my eyes. “No, give it to me now.”
She sighed as the waitress refilled my glass.
“All right,” she said. “No. You don’t have four more years.”
My mouth went dry. I looked at the retreating waitress in a panic. I didn’t have enough spit to call her back, so I took a gulp of iced tea then yelled, “Excuse me? Miss?”
She turned around and I said two words. “Chocolate Suicide.”
CHAPTER 2
Buzzed from the caffeine in two orders of Chocolate Suicide, I ran up the stone steps of Moira’s Tudor and jabbed the doorbell.
“Door’s open,” Moira yelled.
I found her in the living room, wearing only a pair of French-cut panties, rolling around on a Pilates ball.
“Jesus, Moira, what if I’d been the UPS guy or something?”
Moira jumped off the ball, her breasts bouncing with enthusiasm. “Then I guess I would still be getting some exercise,” she said with a smart-ass grin.
Moira was always alluding to other men and rumors were rife among the neighbors on Seagull Lane. I’d taken a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude and had no idea if the rumors were true.
“Geeze, honey,” she said as she took in my appearance, “you look like hell. And what’s that all over your shirt?”
I looked down. “I’ve just done two rounds with Chocolate Suicide.”
“Well, it obviously didn’t kill you, but, sweetie, you sure look wounded.”
For one harrowing moment I thought she was going to hug me. I don’t consider myself to be all that narrow minded, but that didn’t mean I wanted to feel Moira’s bare breasts against my T-shirt. Thankfully, she grabbed a kimono off the sofa and slipped into it. But not before I had enough information to put another Seagull Lane rumor to rest. Not an ounce of silicone on that body. I’d never seen them in action this long before. They were real, all right.
Heavens, was this any time to focus on another woman’s breasts? My world was crumbling. What did I care about silicone? “Something terrible has happened—” I began.
“Well, I’m here to listen and help but you seem awfully rattled. Before you start spilling your guts, you need a martini.” She peered at me again from under her false eyelashes. “Or maybe three.”
I was in no shape to argue. I followed her into the kitchen and watched her make a shaker of martinis.
“Here,” she said, handing me one. “Drink up.”
I’m usually a white wine kind of gal, but the first sip went down easily. Delicious and cold enough to ice skate over the surface. I took another sip. And another.
“Good,” Moira praised. “The color is starting to come back into your cheeks. Now let’s go get comfortable so you can tell mama everything.”
I followed her into the living room and sank onto one of the two white sofas that flanked the fireplace. While the women of Whitefish Cove often worked for years at taking layers of paint off their woodworks and crown moldings, Moira had done just the opposite. Everything was painted a creamy white—even the stone fireplace. Sacrilege to most of the ladies of the Cove, but I thought it was really quite striking. The color in the room came from a red shag rug on the floor and the artwork on the walls—which were mostly bold slashes of color on canvas—the kind of stuff you look at and think you could do yourself just as well. But what did I know about art?
“So,” Moira said once I’d let the down-filled cushions of the sofa enfold me, “spill it.”
I chugged the rest of my martini, put the empty glass on the coffee table, and spilled. The look on Moira’s face grew more horrified with each word.
“Honey,” she said when I’d finished, “you must have had a man for a lawyer.”
I shook my head. “Nope. A woman.”
“Traitor bitch,” Moira mumbled.
“Not really. I insisted on doing it this way.” I braced myself, figuring Moira would look at me and say stupid bitch. But she didn’t. Instead, she asked me why.
“Okay,” she said, “you’re not dumb. So what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that I wanted my life to go on just as I’d planned it,” I said. “I wanted to be a ‘stay at home mother,’ I wanted to be a block watch captain, room mother, chairman of the annual Christmas cookie exchange. I wanted to drive a minivan to soccer games and sew Halloween costumes. I wanted everything that Roger had promised me when I’d married him, damn it. And I didn’t see why Gordy should have to suffer having his life uprooted just because his parents had fallen out of love. Besides, I’d always planned to go back to school and eventually support myself. I mean, I had no intention of living off a man who didn’t love me for the rest of my life.”
“I’m not sure I share your ethics on that one,” Moira murmured as she refilled our glasses from the shaker she’d brought with her from the kitchen.
“The most important thing to me was to know that Gordy would be taken care of until after college.” I shook my head in disbelief. “I guess that’s how I screwed up. I thought I was going to be taken care of for four more years, too.” I leaned forward again and buried my face in my hands. “Don’t you see? I thought I had four more years to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.”
Moira set her glass down on the table, then gathered me to her ample, unfettered bosom. “You poor thing,” she murmured as she rocked me in a way that my own mother certainly never had. I closed my eyes and settled in. Of course, Bernice wouldn’t have been nearly as comfortable to be held against, either. My mother had good bones and never put anything into her mouth that could lead to hiding them. When she was upset, she lost herself in sit-ups or yoga, not double helpings of dessert.
My eyes popped open. OMG! My mother! How was I ever going to face my mother with this?
Comforting as they were, Moira’s arms weren’t going to cut it. I pushed away from her and grabbed my glass off the coffee table, downing the second martini, which wasn’t nearly as cold or delicious as the first, in one huge gulp. I burped then wailed, “How the hell am I going to tell Bernice?”
“I think we need more booze,” Moira said.
She’d met my mother.
Moira was back in the kitchen, shaking up the last of a bottle of Stoli, when Stan came home. I sat up straighter and tried to look less like a tearful lush, then I remembered that Stanley Rice, who at six foot three and about one hundred forty pounds looked like Ichabod Crane in Ralph Lauren, wasn’t known for a keen sense of observation when it came to anything other than business and his model railroads in the basement. He barely glanced at me.
“Hello, Lauren,” he murmured absently while he sorted through the stack of mail he’d brought in with him.
“Hi, Stanley,” I said, trying not to slur my words. Not that he’d
