As You Wish Read online

  Olivia picked up the card and looked at it. “Now that you have what you want, you probably wouldn’t want to change anything.”

  “You can get your New York apartment and maybe you can make your father listen to you,” Elise said.

  Kathy thought about that for a moment. “I think that in this case it’s like a prisoner who’s released after being found innocent. All his life he would have people saying, ‘Weren’t you in jail? What was it like?’ In the advertising world, I will always be known as ‘Ray’s first wife.’ The one he dumped. As it is, women ask me what it’s like being married to him. They sense that he’s only half a step away from being some street gangster and it excites them.”

  “But not you,” Elise said.

  Kathy rolled her eyes. “When we got married, he was barely civilized. I taught him table manners, gave him ballroom dancing lessons. You know what he got me for our first anniversary? A handbag with a lizard on it. A real lizard that had once been alive. He said his mother had always wanted one of those bags.”

  Olivia was the first to laugh.

  “He gave me so many weird gifts that a condition I put on his secretary was that she had to do whatever was necessary to keep him from buying me anything. And I opened an account at Chanel.”

  Olivia was laughing harder. “He told me that Elise was all Chanel and Cartier.”

  “And who do you think taught him that?” Kathy drained her glass and leaned forward. “This thing—” she nodded at the card “—is a scam. Whoever it is will want lots of money, but I say let’s go anyway. I haven’t had so much fun in years. Just thinking about rewriting my past and not marrying Ray Hanran is making me feel like dancing.”

  “Me too!” Elise said. “Imagining running down the aisle in my wedding dress—away from Kent—is a great fantasy.”

  “No dancing for me,” Olivia said. “It’s making me feel like driving—not that it’ll do any good. There is no Everlasting Street anywhere in Summer Hill and there’s nothing on FM 77 but a few old houses. One of them was abandoned years ago.”

  “I vote for anything that might help me with my current situation. Or at least give me some hope of a solution.” Elise stood up.

  “I second that,” Kathy said.

  “Put everything in the sink and let’s get in Kathy’s car,” Olivia said. “Mine might be recognized. Anyone have some big sunglasses and some scarves?”

  “Prada and Hermès do for you two?” Kathy asked.

  “No dead lizards?” Elise said. “Darn!”

  They laughed.

  * * *

  Olivia drove, Kathy beside her, and Elise got in the back. Olivia was glad the two of them were chatting, bonding. They each had body hang-ups. Kathy obsessed about her weight, and eyed every morsel of food as though weighing it for calories and nutrition.

  Whenever Kathy moved, Elise looked at her, assessing every curve. She seemed to be wondering whether being more voluptuous would help her capture love.

  Olivia had to fight the urge to lecture both of them. It wasn’t their body types that won or lost a man. It was him. The man. The women had chosen wrong—and Olivia was an expert on that. The things Kit liked about her were what Alan had abhorred. Olivia’s competence, her ability to get a job done, had made Alan feel useless, had taken away his essential feeling of being a man.

  It was after Kit returned to her life that she thought about the differences in personalities.

  Kit didn’t know it, but she’d asked his son about his mother.

  Rowan’s usually serious face softened. “Mom is lovely. She’s related to Italian nobility and she’s quite beautiful. She’s well educated, well traveled, and can talk to anyone about anything.”

  “Oh.” Olivia’s eyes showed her disappointment. How could she compete with “Italian nobility”? And she had never been out of the US.

  “What Mother couldn’t do was deal with Dad’s peripatetic life. He’d get a call from some government and we were to be gone in twenty-four hours. He expected Mother to organize the move and to take care of everything. But she couldn’t do it. She was used to being taken care of, not the other way around.”

  Olivia’s eyes brightened at his words. Moving, organizing, managing people were all things she could do. And more importantly, she would have loved it.

  Rowan’s handsome face hardened. “Dad wanted Mother to be something she wasn’t, and when she couldn’t be that person, he got angry.”

  Olivia had just nodded. She’d understood well. But understanding didn’t take away the pain.

  She drove past Mr. Ellis’s farm. Long ago it had been sold to a developer and a few little houses had been built, with many more planned. If she could go back in time, she’d buy the land with the rocks where she and Kit had sat and talked. Someone told her that the new owner was going to blast them out of the ground. Boring houses needed boring, flat tracts of land to be built on.

  Just as there was no Everlasting Street in Summer Hill, Olivia was sure that no one on earth could rewrite the past—if that’s what that silly card even meant.

  Kathy and Elise were now discussing the design details of Phillip Lim handbags and enthusiastically agreeing that he was someone to watch.

  Olivia couldn’t help smiling, happy that they were finding a common ground—and glad that for a moment they’d forgotten the bad of their lives. What concerned her was that the young women were so traumatized by what the men had done to them that they’d never recover. They were both beautiful women. Different but quite lovely. But years of being put down and found to be lacking had made them feel less than they were. How could big, lusty Ray not want to pounce on Kathy? As for Kent, he was just plain stupid.

  When Olivia got to FM 77, she slowed and turned right. She knew what was down the road. There were three old farmhouses set quite far apart. The first two were inhabited by older couples, and for lack of money, the houses had been allowed to deteriorate. Last year Josh Hartman had been paid by the church to repair the roofs. She knew he had put in many more hours than he was paid for.

  At the end of the road was the third house and no one had lived in it for over twenty years. It was set way back from the gravel road and had once been owned by an old man with six dogs. He’d left the house to his son, but no one could find him so the house had sat vacant.

  Olivia drove down the road slowly and at each driveway she had an impulse to turn around. This was ridiculous! Why were they here? To give money to some charlatan? To be ripped off because... Because they had hope? Is that what they were trying for?

  By the time she neared the end of the road, she was driving so slowly the car was barely crawling. She could hear every piece of gravel under the tires.

  Kathy turned in her seat and looked out the windshield. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m feeling silly. Why are we doing this?” Olivia asked.

  “Why not? Getting out of the house, thinking about something positive instead of the rotten things men have done to us has to be good.”

  Olivia smiled. “I like your attitude.”

  “Look!” Elise leaned between the seats and pointed.

  There was a brand-new green-and-white sign that said, EVERLASTING STREET. Olivia couldn’t help giving a snort of laughter. “This is a driveway.”

  “Magic comes in many forms,” Kathy said.

  Olivia turned into the driveway that was now called a street. There were big old trees shading the way, and it wasn’t until she got to the end that she saw the house.

  What had once been a derelict, decaying old place had been completely rebuilt. Big windows had been added and the front section built out to form a tall bay window. The old porch enclosed the entire side of the house.

  “Looks like some work has been done,” Elise said. “Think it was magic?”

  “Unless I miss my guess, it was Josh Hartman. He c