Part 2 (2/2)

My voice mails were an odd and interesting mix that morning.

”Lacey, this is Jim Moffitt,” was the first message on my voice mail. ”I think we need to talk. I know you're going through an emotional time right now. Just call me.”

d.a.m.n it. I forgot Reverend Moffitt was on the mailing list. He was a nice man and wonderful pastor, but we hadn't gotten particularly close in his two years at the church. And I was pretty sure Mike and I were well beyond a good old-fas.h.i.+oned pastoral counseling session at this point.

The next message was from Mike. ”Lacey, baby, my mom just called. She mumbled something about the newsletter and then she was crying so hard that I couldn't understand what she was saying. I didn't see a receipt for postage. Did you mail something out without showing it to me? What's going on?”

Double d.a.m.n it. I forgot to take Mike's parents off the list.

”Lacey, it's Mama, Norma Willet just called us in Hilton Head and told me I needed to call you right away. Is everything okay?”

I really should have called my mama before I did this. Well, the next time I find out my husband is cheating on me, she'll be first on my emergency contact list.

”Lacey, it's Jeanie Crawford, I just got your e-mail, and I wanted you to know that I'm so sorry for what's happening to you. I gotta tell you, I laughed my head off at what you wrote.”

Well, that was just strange.

Mike, again. ”Lacey, baby, it's me. Bob Martin just called and said I need to get a tighter rein on you. What does that mean? Call me.”

So apparently people were calling Mike about the newsletter but were too embarra.s.sed to give him details. Good, let him squirm.

”Lacey, you need to call me, right now. Right now.” That was the last of Mike's messages.

6 * Bagels and b.i.t.c.hery.

I turned all phones off that afternoon after my voice mail and Mama's answering machine filled up. The one person who'd stopped calling me was Mike, whose divorce lawyer, Bill Bodine, had left a message stating that all future communications from Mike would come through him.

In retrospect, it would have been wiser to leave the phones on as that might have given me some warning that my mother-in-law would be dropping by for a visit. Instead, picking at a bagel, I opened up my mother's front door to find Wynnie Terwilliger, standing there, twitching.

This wasn't good.

While Mike claimed to be a modern man, his mom pretty much ruined him for women born after 1952. His mom didn't work as he grew up, so he was used to coming home to an immaculately clean house, hot meals, and pressed s.h.i.+rts. Wynnie considered dust bunnies to be an insidious threat against democracy and the sanct.i.ty of the American home Wynnie never missed an appointment with the colorist that had kept her pageboy the same shade of dark honey blond since the late 1970s. Today she was wearing teal pants and a jacket set off with the silver dragonfly pin she considered her ”signature piece.” That was strangely appropriate as Wynnie was also stick thin and had no measurable sense of humor.

We'd never had any real problems, because, in general, I met her standards for a good daughter-in-law. I came from a good family, kept a nice home, entertained beautifully, and made the family look good. In general, I did what I was told when it came to holidays and family events because I just didn't have a reason not to. It's hard to object to spending every Christmas with your husband's parents when your parents were going to be there anyway.

This didn't necessarily mean I enjoyed spending time with my mother-in-law. If pa.s.sive aggression were an Olympic sport, Wynnie would have her own Wheaties box. She couldn't seem to get through a conversation without lovingly correcting me, whether it was the way I fried chicken or showing the proper reverence for the roof ”her boy” put over my head. Every Christmas, she gave me clothes at least one size too small and reminded me that ”Mikey has always liked his girls thin.”

Wynnie honestly believed Mike was perfect in every conceivable way. So telling her that her precious baby boy suffered from cranial-rectal inversion would have done little to improve her disposition. The general lack of acrimony in our relations.h.i.+p left me unprepared for the venom in her eyes when I opened the door.

”Well, Lacey?” she demanded. ”What do you have to say?”

I offered her a bite of my breakfast. ”Bagel?”

Wynnie stuck her hands on her hips and shouted, ”Are you going to stand there and act like you haven't shamed the whole family? That you haven't made a fool out of yourself in front of the entire town?”

I swallowed. ”No.”

She sighed, staring at me for a long moment, and tapped her foot. ”Well, we can't dwell on what's been done. We just have to fix it. I think you and Mike need to go away on a long vacation. Get to know each other again. Maybe go on a cruise.”

”You completely misinterpreted that 'no,” I told her as she marched past me, into the house. ”I'm divorcing him. Wynnie, it's over.”

”Oh, don't be silly.” Wynnie waved aside my announcement with a flick of her wrist. She pulled her cell phone out of her purse. ”We just need to get the two of you out of town for a while, away from all this fuss, to give your mama and me time to smooth this all over. We'll tell people that you were playing around with a new way to send the newsletter, wrote up a funny gag version of your e-mail and accidentally sent that out to the mailing list instead of the real one. And that you're very sorry for the misunderstanding. And now you two are on a second honeymoon to try to forget the whole thing.” She flipped her phone open. ”I'll just call my travel agent and set this whole thing up. Do you want Jamaica or Na.s.sau?”

”Wynnie, a cruise isn't going to fix this. The only way Mike would get on a boat with me is if I were being used as an anchor. Your son obviously doesn't want to be married to me anymore and I definitely don't want to be married to your son.”

”All my boy did was play the field a little bit. Why'd you have to make such a fuss? He's just a man, Lacey. They're all just men. You're a big girl. You know what men are like. You've seen other women go through this. But what you did, Lacey, how could you? This could have been handled quietly, within the family.”

”Within the family. I was supposed to tell on him? What were you going to do? Send him to time-out?”

I didn't think it was possible, but Wynnie's lips thinned even more. ”You think I didn't know it when Jim took up with that waitress from the club? You think I didn't hear people suddenly stop talking when I came into church? You think going to the beauty parlor was easy when I knew they'd been talking about 'poor Wynnie Terwilliger' the second before I walked in? But I held my head high. I didn't roll around in the mud, making a fool of myself. I never even told Jim that I knew. Because at the end of the day, he came home to me, to our family, and that's what mattered.” She sniffed. ”And before you climb up on that high horse, I think there's something you should consider, that maybe if you'd kept Mike a little more occupied at home, he wouldn't have strayed.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. ”I think there's something you should consider. Beebee could be your next daughter-in-law. She and her cleavage will make a lovely addition to the family Christmas card photo.”

Wynnie turned an exquisite shade of tomato red. ”There's no reason this has to come to divorce. That won't improve anything. My boy knows the difference between the kind of girl you bring home and the kind of girl you just play around with. He wasn't thinking of marrying her. He was just thinking...”

”With Little Mike,” I suggested.

Wynnie glared at me. ”If you would just be reasonable, talk to him. A good Christian wife would know how to look past this and forgive him.”

”Well, I will start looking into Buddhism as soon as possible.”

”This isn't the time for your inappropriate jokes. I don't think you appreciate your position here, Lacey,” she said, her tone sweetening to a wheedle. ”When I was your age, Jim had no idea whether I knew about his little dalliances. He was always so guilty, so nervous that he'd be caught, that I had whatever I wanted without even asking for it. I always knew when he'd been with her because he'd bring me home flowers, a sweet little piece of jewelry, or he'd take me on some wonderful trip to make up for it. For my fiftieth birthday, he took me to New York City to see Cats. Do you think he would have done that if he wasn't cheating on me? And Mike's already been caught! He's got that much more to make up for. You could end up with an entirely new wedding set or maybe even a car!”

I stared at her. ”Are you on medications that I'm unaware of?”

”Are you listening to anything I'm saying?”

”Yes, you think I should let Mike humiliate and betray me repeatedly for the sake of the presents.”

”Well, if you're going to think about it that way, I'm not going to be able to help you,” she grumbled.

”I think you need to leave now,” I told her.

Wynnie could whip up tears in a second's notice. Her eyes glistened. Her lip trembled. She fished around in her enormous teal handbag for a monogrammed hanky. ”I can't believe you. I can't believe how ungrateful, how unfeeling you're being after all these years. I can't believe you're being so hard-hearted. This isn't the Lacey I know. I'm ashamed of you. You're not the girl I welcomed into my family.”

Under normal circ.u.mstances, that kind of disapproval would have sent me scrambling to make up for whatever I'd done. I would have apologized automatically. Wynnie was looking at me with the kind of contempt my father reserved for straight-ticket voters. She was probably angrier with me than, well, arguably anyone, had ever been in my life. And the world wasn't ending.

I was fine. My stomach wasn't churning. I wasn't tearing up. My hands weren't even shaking.

I'd spent so much of my time worrying about whether I was liked, whether other people were happy with me. I took stupid, mind-numbingly tedious a.s.signments at club meetings because women with bigger shoulder pads told me gathering twelve different kinds of coleslaw recipes would be ”just perfect” for me. I let Wynnie keep a key to our house, because Mike said it would hurt her feelings if she didn't feel free to let herself in, even if we weren't home. People had certain expectations of me and I rushed to meet them, because if I didn't... Well, I didn't know. I never figured out that it wasn't the end of the world if I disappointed someone or made someone angry.

Honestly, how much worse could it get? What was Wynnie going to do? Ground me? It's not like I was going to be married to her son for long. I didn't have to worry about getting her approval or making sure Thanksgiving went smoothly. I didn't have to swallow ”that's just the way she is” because that made Mike's life easier.

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