Ladies' Night (11 page)

She’d started in the storeroom, clearing out an entire Dumpster’s worth of antiquated equipment, a deep fryer her father had always meant to fix, an ice machine that had stopped working ten years earlier, boxes and crates of old business records, food service catalogs, and broken chairs and tables.

From there she’d moved on to the kitchen, ruthlessly tossing anything and everything that wasn’t essential to their food-service operation. She’d inspected every glass, dish, and piece of cutlery, consigning anything chipped, bent, or discolored to a crate she’d allocated for the local homeless shelter’s soup kitchen.

Along the way, she’d had to abandon all her old, genteel ideas about housecleaning. Diluted vinegar and baking soda were useless in her dust-busting efforts here. Now, her weapons of choice included every industrial-strength, commercial-grade cleaner she could find at the local janitorial supply house.

Grace set her mop aside, peeled off the rubber gloves, and sipped her coffee. She gestured around the room. “I feel like I’m finally making some headway, don’t you?”

Her mother shrugged. “Place doesn’t even smell like a bar anymore. You’ve scrubbed away every last trace of the Sandbox ambiance.”

“Mom, that wasn’t ambiance, it was crud. Years’ and years’ worth of baked-on, smoked-in, ground-down crud. This place was gross. Can’t you just admit you like it better clean?”

Rochelle rested a hand on the old mahogany bar. “I liked it the way it was,” she said pointedly. “We were shabby before shabby got cool. Now it’s like a hospital operating room, for God’s sake. Who wants to grab a beer and a burger in a hospital?”

“There’s a difference between shabby gentility and run-down and decrepit, and it’s really not so fine a line,” Grace said. “Our regulars may grouse at first, but you wait, they’re gonna appreciate pouring beer from a pitcher without a busted spout or eating with a fork without bent tines.”

“My
regulars don’t know what a fork tine is,” Rochelle said.

Maybe, Grace wanted to tell her, if we clean this place up, change the menu, and raise our standards a little, maybe we’ll attract a clientele that actually will pay $15 for a decent dinner entrée.

But before she could lob another useless argument into Rochelle’s court, she happened to glance up at the television and stopped, midsentence.

Rochelle followed her gaze. “Aw shit. Here we go again.”

The morning news hour had segued into
Sunrise Sarasota,
one of those chatty, morning-magazine-format shows. The cohosts, an unbearably perky husband-and-wife team named Charley and Joe, were doing an “In the Kitchen” segment that had the wife, Charley, attempting to crack a Florida lobster shell while the husband, Joe, was being tutored in the finer points of crafting a table setting.

When Grace heard an all-too-familiar voice, a high-pitched nasal twang, she turned around to stare at the wall-mounted television above the bar.

The guest coaching Charley and Joe through their cooking segment was none other than J’Aimee. Her J’Aimee, or rather, Ben’s J’Aimee.

Rochelle grabbed for the remote to change the channel, but Grace was faster, snatching it up from beneath her mother’s fingers, then staring, dumbfounded, at the television.

“Don’t go away!” Charley was saying. “We’ll be right back with Gracenotes-style blogger J’Aimee.

“What?” Grace shrieked. “Gracenotes-style blogger? Seriously?”

“Just turn it off,” Rochelle said soothingly. “Tune it out. This means nothing. You’re just going to get yourself all worked up for nothing.”

“It’s not for nothing,” Grace said, still staring up at the television. “This is all Ben’s doing.” She scrabbled around on the bar, looking for her phone.

“I’m calling my lawyer,” Grace said, scrolling through the numbers on her contact list. “He can’t do this. He can’t promote her as a Gracenotes blogger. He can’t turn her into me!”

“Looks like he already did,” Rochelle said, under her breath.

Grace got Mitzi Stillwell’s voice mail. “Mitzi! This is Grace. Turn on
Sunrise Sarasota
right now! Ben has J’Aimee on there, promoting herself as the Gracenotes-style blogger. You’ve got to do something, Mitzi. Call the judge, get an injunction or something. Call me back, okay?”

The commercial break was over, and Charley and Joe were back with their guest.

“Look at that whore!” Grace ranted. “See how good she looks? I swear, Ben’s gotten her a makeover. She looks almost classy.”

J’Aimee was wearing a sleeveless hot-pink dress, her newly dyed dark locks worn in a simple upsweep.

“They must have put some kind of concealer on that barbed-wire tattoo she has on her right bicep,” Grace muttered. “And I think maybe she got Botox on her lips. You see how full they are now?”

Rochelle shrugged. “I never paid that much attention to the girl, to tell you the truth.”

J’Aimee was now openly flirting with Joe, batting her artificial lashes at him, giggling and playfully flicking a dinner napkin at him …

“Hey! That’s my damned napkin.” Grace scrambled up on one of the barstools to get a closer look at the television. She pointed at the screen. “Those are my hand-blown Mexican wineglasses.” She felt tears welling up in her eyes. “I carried those all the way back from Puerto Vallarta on my lap.

“And look. She’s using that fugly damned pottery from my Gracenotes sponsor. That’s strictly a Ben move.”

She sank back down on the barstool, unable to take her eyes off the television. Now J’Aimee was placing a centerpiece in the middle of the table. It was a large, shallow glass bowl, heaped with shiny green Haas avocados.

“I always like to use fresh local fruits and vegetables in my table settings,” she told Charley, adjusting one of the avocados. “It gives a party a sense of authenticity, don’t you think?”

“Authenticity?” Grace howled. “She didn’t know an avocado from an orange before I hired her.”

Rochelle quietly removed the remote control from Grace’s clutch. She aimed it at the television and clicked.

“You’re getting yourself all worked up for nothing,” she said. “So what if she’s on television? So what if Ben has her writing a blog with your name on it? She’s not you. She’s just a cheap little floozie. You are the real thing. You’re butter and she’s … she’s not even Parkay. Ben will figure that out soon enough. Your readers will figure it out. Everything will work itself out.”

“No, it won’t,” Grace said tearfully. “She’s stolen everything from me. My house, my husband, my napkins. That was my wedding silver she was setting the table with. My Repoussé silver, Mom.”

Rochelle sighed and folded her weeping daughter into her arms. “It’ll be okay, Grace. Really it will. I know it hurts right now, but you’ll get through this. You will. I’ll help you.”

Grace looked up at her. Tears streamed down her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose was snotty. She sniffed loudly. “How, Mom?”

“I just will,” Rochelle vowed. She grabbed the bottle of spray cleaner Grace had left behind the bar. “Look. I’ll let you clean the office next, okay? You can throw out whatever you want, and I won’t say a word.”

*   *   *

After the judge refused to give her back her blog, Grace promised herself she would
not
look at Gracenotes. But that afternoon, once she’d filled the Sandbox’s Dumpster with dusty files and years’ and years’ worth of old
Sports Illustrated
and
Florida Sportsman
magazines, Grace opened her laptop and clicked on the icon for her blog.

“Oh no she didn’t,” she murmured, looking at the home page. Everything had changed. Including the name. It was now Gracenotes for Living, with J’Aimee! The new banner was in a nearly unreadable font, in a garish orange and teal color combination. The rails on both sides of the page were filled with tiny, one-inch squares advertising everything from
New Unbelievable Anti-Aging Serum!
to bank credit cards to cruise ship vacations to
Pet Meds by Mail!

“Horrible,” Grace said, shaking her head. “Heinous.” She counted three dozen ads on the home page. Ben must have been having a field day, she decided, maximizing and monetizing to his greedy heart’s content.

She read the previous day’s post. It was titled “How to Buy Furniture.”

“Hmm. Scintillating,” Grace said. As she read, she felt sick. The entire blog was really a thinly veiled advertorial for Room in a Box, a wholesale furniture company with franchise operations all over central Florida. The same furniture company whose banner ad now took up the entire top of the home page.

Room in a Box’s marketing people had been pestering Grace for more than a year to write about their furniture. They’d even had the nerve to ship a faux-leather recliner chair to the house—as an inducement/bribery for Grace to write testimonials about their product line.

“No way,” Grace had said, as Ben cut the cardboard crate away from the chair—which actually came with a remote control allowing it to recline, vibrate, and even play music. “Pack that thing up and tell UPS to come back and get it. I don’t even want it to stay here overnight.”

Ben knew it was useless to argue with her. Obviously he’d waited until he no longer had to argue with her. Grace was gone, and with her had gone any hint of editorial standards.

She couldn’t read any more of this drivel. She closed out the blog, opened a file, and began to type, her fingers flying over the keyboard.

By four that afternoon, she’d registered a new domain name for herself, TrueGrace. Maybe not the most original name, she admitted, but it would serve its purpose, hopefully letting her readers know this blog was the real thing.

This time around, she promised herself, the blog would be all hers. And for her first post, she decided to go public with what had happened in her life and to her old world.

No more prettying things up, Grace decided. She was still writing, deleting, revising, when she looked down at her watch and realized it was nearly 7:00
P.M.
She hit the
SAVE
button, closed her laptop, and reluctantly went downstairs.

Rochelle was behind the bar, pouring a beer for an older woman Grace didn’t recognize. She looked up in time to see Grace heading for the Sandbox’s front door.

“Where are you headed?” Rochelle called.

Grace grimaced. “To my so-called therapy group.”

“Looking like that?”

Grace looked down at herself. She was wearing a faded lime-green Sandbox T-shirt, white shorts, and flip-flops, the same outfit she’d changed into after her morning run. Her hair was knotted in a limp ponytail and she wore no makeup.

“The judge said I had to go,” she said, her chin jutting out defiantly. “He didn’t say I had to dress to impress.”

Rochelle handed the beer to her customer and hurried around the bar to her daughter’s side. “Honey, you don’t want to go in there with an attitude,” she said, her voice low. “Maybe these sessions will actually be helpful. Maybe you should keep an open mind. Or at least do something about your hair.”

Grace sighed. She reached into the glass display case where they kept the Sandbox-branded merchandise, the koozies, tees, bumper stickers, and key chains. She grabbed a baseball cap with the Sandbox logo embroidered on the bill, jammed it on her head, and looped her ponytail through the opening in the back of the hatband.

“Better?” She didn’t wait to hear Rochelle’s answer.

11

Grace had to check the street address on the therapist’s door to make sure she’d arrived at the right place. This was a shrink’s office? It was a drab one-story stucco storefront occupying the end slot in a strip shopping center that also boasted a Vietnamese nail salon, a hearing aid salesroom, a business called the Diaper Depot, and a tattoo parlor. The dusty plate glass window was boldly lettered in gilt-edged black letters;
PAULA TALBOTT-SINCLAIR, L.S.W. FAMILY AND MARITAL COACHING, DIVORCE DIVERSION, EMOTIONAL HEALING.

“Emotional healing,” she muttered to herself, taking a last sip of lukewarm coffee before getting out of her car. “Right. Like that’s going to happen.” There were four other cars in the otherwise empty parking lot. One of them, a shiny black VW bug, boasted a yellow smiley-face bumper sticker with the motto “Change Happens.” Had to be the therapist’s car, she decided, hating her on the spot.

Paula Talbott-Sinclair’s reception area wasn’t much more impressive than her storefront. Worn and faded brown indoor-outdoor carpet, a low-slung olive-green pleather sofa, and a couple of armless chairs. There was a receptionist’s desk, with a computer terminal and telephone, but no sign of a receptionist. Only a clipboard with a hand-lettered sign on the desktop:
DIVORCE RECOVERY GROUP MEMBERS, PLEASE SIGN IN HERE
. There were three other names on the sign-in sheet, all women, Grace noted.

The door on the wall opposite the front door was slightly ajar, and Grace heard the low hum of voices. She wrote her name on the sign-in sheet, hesitating a moment, before jotting down Grace Davenport.

“Hello?” she said softly, approaching the door. A woman popped her head out. Grace guessed she must be in her midforties. Her heart-shaped face was framed with a cascade of sandy-blond curls, and she had startlingly blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. She was dressed in a figure-hugging sleeveless black tank top and tight black yoga pants, with a gauzy black shawl draped around her bony shoulders. And she was barefoot.

“Oh hi,” she said brightly, looking Grace up and down. She grasped both of Grace’s hands in hers and squeezed. “I’m Dr. Talbott-Sinclair, although in group, we all just use first names. So I’m Paula. And you must be Grace Stanton?”

“Actually, it’s Davenport,” Grace said. “If you don’t mind.”

“I see,” Paula said, pursing her lips. “Well, that’s something we’re going to want to talk about, isn’t it?”

“Taking back my maiden name?” Grace asked. “Does the judge have a problem with that?”

Paula cocked her head and blinked. “The question is, Grace, do you have a problem with it? Is this something you’re doing out of anger? Because we can’t have a healing when our hearts and minds are full of bitterness. You’ll come to see that, I think, eventually, in group.”