“Maybe I can just go into the library and read.”
“On Friday night?”
“Some people do read on Friday night, Mother. Some people work, too. Some people even just stay home and don’t see anybody.”
“This is the club on Friday night. You’ll look ridiculous. Sometimes I think you want to look ridiculous.”
“Maybe I just want to look like myself. Or maybe I just don’t want to look like a debutante.”
“Stay in the car for all I care,” Sally said, popping her door open and letting the wind rush in. “Stay out here and freeze. If I don’t do what I came here to do, we’re not going to eat next week.”
She climbed out onto the gravel and slammed the car door shut behind her. It was freezing out here, not only late October but early frost. She had left her coat in the backseat of the car. She didn’t want to get it. Mallory was fumbling around in there, getting ready to come out. Sally didn’t want to talk to her again.
Sally wrapped her arms around her chest and started across the lot, wobbling so violently on her high heels that she thought she was going to break an ankle. When she got to the lodge’s front door, she turned back and saw Mallory lumbering toward her, not wearing any kind of coat, either. Maybe with all that fat on her she doesn’t get cold, Sally thought—and then she was ashamed of herself, because that seemed spiteful.
She turned away and let herself into the lodge. There was no one at all in the front lobby although Sally could see a few couples in the dining room beyond, and one or two of the girls in Mallory’s group. The girls were not the ones Sally most wanted Mallory to know—but then they wouldn’t be, since girls like that almost always had other things to do on weekend nights besides hang around at the club. That was true even if they were heavy and unattractive, like Mallory was. Money covered a multitude of sins. It was one of those things Mallory just didn’t understand.
Sally bypassed the main rooms and went down to the back where the administrative offices were. Her own office was the second-biggest one on the corridor, after the club manager’s, SALLY MARTINDALE, FINANCIAL OFFICER the sign on her door read. Sally made a face at it. Of all the things she found it hard to take, this was what she found the hardest: that there was a sign on her door that announced, unequivocally, just how far she had come down in the world.
She went into her office and turned on the lights. She punched at the keyboard of her computer and waited for it to boot up. Then she sat down in the little chair and punched at her keyboard some more, until she brought up the file she had to have to do what she wanted to do. It was only then that her fear came back to her, and it came back in a wave. Mallory thought she did this without a qualm, but it wasn’t true. Sometimes she lay awake in the night, imagining all the worst things happening to her, getting caught, going to jail, watching Mallory move to New York to live with Frank. Except, of course, that Frank wouldn’t take Mallory. The last thing Frank wanted was a fat, sullen, unattractive daughter hanging around the apartment letting all his perky little girlfriends know exactly how old he was.
Sally scrolled up the page, looking for the names she liked the best. It was not a good idea to take money out of the same accounts two weeks in a row, even small sums of money, like one or two hundred dollars, which was all Sally ever took. She didn’t want to turn into a real-life embezzler. She just wanted enough to get by, to keep the phone and the gas on, to make sure she didn’t have too many calls from the people she had her credit cards with, wondering where their money was going to come from this month. In the past six months, Sally had been threatened with law suits twice, both by out-of-town banks where she had Visa cards. When she and Frank had been together and she had been working for Deloitte, it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to run up huge balances and pay them off only sporadically. It had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to drop a thousand dollars in a single afternoon at the West Farms Mall, just because she was bored.
The problem was, not every member of the club kept significant amounts of money in their club account. Sally couldn’t always alter the list of people she was taking fifty dollars from here and twenty-five dollars from there. She kept coming back to the same names over and over and over again, and that was dangerous.
Actually, if she was honest about it, she kept coming back to the same name over and over again—name singular, not plural. She looked down at the screen and bit her lip.
“Anson, Kayla,” it said, the letters pulsing a little on their dark blue background. Kayla’s club account had over fifteen hundred dollars in it. It was the largest of any account kept at the club. Even other very rich women, like Penny Harrison or Dee Marie Colt, rarely kept more than a couple of hundred on account at any one time.