clothing, but even at that I think that Atlanta may give you some problems. She's your size."
"My size," I whispered. "Take my clothes."
"You can fight it all, of course," Phillip was saying. "But something's wrong. About six months ago, Atlanta hinted that she knew some big secret about you."
Phillip looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I knew he was again asking me if there were other men in my life. But when? I wondered. Jimmie didn't like to be alone, not even for a second, and he made sure I was never alone. " 'Fraid the bogeyman will get me," he said, kissing my nose, when I asked him why he avoided solitude so diligently. Jimmie rarely — no, Jimmie never gave straight answers to personal questions. He lived in the here and now; he lived in the world around him, not inside his head. He wasn't one for pondering why people were the way they were; he accepted them, and liked them or didn't.
"I was a virgin when I met him," I said softly to Phillip, "and there's only been Jimmie." But I looked away when I said it, for I knew that there was a secret between Jimmie and me. Only I knew it, though. Atlanta couldn't know — could she?
But she did.
By eight, my comfortable, safe world as I knew it had collapsed. I don't know how Atlanta heard about Jimmie's plane going down so soon after it happened, but she had. And in the time between when Atlanta was told and the press heard of Jimmie's death, she had accomplished more than in all the other forty-eight years of her life combined.
When Phillip and I returned from our crazy shopping expedition, we were greeted at the front door of what I'd thought of as my house by men carrying guns, and I was also told I wasn't allowed to enter. I was told that, as Jimmie's only surviving relatives, Atlanta and Ray now owned everything.
When Phillip and I got back into the car, he was shaking his head in wonder. "How did they find out about the will? How did she know James left it all to them? Look, Lillian," he said, and I noted that up until Jimmie's death, he'd always called me Mrs. Manville, "I don't know how she found out, but I'll find the culprit who told and...and..." Obviously, he couldn't think of anything horrible enough to do to someone on his staff who'd leaked the contents of Jimmie's will. "We'll fight this. You're his wife, and you have been for many years. You and I will — "
"I was seventeen when I married him," I said quietly. "And I didn't have my mother's permission."
"Oh, my God," Phillip said, then he opened his mouth to begin what I assumed was going to be a lecture on my irresponsibility. But he closed it again, and rightfully so. What good would it do to lecture me now that Jimmie was gone?
The next weeks were horrible beyond anything I'd ever imagined. Atlanta was on TV just hours after Jimmie's death, telling the press that she was going to fight "that woman" who had so enslaved her beloved brother for all those years. "I'm going to see that she gets everything she deserves."
It didn't matter to Atlanta that Jimmie's will stated I was to get nothing. Not even the farmhouse was mentioned in the will. No, Atlanta was out to avenge all the things she imagined I'd done to her over the years. She didn't just want money; she wanted me humiliated.
Yes, of course she'd found out that my marriage to Jimmie hadn't been legal. It couldn't have been difficult. My sister knew. She and her husband had divorced because she couldn't bear to stay in Morocco, but her husband wouldn't give up all that cash and luxury. My sister blamed me for her divorce. Maybe she called Atlanta and volunteered the information that I wasn't legally married to Jimmie.
However she found out, Atlanta waved my birth certificate before the press, then showed them the photocopy of my marriage certificate. I was only seventeen when we'd married, but I'd lied and said that I was eighteen, and therefore legally in charge of my own fate.
No longer did I have Jimmie to protect me from the press. Now every reporter who'd been mistreated by him — i.e., all of them — dug through his archives and pulled out the most unflattering photos of me he could find, then slapped them across every communications media there was. I couldn't look at TV, a magazine, or a computer screen that didn't feature all my chins and the nose I'd inherited from my father. I'd told Jimmie about a thousand times that I wanted to have my overlarge nose "fixed." "Removed!" is what I said, but Jimmie always told me that he loved me as I was, and, eventually, the right hook of my nose didn't seem to matter.
When I heard what was being said about me, my ugly nose was the least of my concerns. How can I describe what it felt like to see four respected journalists — three men and a woman — sitting around a table, discussing whether or not I had "trapped" James Manville into marrying me? As though a man like Jimmie could be trapped by anyone! And by a seventeen-year-old girl whose only claim to fame was a handful of blue ribbons won at the state fair? Not likely.
Lawyers talked about whether or not I was legally entitled to any of Jimmie's money.
But when the will was finally read and it was seen that Jimmie had given it all to his brother and sister, I was suddenly the Jezebel of America. Everyone seemed to believe that I had somehow ensnared dear little Jimmie (the youthful Salome was the comparison used most often) but that he had found out about it and had used his will to give me "what I deserved."
Phillip did his best to keep me away from the press, but it wasn't easy. I wanted to get on a plane and go away, to hide from everything — but that was no longer an option. My days of jumping on a plane and going anywhere in the world I wanted were over.
For six weeks after Jimmie's death, while the courts dealt with his will and the press hashed and rehashed everything they heard, I stayed locked inside Phillip's sprawling house. The only time I left during those horrible weeks was when I went to Jimmie's funeral, and then I was so shrouded in black draperies that I may as well not have been there. And I most certainly wasn't going to give the press or Atlanta and Ray the satisfaction of seeing me weep.
When I got to the church, I was told that I couldn't enter, but Phillip had anticipated such an event, and seemingly out of nowhere, half a dozen men the size of sumo wrestlers appeared and surrounded me.
That's how I entered Jimmie's funeral: walking in the midst of six enormous men, my face and body covered with black cloth.
It was all right, though, because by that time I had realized that Jimmie was actually never coming back, and nothing anyone did mattered much. And, too, I kept imagining that farmhouse he'd left me. One time Jimmie had asked me to describe where I'd like to live, and I'd talked of a cozy little house with a deep porch, tall trees around it, and a lake nearby. "I'll see what I can do," he'd said, smiling at me with twinkling eyes. But the next house he'd bought was a castle on an island off the coast of Scotland, and the thing was so cold that even in August my teeth were chattering.
After the will was probated, I made no move to leave Phillip's house. With the press still hovering outside and with Jimmie gone, it didn't seem to matter where I was or what I did. I took long showers, and I sat at the table with Phillip and his family — his wife, Carol, and their two young daughters — but I don't remember eating anything.
It was Phillip who told me that it was time for me to leave.
"I can't go out there," I said in fear, glancing toward the curtains that I kept drawn night and day. "They're waiting for me."
Phillip took my hand in his and rubbed his palm against my skin. For all that I no longer had a husband, I still felt married. I snatched my hand away and frowned at him.
But Phillip smiled. "Carol and I have been talking, and we think you should...well, that you should disappear."
"Ah, yes," I said, "suttee. The wife climbs onto the funeral pyre and follows her husband into the afterlife."
From the look on Phillip's face, he didn't appreciate my black sense of humor. Jimmie had. Jimmie used to say that the more depressed I was, the funnier I was. If that was so, I should have gone onstage the day of his funeral.
"Lillian," Phillip said, but when he reached toward my hand again, I withdrew it. "Have you looked at yourself lately?"
"I — " I began, intending to make a sarcastic remark, but then I glanced into the mirror over the big dresser across from the bed in the guest room in Phillip's house. I had, of course, noticed that I'd lost some weight. Not eating for weeks on end will do that. But I hadn't noticed how much I'd lost. My chins were gone. I had cheekbones.
I looked back at Phillip. "Amazing, isn't it? All those diet programs that Jimmie paid for for me, and all he had to do was die and bingo! I'm finally slim."
Phillip frowned again. "Lillian, I've waited until now to talk to you. I've tried to give you some time to come to terms with James's death and his will."
He started on another lecture about my stupidity in not telling either him or Jimmie that I'd been seventeen when we married. "He would have given you a huge wedding. He would have loved doing that for you," Phillip had said the day after he found out. "It would have been so much better than the elopement you had the first time."
But I'd heard that lecture before and didn't want to hear it again, so I cut him off. "You want me to disappear?"
"Actually, it was Carol's idea. She said that as things stand now, the rest of your life is going to be one long press interview. People are going to hound you forever to tell them about your life with Jimmie. Unless — "
"Unless what?" I asked.
Phillip's thin face lit up, and for a moment I saw the "little fox" that Jimmie had always said the man was. "Do you remember when I told you that I'd tried to talk James out of writing his will as he did?" He didn't wait for me to answer. "I did persuade him not to put the farmhouse in the will. I said that if he was so afraid of what his sister would do, then she'd probably try to take the farm too. At that time I hadn't seen the place, and I thought it was — "
"Was what?" I asked.
"Valuable," he said softly, looking down at the floor for a moment, then back up at me. "Look, Lillian, I know the farmhouse isn't much, but it must have meant something to James, or he wouldn't have kept it all these years."
"Why did he buy it in the first place?"
"That's just it, he didn't buy it. I think he's always owned it."
"People have to buy things," I said, confused. "People just don't give real estate away, at least not while they're alive." It was then that understanding began to hit me. "You mean you think that Jimmie might have inherited this farm?"
For the first time, I felt some interest spark inside me. All three of them, Atlanta, Ray, and Jimmie, were maddeningly secretive about their childhood. When questioned, Ray evaded and changed the subject. Atlanta and Jimmie out-and-out lied. They would say they were born in South Dakota one day, and in Louisiana the next. I knew for a fact that Jimmie had given me four different names for his mother. I'd even secretly read all six of the biographies that had been written about him, but the authors had had no better luck than I had in finding out anything about the first sixteen years of James Manville's life.
"I don't know for sure," Phillip said, "but I do know that James didn't buy the place since I've known him."
At that statement, all I could do was blink. Jimmie and Phillip had been together from the beginning.
"When I said that Atlanta and Ray might try to take the farm away from you, all I can tell you is that James turned white, as though he were afraid of something."
"Jimmie afraid?" I said, unable to grasp that concept.
"He said, 'You're right, Phil, so I'm going to give the place to you, then when the time comes, I want you to sign it over to Lil. And I want you to give her this from me.' "
That was when Phillip handed me the note written by Jimmie. It was in a sealed envelope, so Phillip hadn't read it. He'd kept it and the deed to the farm in Virginia in his home safe, awaiting the day when he'd turn them both over to me.
After I read the note, I folded it and put it back into the envelope. I didn't cry; I'd cried so much over the last six weeks that I didn't seem to have any more liquid inside me. I reached for the deed to the farm, but Phillip pulled it back.
"If I make this out to Lillian Manville, then register the property transfer, within twenty-four hours, you'll have reporters — and lawyers — on your doorstep. But — " he said, drawing out what he wanted to say as though I were a child he was enticing to be good.
I didn't take the bait, but just stared at him.
"All right," he said at last. "What Carol and I thought was that maybe you should change your identity. You've lost so much weight that you don't look like James Manville's fat little wife anymore."
That remark made me narrow my eyes at him. I did not want to hear what he and the rest of Jimmie's staff had sniggered behind his back. I guess I'd not spent all those years near Jimmie for nothing, because I could see Phillip beginning to wither under my gaze.
"All right," he said again, then let out his pent-up breath. "It's up to you, but I've already done a lot of the work, such as get you new documents of identification. I needed to use James's connections while they still remembered him. Sorry to be so blunt, but people forget fast. Now, it's up to you to accept it."
He handed me a passport, and I opened it. There was no photo inside, but there was a name. "Bailey James," I read aloud, then looked up at Phillip.
"It was Carol's idea. She took your maiden name and James's first name and — You don't like it."
The problem was that I did like the idea. A new name; maybe a new life.
"Carol thought that with your weight loss, and if you got your hair cut and lightened, and if you...Well, if you..."
I looked at him. What was he having such a hard time saying? But then I saw that he had his eyes fixed on my nose. I'd gone down headfirst on a playground slide in the first grade and had managed to knock my nose permanently to the right. "No wonder," sixth-grade Johnnie Miller had said as I stood there gushing blood. "Her nose is so big that it hit the ground half an hour before she did." I still remember the teacher holding me and oozing sympathy even as she tried hard not to laugh, even as she made Johnnie apologize for his remark.
"You want me to get a nose job," I said flatly.
Phillip gave a curt nod.
Turning, I looked at myself in the mirror. If Jimmie had left me his billions, I could have made a prison with high fences and locked myself away from all the gigolos and hangers-on that orbit around money. I didn't have the billions, but I did have the notoriety. I knew that, eventually, in ten years or so, Jimmie would fade in people's memories and I'd be left alone, but during those ten years...
I looked back at Phillip. "It's my guess that you have a surgeon all set up."
"Tonight." He looked at his watch, the twenty-thousand-dollar one that Jimmie had given him; Atlanta was now wearing mine. "If you're ready, that is."
I took a deep breath. "As ready as I can be, I guess," I said, then stood up.
That was two weeks ago. My nose had healed enough that I knew it was time to step outside Phillip and Carol's big house. It wasn't Lillian Manville who was to greet the world, but someone I didn't even recognize in the mirror, someone named Bailey James.
During the time I was recovering from surgery, I'd come to know Carol somewhat better. In the past she'd attended the parties that Jimmie liked to give, but he had always warned me that it was better not to get too chummy with employees, so I was courteous, but there were no secrets shared between us. I didn't share secrets with anyone other than Jimmie.
The surgery had been done in the doctor's office, and a few hours later I was driven back to Carol and Phillip's house. The first night a nurse stayed with me, but the second night I was alone when Carol tapped on my door. When I answered, she tiptoed in and sat on the edge of the bed. "Are you angry?" she asked.
"No, the doctor did a fine job. Nothing to be angry about," I answered, pretending that I didn't know what she was talking about.
She didn't fall for it; she stared hard at me.
"You mean, am I angry that I spent sixteen years giving my entire life to a man, only to be cut out of his will?"
Carol smiled at my sarcasm. "Men are slime," she said, then we smiled together, and when I touched my sore nose in pain, we laughed. It was my first genuine feeling of humor since I'd last talked to Jimmie.
"So what are you going to wear?" Carol asked, folding her legs and sitting on the corner of the bed. She was about ten years older than me, and I'd be willing to bet that she was no stranger to the surgeon's knife. She was blonde and pretty, and extremely well cared for. I knew what that meant because I, too, used to spend a lot of my time looking after myself. I may have been plump, but I was a well-coiffed, well-tended plump.
"Wear where?" I asked, and felt my heart jump a bit. Please, I silently prayed, someone tell me that I wasn't going to have to go again to some courtroom and hear Atlanta and Ray accuse me of "controlling" Jimmie.
"On your new body," Carol said. "You can't keep on wearing my sweats, you know."
"Oh," I said. "Sorry. I guess I haven't thought much about clothes lately. I — " Damnation, but tears were coming to my eyes. I wanted to be the brave little soldier and believe that, whatever Jimmie had done had been done out of love. But when I was confronted with issues such as the fact that the only clothing I now owned was what I'd put on the night Jimmie died, and the black shroud that Phillip had given me, I didn't feel very brave.
Carol reached out to touch my hand, but then she pulled back and moved off the bed. "I'll be back in just a minute," she said as she left the room. In seconds she returned with a foot-high stack of what looked like catalogs. She'd taken so little time to get them, I knew she must have had them piled outside.
She spread them across the bottom of the bed, and I looked at them in wonder. "What are these?"
"Phillip owes me five bucks!" she said in triumph. "I bet him you'd never seen a catalog. In nor — uh, most households, catalogs come through the mail at the rate of about six a day."
I knew she'd been about to say "in normal households," but she'd stopped herself. In Jimmie's houses, a servant brought me my few pieces of mail on a silver dish.
I picked up one of the catalogs. Norm Thompson. Inside were the kind of clothes that appeared in my closet now and then, especially in the two island houses. Jimmie had someone he called a "shopper" who made sure that we had whatever clothes we needed in every house.
Carol picked up a catalog and flipped through it. The cover read "Coldwater Creek." "You know, I used to feel sorry for you. You always looked so alone and lost. I told Phillip that — " Breaking off, she bent down toward the catalog.
"You told him what?"
"That you were like a lightbulb, and you were only on when James was around."
I didn't like what she'd said. Not one bit. It made me sound so...so nothing, as though I weren't a person at all. "So what did you have in mind with these?" I asked, making my voice sound as cool as possible.
She understood my tone. "It's my opinion that we owe you for the wedding gift that you gave Phillip and me, so I thought we might order you some new clothes and whatever else you might need in your new life. We'll charge it all to Phillip; he can afford it." She lowered her voice. "He's going to be one of the attorneys for Atlanta and Ray."
At that my mouth dropped open, then I winced because my new, smaller nose hurt at the movement. I wanted to scream, "The traitor!" but I didn't. "Remind me. What did Jimmie and I give you for your wedding?"
"This house," Carol said.
For a moment I couldn't speak, and I had to look away so she wouldn't see my eyes. He gave a house to his attorney, a man he thought was his friend, but now that so-called friend was going to work for the enemy. I picked up a catalog. "Do you have one of these things for jewelry? I need a new watch."
Carol smiled at me; I smiled back; a friendship was formed.
