The door chimes sounded, but he wasn’t in the mood for company, and he ignored them. He hadn’t been sleeping too well or eating much more than an occasional bologna sandwich. Even Lucky Charms had lost their appeal—they held too many painful memories—so he’d been substituting coffee for breakfast. He rubbed a hand over his stubbly jaw and tried to remember how long it had been since he’d shaved; but he didn’t feel like shaving. He didn’t feel like doing anything except watching game films and yelling at Kevin.
The door chimes rang again, and he frowned. It couldn’t be Tucker because somehow the sonovabitch had gotten a house key of his own. Maybe it was—
His heart made a queer jolt in his chest, and he banged his elbow on the doorframe as he made a dash for the foyer. But when he yanked the door open, he saw his father standing on the other side instead of the Professor.
Jim stormed in waving a supermarket tabloid folded open to an article. “Have you seen this? Maggie Lowell shoved it at me, right after I gave her a Pap. By God, if I were you, I’d sue that wife of yours for every penny she has, and if you don’t do it, I will! I don’t care what you say about her. I had that woman’s number from the beginning, and you’re too blind to see the truth.” His tirade abruptly ended as he took in Cal’s appearance. “What the hell have you done with yourself? You look terrible.”
Cal snatched the tabloid out of his father’s hand. The first thing he saw was a photograph of himself and the Professor that had been snapped at O’Hare the morning they’d left for North Carolina. He looked grim; she, dazed. But it wasn’t the photograph that made his stomach drop to the bottom of his feet. It was the headline below it.
I Trapped the NFL’s Best (And Dumbest) Quarterback into Marriage by Dr. Jane Darlington Bonner.
“Shit.”
“You’ll have a lot more to say than that when you read this piece of crap!” Jim exclaimed. “I don’t care if she’s pregnant or not—the woman’s a compulsive liar! She says in here that she posed as a hooker and pretended to be your birthday present so she could get herself pregnant. How did you ever get tangled up with her?”
“It’s like I told you, Dad. We had a fling, and she got pregnant. It was just one of those things.”
“Well, apparently the truth wasn’t exciting enough, so she had to go and invent this outlandish story. And you know what? The people who read this rag are going to believe it’s the truth. They’re actually going to believe that’s the way it happened.”
Cal crumpled the tabloid in his fist. He’d wanted a good excuse to go see his wife, and now he had it.
It was blissful, this life without men, or so they told themselves. Jane and Lynn lazed like cats in the sun and didn’t comb their hair until noon. In the evening, they fed Annie her meat and potatoes, then smeared cottage cheese on ripe pears for themselves and called it supper. They stopped answering the phone, stopped wearing bras, and Lynn tacked a poster of a muscular young man in a Speedo to the kitchen wall. When Rod Stewart came on the radio, they danced with each other. Jane forgot her inhibitions, and her feet flew like dove’s wings over the carpet.
To Jane, the rickety old house was everything a home should be. She snapped beans and filled the rooms with wildflowers. She put them in carnival glass tumblers, china bud vases, and a Bagels 2 Go commuter mug Lynn found on the top shelf. She didn’t know exactly how she and Lynn had developed such an attachment to each other; maybe it was because their husbands were so much alike, and they didn’t need any words of explanation to understand the other’s pain.
They allowed Kevin into their women’s house because he entertained them. He made them laugh and feel desirable even with pear juice trickling down their chins and seedpods caught in their hair. They let Ethan in, too, because they didn’t have the heart to turn him away; but they were glad when he left since he couldn’t hide his worry.
Lynn gave up her women’s club meetings and coordinated outfits. She forgot to color her hair or do her nails, which grew ragged at the cuticle. Jane’s computer stayed in the trunk of her Escort. Instead of trying to unlock the Theory of Everything, she spent most of her hours lying on an old wicker chaise that sat in the corner of the front porch, where she did nothing but let her baby grow.
They were blissfully happy. They told each other so every day. But then the sun would set and their conversation would begin to lag. One of them would sigh while the other stared out at the gathering dusk.
Along with the night, loneliness settled over the rickety old house on Heartache Mountain. They found themselves yearning for a heavier tread, a deeper voice. During the day, they remembered that they had been betrayed by the men they’d loved too well, but at night their house of women no longer seemed quite so blissful. They got into the habit of going to bed early to make the nights shorter and then rising at dawn.