Fast Women Read online

  She winced at the name, the pain slicing through her because she wasn’t braced for it. “If he wanted to leave, he didn’t have to go to her,” she said. “You can’t tell me that he didn’t look at her and notice she was younger and firmer and—”

  “No guy would prefer Olivia to you,” Riley said, sounding disgusted with her. “Stop wallowing.”

  Suze ignored him and faced the truth: She’d ended her own marriage, and now she didn’t even have Olivia to blame for it. Jack. “I hate this.” She turned around to face Riley, a little surprised to find that he wasn’t standing close. He’d seemed so close. “And it’s all my fault.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Riley said, exasperated. “You married a guy who was so controlling that normal everyday life threatened him. You quit your job and close the checking account and then what? You going to sit in this dining room for the rest of your life, looking at those blue plates? Because I’m pretty sure you’ll have to give up all those cups with feet, too. They creep me out, and I’m not trying to hold on to you.”

  Give up the cups? “I need Nell,” Suze said and burst into tears.

  “Hold on.” Riley backed up a step. “Just wait a second.” She heard him retreat into the kitchen and dial the phone. I traded in the only man I’ve ever loved for a checking account and a bunch of egg cups, she thought, and then she put her head down on the dining room table and howled.

  A few minutes later, when the worst of it was over, she lifted her face and Riley stuck a box of Kleenex under her nose. “Nell’s on her way,” he told her, sounding as if he couldn’t wait.

  “Sorry about the crying,” she said and took a tissue to blow her nose. “That must have been awful.”

  “Yes, it was. Don’t do that again. Would you like a drink? Or something?”

  She sniffed again and tried to smile up at him. He looked trapped and wary. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Riley, I just cried, that’s all. My marriage died, I’m allowed to cry.”

  “Sure you are. Save it for Nell. She’ll be here in about half an hour. You sure you don’t want a drink? Because I do.”

  “Why half an hour? It’s not that far.”

  “Gabe was with her at her place. They were fighting over us not telling you and then they … stopped. She’s getting dressed.”

  There, Suze thought as she sniffed again. Nell had found somebody else. She hadn’t curled up and died when her marriage ended that Christmas, she’d—

  “Oh, God,” Suze said. Nell had waited two years. It was going to be another two years before she wasn’t alone again. And all Nell had had to get over was that worthless Tim. She was going to have get over Jack. “Oh, God.”

  “What?” Riley said.

  “It’s going to be two years before I have sex again,” Suze wailed.

  “I’ll just get those drinks,” Riley said and escaped into the kitchen.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Suze sat on the stairs at midnight and patted Marlene while she listened to Nell tell Jack exactly what kind of cheating, disgusting, degenerate weasel he was through the locked door. She’d put the dead bolt on, and she wouldn’t let him in, and eventually, he’d given up and gone somewhere else, probably to Olivia.

  “Tomorrow you get a lawyer,” she told Suze, coming up the stairs to her.

  “Tomorrow I have to go to work,” Suze said. “I have a teashop to run.”

  “You can call a lawyer from the teashop,” Nell said, and then stood by her the next day while she did.

  Suze’s days dissolved into a blur of blended teas and Margie’s cookies, drinks at the bar as a decoy for Riley, painful discussions with the lawyer, and long talks with Nell, who never got tired of listening, even when Suze kept going back relentlessly to the same themes.

  “I’d be ready to kill me,” she told Nell on Valentine’s Day. “I know I keep saying the same things, but I just can’t seem to get unstuck. I know I should file for divorce, the lawyer says it’s time, but I just can’t seem to—” She broke off. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re doing better than I did,” Nell said. “I didn’t say anything at all for a year and a half. What do you want for dinner?”

  They were at Nell’s, something that made Suze feel guilty because here was Nell, finally happy with a good man to love her, and there was Suze, planted in the middle, like the toad in the fairy tale, spoiling everybody’s good times. “Listen, it’s Valentine’s Day. I can go home.”

  “Over my dead body,” Nell said. “How about stir-fry? I can do that fast.”

  “Sure,” Suze said and wandered into the living room to pat Marlene again. It was amazing how therapeutic patting a dachshund could be, even one with an attitude as bad as Marlene’s. She stopped by Nell’s china cabinet and looked at Clarice’s dishes. The Secrets houses stood alone on the hill with their lonely smoke plumes and depressed the hell out of her, so she looked at the Stroud cartouches instead, the cheerful little orange-roofed houses inside the perfect little squares. For some reason they were worse, that lonely little single house trapped inside the square, everything so tidy, everything so impossible. Maybe that was what she was doing, trying to keep everything tidy, outlined in black. Your husband cheats, so you get rid of him. That was cartouche life, not real life. Real life was messy, complicated by doubts and regret.

  Maybe she should go home and call Jack. Maybe they should talk without the lawyers there.

  “You okay?” Nell said when Suze came out to the kitchen to help set the table.

  “Maybe I gave up too soon,” Suze said. When Nell didn’t say anything, she turned to look at her. “What do you think?”

  “I think that whatever you decide, I’m behind you one hundred percent,” Nell said. “And Margie will be behind you one hundred percent with a thermos of soy milk.”

  “What would I do without you?” Suze said.

  “That you’ll never have to know,” Nell said, putting a plateful of food in front of her. “Now eat. I worry you’ll be as dumb as I was and do the sleepwalking thing.”

  For all Nell worried about her, Suze worried about Nell. Working at The Cup with Margie and moonlighting at the agency gave Suze a ringside seat on Nell’s new relationship, and as far as she could see, if Nell didn’t wise up, they were both going to grow old alone.

  Because in spite of her obvious ecstasy, Nell wasn’t living a new life. Nell had remade her old life, running her new boss the way she’d run her old boss. The problem was, her old boss had been a wuss and her new boss wasn’t. Nell would ask for something, Gabe would say no, and Nell would work around him. Then Gabe would yell, Nell would drag him off to bed, and the whole thing would start all over again with something else Nell wanted, including her last three great goals, the ones even she was afraid to do an end run for: the couch, the business cards, and the new window. She and Gabe were either fighting or making love or on the way to one or the other, and while Suze could understand the exhilaration, she couldn’t understand how they kept going. She’d have needed medication long ago.

  “I don’t understand them,” Suze said to Riley when he came into the teashop to get away from the arguing one afternoon. She poured him a cup of tea and set out the plate of broken cookies she kept behind the counter for him, and he picked up half a star and nodded.

  “You had it right,” Riley said. “They’re both kissers. And if Nell doesn’t knock it off, they’re going to have real problems.”

  “Oh, it’s Nell’s fault, is it?” Suze said.

  “Yes, it is, and I’m not fighting with you so don’t even start.” Riley bit into the cookie, and Suze took a deep breath and calmed down. “Gabe owns the agency,” Riley went on, “she’s his secretary, she doesn’t get to make decisions and just assume he’ll rubber-stamp them. I can’t believe the crap he’s let her get away with so far, but it’s getting to him.”

  “How can you tell?” Suze said. “He looks the same to me.”

  “I can tell because they fight every goddamn day, and he doesn