women sat, the cards were dealt. The day was warm, but happily the humidity was low, and a breeze moved the sheer curtains in Helen’s first-floor windows.
“News of the Week in Review,” Phyllis said, in another tradition as old as the game. “Hostess first.”
Helen spoke, as she always did, about her husband, Hugh, and her children. Her older two were married, the parents of a brood of grandchildren. Helen’s third child, Lizzie, was thirty and single. Lizzie’s engagement to a most unsuitable man had been originally responsible for Jane’s growing reputation as someone who could help out with problems that, while vexing or frightening, weren’t appropriate for the police or other authorities. When Helen had described Lizzie’s fiancé as “dead behind the eyes,” Jane, who’d been a little at sea after her retirement, decided to investigate. It hadn’t taken much to find his other two fiancées and his “late” mother living on the other side of Cambridge. Jane had been the one to warn him off, too, reasoning it was better that he break Lizzie’s heart sooner rather than run her through the wood chipper later. Helen had been grateful, and she had talked. A lot.
Jane’s reputation had grown. All winter and spring, people had made their way down the flagstone walk to Jane’s office.
Gerri McLaughlin needed help switching from her hairdresser to the one in the next chair. During an unexpected absence, the other hairdresser had done Gerri’s cut and color. The resulting hairdo had a new bounce and shine that had added a bounce to Gerri’s step as well. She’d urged her original hairdresser to re-create it, but without success.
Every woman knew ending a relationship with the person who did your hair was fraught. It was a professional arrangement, one in which money was paid for skill and services. But it was also a relationship in which confidences were exchanged and loyalty expected. Turning up a month later in the next chair was unthinkable. Gerri had considered proposing to the new hairdresser that she sneak into the shop after hours but had rejected it as ridiculous.
Jane counseled directness. It was time for a change. Not just in style but in stylist. When Gerri couldn’t face it, Jane had gone in and delivered the message herself. The original hairdresser was hurt but accepted the switch as inevitable. It was better, after all, to keep the client in the shop. Gerri had reported that after a couple of tense appointments, with much sighing coming from the next chair, everything had evened out. Everyone was fine.
Virginia Westbury didn’t know how to tell her neighbors their five-year-old was peeing in her garden every day. Jane volunteered to weed Virginia’s garden for a while. When the boy approached, equipment at the ready, so to speak, she jumped up and yelled, “Cut it out! You know you’re not supposed to do that!” He screamed and ran home. Jane worried about what he might tell some future therapist about the encounter, but the peeing stopped and Virginia was happy.
In Jane’s opinion, many people sadly lacked the skill to have difficult conversations with acquaintances and neighbors. Given a noisy house party or a car parked blocking a driveway, people stewed in silence—or worse, called the police—when a simple knock on the door and a polite request would have done the job. It was into this breach that Jane had leapt again and again. Now she was being offered the chance to be paid for her efforts. Why wouldn’t she take it?
When Helen was done speaking, Irma Brittleson reported on her week. Irma was retired from her job as a top administrator at Mount Auburn Hospital, but she still volunteered there several days a week. She lived with her mother in a lovely two-family overlooking a park on the Cambridge–Somerville line.
Irma had also sought Jane’s help, and brought her first failure. Irma’s ninety-six-year-old mother, the irrepressible Minnie, had been scammed quite badly by someone who had telephoned, claiming to be from her bank, asking her to help test their procedures by withdrawing $9,000 from her inactive savings account and then returning it to the bank manager, who would be waiting in the lobby. Minnie, happy to help, had struggled down her front steps while Irma was at her volunteer job and taken a cab to the bank.
The bank manager was, of course, not the bank manager, and the money was gone.
Jane had explained this was not a job for her but for the police. When Minnie refused to involve the authorities because she was mortified, Jane had volunteered to report Minnie’s story for her.
All this had occurred at a time when Jane was experimenting with letting her hair go gray. When she told the nice Detective Alvarez of the Cambridge Police Fraud Squad, the story “about a friend,” he had assumed she was the ninety-six-year-old Minnie.
Horrified, Jane had set him straight, left the police station, and raced immediately to her salon, where the redoubtable Hugo had returned her hair to the honey-blond that, while not natural to nature, felt natural to Jane. “I told you it would never work,” Hugo had said.
“Back to you, Jane,” Phyllis said when Irma finished the report on her week. “Who is this guy you were talking about, and what does he want to pay you for?”
“As I said earlier, he’s the executive director at Walden Spring,” Jane repeated. “Irma recommended me.”
The three of them looked at Irma, who shrugged. “He told me he needed help with some community problems.” She looked at Jane. “That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
Was it?
“When is this happening, if you do it?” Phyllis asked. Phyllis’s face was soft and pleasant, like the rest of Phyllis. She was short and kind, a retired attorney and mother of four.
“Mr. Peavey wants me to meet him at Walden Spring on Monday morning.”
“No!” Phyllis shouted, too loud.
“Why ever not?” Jane was slightly annoyed Phyllis would presume to tell her what she could or couldn’t do. Advice was fine, but edicts, not so much.
“Because Monday is the day you’re going to help me find a man to date,” Phyllis answered.
Only Irma had the nerve to say what they were all thinking. “You’re kidding.”
Phyllis had had a long and happy marriage to Sam, a real sweetheart, who’d been struck down by leukemia at the age of fifty-nine. That was tragic. Also tragic was Phyllis’s reaction. Less than a year after Sam’s death, over the boisterous objections of her grown children and the somewhat more muted ones from the bridge club, Phyllis had married Craig, shortly thereafter known as “The Awful Craig,” and finally just as “The Awful.”
Phyllis was sparkly and pretty. She was round like a snowman, round hips, round chest, and a round face she emphasized with her short, feathered brown hair, a color that was no more natural than Jane’s honey-blond but that suited her. Phyllis’s was the kind of roundness men found enticing, and when Jane went out with her, she couldn’t help noticing Phyllis still attracted their attention.
Phyllis had gone to law school when her youngest child started kindergarten and later made so much money as a corporate lawyer, both she and Sam were astonished. But like many smart people, Phyllis could be incredibly dumb.
It had taken two years for Phyllis to admit her marriage to The Awful was a disaster. She ordered him out of her house. He refused to go. Phyllis hired a divorce attorney. The Awful did, too. Delays piled on delays.
Phyllis moved in with Jane and had the electricity and the gas turned off at her house. She let the oil tank run dry. At first, she drew the line at turning off the water, fearful of what The Awful could do in a house
