the first person you’re going to call when we get there?” I asked her. “Matt?”
She took a long time answering. The tires hummed along the road.
“No. Not Matt. For all I know, he’s married with a houseful of kids. I’ll probably call my sister first.”
“Not your mom?” M.J. asked.
“No. Not my mom.”
“Why not?” I saw Cat’s jaw tense and release. Her mom is a sore point with her, but I wasn’t letting her get away with being evasive anymore.
She let out a long whoosh of a breath. “Okay. If you can admit you were once a debutante, I guess I can admit that I was born trailer trash.”
For a moment I was struck dumb, not from what she said, but how she said it. There was such contempt in her voice. Loathing, even.
“Trailer trash,” M.J. repeated. “You know, I hate that term. It’s like people always have to find a shorthand way to categorize people. Dumb blonde. Trailer trash. Beauty queen. Trophy wife. They categorize you because it makes it easier to dismiss you. Debutante, too,” she added. “Society deb.”
All of a sudden she laid on the horn, I mean mashed it over and over, all the while tearing southeast on the interstate doing at least eighty-five. “Make way for the Trophy Wife, Trailer Trash, Debutante Express! Look out world, ’cause ready or not, here we come!”
We squealed and cheered and laughed until our sides ached. It was a good thing our butch C.H.I.P. wasn’t around, because this time she would have hauled us straight to jail.
“We need to find a rest stop,” Cat pleaded. “I have to pee.”
Which sent M.J. into fresh whoops of laughter. “Well said, trailer trash. You need to pee, but I need the little girls’ room.”
“Oh, you trophy wives are all the same,” I put in. “You never grow up. What this debutante needs is a powder room. And fast.”
We found one, and none too soon. Of course, after we relieved ourselves, M.J. made me walk from one end of the rest stop to the other, the entire time goading me to go faster. Faster. She said it was about a mile round trip, but in the desert heat it felt like five. I did it, though, and when we stopped two hours later for lunch, I gobbled up a huge Cobb salad with fat-free ranch dressing.
Cat drove the next leg. We meant to reach Phoenix by dusk and get a hotel with a nice health club. Three to a room would keep it reasonable. Though I’d consumed probably less than four hundred calories at lunch, I was still halfway into a torpor when Cat said, “So, are we going to visit Margaret?”
I blinked away the beginnings of a nap. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” M.J. turned around to study me. “The perfect mom doesn’t want to see her daughter whom she hasn’t seen in months?”
Why did that make me feel so guilty? Because it was true. “I’m planning on calling, but she may be too busy to see us. She works evenings. Besides, if I see her I’ll only worry about her.”
“You’ll worry anyway, so I say we go see her. Okay, Cat?”
“Okay with me. We can go to the club where she works. Maybe I can pick up some young studly college boy. I’ve been thinking that what I need is a trophy husband.”
M.J. laughed. “Sorry, darling, but it doesn’t work that way. Trophy husbands are old and wrinkled and very, very rich.”
“Like Frank.”
“Like good old Frank.”
“Is that what you want again, M.J?” I asked. “A trophy husband?”
“I think she should hook up with Mr. Football,” Cat said. “What was his name?”
“Jeff Cole.” M.J. smiled and hugged her knees. Damn, but that girl was limber. “Wouldn’t that be great if my first real boyfriend was rich and still available?”
“We should try to find out,” Cat said. “Bitsey gets to meet up with Eddie at her reunion. You could call Mr. Football.”
“And what about you?” she asked. “Are you going to look up Mr. Stick in the Mud?”
“Matt,” Cat said. “Sheriff Matt Blanchard, according to one of my mother’s infrequent Christmas cards.”
“He’s a sheriff?”
“Of my old hometown. Mais, I tol’ you, he’s a good ol’ boy,” she said, slipping into a thick Cajun accent. “He prob’ly has a passel of kids by now, cher, an’ a kennel of hunting dogs, an’ a gun rack in his pickup truck.”
“I bet he chews tobacco,” M.J. said.
“And has a beer belly,” I put in.
“And hates uppity women,” Cat said. “Maybe I will look him up, just to be mean.”
From the back seat I considered just what we were doing in M.J.’s semistolen Jaguar on our way cross-country to New Orleans. I was going to my high school reunion because I wanted to see Eddie. I couldn’t explain why. I’m happily married, although I’m not so sure my husband is. The fact remained, however, that I wasn’t in the market for another man. But M.J. and Cat, my two very best friends, could each use a decent guy in their lives.
I unfastened my seat belt and scooted forward so that my head was even with theirs. “Listen to us,” I said. “We’ve all admitted that we have these unresolved relationships with our old boyfriends. Maybe there’s a reason we’re making this trip together. Maybe we’re supposed to resolve them. You and Jeff.” I squeezed M.J.’s shoulder. “And you and Matt.”
Cat fixed me with a narrow gaze. “And you and Eddie?”
I sat back. “Maybe.”
“You would cheat on your husband?” M.J. asked.
“I didn’t say that. God, you have your minds in the gutter. What I’m saying is that things are not…wonderful between me and Jack. I just need some perspective.”
“I say go for it,” Cat said.
“I will if you will,” I said right back.
M.J. frowned. “I don’t know if Jeff is even in New Orleans.”
I grinned. “I bet Margaret can find out for us.”
“Margaret?”
“The Internet. If he was a football player and later a coach, she can probably find out where he is now.”
“Maybe there will be something about the good sheriff, too,” Cat said. “And Eddie Dusson.”
It was decided then. Ahead of us the southern tail of the Rockies formed a jagged line on the horizon. But we would be driving over them and through them, and at the end of our journey we would find the girls
