The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (18 page)

“Children,” I said. “David loves children. He wanted to
have a whole houseful. I didn’t want any. After Brynn was born, I just flatly refused to have any more.”

“But you did have the one,” Chester pointed out. “I don’t think that’s having your own way, I think that’s compromising.”

“He begged me at least to try for a boy,” I told Chester. “I said no and wouldn’t even discuss it.”

“Would that have made a difference in what has happened now?”

“It might have,” I said. “He might have been happier and more fulfilled. He might never have started playing around, and then he would never have met this Mikki.”

“What about you?” he asked. “Would having another child have been better for you?”

“Well, of course not,” I said with certainty. “I could barely manage Brynn.”

“Then don’t start trying to second-guess your past,” Chester said. “It’s like wrestling a pig, it doesn’t do any good and it annoys the pig.”

I laughed, which was exactly what he wanted.

“Don’t waste your time worrying about what you can’t change,” he said. “You need to be focusing on the future.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I need to figure out what to do. I’ve got to keep my marriage together.”

“If that’s what you want,” Chester said.

The question in his voice surprised me. Chester was a man who’d lived most of his life in another era, with old-fashioned rules. He’d married his Vera for life and lived happily with her until death did them part. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t for keeping a marriage together at all costs. “I’ve got to fight for my family,” I said. “It’s what a woman is supposed to do.”

“Of course it is,” he answered. “Except when it’s not.”

“What are you saying? I should let David go?”

“Oh no,” he assured me hurriedly. “I’m not saying that at all. What I think is that sometimes we react to things on impulse. Someone hits us, we hit back. Someone tries to get away, we hang on to them. We move too quickly, and fall back on instinct. But we are not just creatures of instinct. There is the spiritual side of us, as well.”

I eyed him skeptically.

“The spiritual side can push through and beyond our initial tendency and give us a whole different view of how the world might go.”

“I don’t know if I believe that,” I admitted.

“Okay,” Chester said. “Let’s try looking at it this way. If you’d been killed in that car, David wouldn’t have to be asking you for a divorce.”

That suggestion brought a thousand possibilities tumbling through my thoughts all at once. They took my breath away.

“You think that I was supposed to die in that car and David was supposed to be free to marry Mikki? And because I asked to live, I messed all that up for him?”

“Whoa! Slow that old caboose down,” Chester said, chuckling. “I’m not saying anything of the sort. I’m just saying that I believe there is a distinct possibility that the world is all tied together in a humongous pattern. And it might do you some good to take a deep breath, think things through slowly, calmly. You’ll see what is the right thing to do.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Pretty much so,” he answered.

I went home, sat in my darkened office. The place made me feel more in control. The darkness suited my mood.

I thought about Chester’s words. I thought about those moments in the car. Had my pleas somehow altered fate? Not just my fate, but David’s and Mikki’s and everybody’s.

Did that mean I should just pretend that I had died? Or more correctly stated, just roll over and play dead? Should I let David walk off into the sunset with his young, blond person? I didn’t want that. But why didn’t I?

Did I love David?

I examined that question, trying to hold back on my rush to pessimism. We’d shared a lot of our lives together. We’d just been kids when I maneuvered him into marrying me. And he had made all my dreams come true. The wedding at the club had been a Cinderella fairy tale come to life. The whole extravaganza in daffodil and cream had been provided by him and his family. Our little three-bedroom “starter home” had been the nicest place that I’d ever lived. And a pile of student loans that would have taken a decade to get out from under were wiped away with the stroke of a pen.

But there was more than money to our marriage. Even in my most cynical frame of mind, I couldn’t discount the quiet times we’d spent together, the warmth and tenderness that we’d shared. I could remember the look in his eyes the first time he’d held Brynn in his arms. I could remember the comfort of his hand in mine at the funeral of a dear friend. I could almost hear the way my name sounded on his lips. And I enjoyed the noise of his boisterous, baritone laughter.

I loved David. I cared about him. I wanted him to be happy.

Could I make him happy?

This was a question that deserved consideration. David wanted Mikki because he thought he was in love. He wanted more in his relationship than he was getting from me. Did I want more in a relationship with him? If I got him back, was I willing to try harder, to build a stronger marriage, to grow and change with him?

Of that, I wasn’t so sure. What I really wanted was for things
to go on as they had been. I wanted the relationship that we had. Sort of a no-frills marriage. He did his thing. I did mine. If he wanted to see other women, all right, that was fine, as long as he was discreet. And if he didn’t want to show up with me at the club, okay, I was comfortable going without him. Why was it necessary to break up a partnership that was, from my point of view, working very nicely?

The doorbell rang, interrupting the direction of my thoughts. I went to the window, but the car in the driveway, a white Lexus SUV, was unfamiliar. I considered not answering at all, but when the bell rang a second time, I headed in that direction. I wasn’t really anxious for visitors. But sometimes a distraction can be welcome. Even cleaning-products salesmen or Mormon missionaries would be a break from difficult considerations.

I looked through the security peephole to see a familiar young woman. I couldn’t immediately put a name with her face, but I knew I recognized her. Undoubtedly she was one of the younger brokers or a new member of the Junior League. I opened the door.

“Hi! How are you?” I said pleasantly.

The woman responded to my warm greeting with a stunned look—an instant later I realized why.

“Mikki, I hardly recognized you,” I said. “Is that jacket a Sharagano? I thought your taste ran more to the Kathie Lee Collection.”

She glanced down at her coat as if unsure of what she was wearing. The catty little jab that I’d leveled at her went over her head completely.

“It…it was a present for my birthday,” she said.

I knew immediately that David had bought it for her. He cared very little for fashion or designers, but he had impeccable taste, and when he bought clothes they were always perfect.

“Happy birthday,” I said. “You’re twenty-one?”

“Oh no, I’m twenty-six,” she assured me, as if that were a lifetime of difference. “May I come in?”

I thought about refusing her. Even Miss Manners would agree that I wouldn’t be required to offer the hospitality of my home to the woman my husband wants to marry.

Still, Mikki obviously had something to say. I decided I didn’t particularly want to hear it on the porch. I opened the door and invited her inside.

I tried not to really look at her. I didn’t want to see how cute and perky she was. I didn’t want to remember how much closer she was to my daughter’s age than my own. But I couldn’t not look at her. She was the woman who was ruining my life and she was standing in the middle of my living room. Like rubberneckers at the site of a grizzly crash, I just couldn’t draw my eyes away.

In truth, it wasn’t a satisfying experience. When your husband wants to leave you for another woman, you would hope, at least, that she would be gorgeous, if not witty, wealthy and famous. If he leaves for Tyra Banks or Mena Suvari, then you can throw up your hands and say, “What could I do?” But on close examination, this young woman was absolutely nothing special.

Her hair was bright blond, but it had that dry, overtreated look. Her makeup was too heavy and too contrasting. The eyeliner and mascara was thick and black. The lipstick too red and glossy. She was not long, lean and lissome. She was short. And although in the past when I’d seen her I’d thought she was thin, today that expensive designer coat couldn’t disguise the fact that the young woman was downright pudgy.

“May I take your coat?”

She grabbed hold of the lapels as if she thought I might rip it from her back. “Oh no,” she said.

The girl had probably never owned anything so nice in her whole life and was afraid to let it out of her sight.

I sat down. Mikki sat as well. She was ill at ease and uncomfortable, but that didn’t stop her from gazing around curiously as if she were in a museum or a gallery.

“You like the room?” I asked.

“Oh yes, it’s great,” she answered. “And it’s so…kind of foreign, like Europe or something. It’s…it’s nice. I never thought David’s place would look like this.”

I had never really thought of my home as
David’s place
and I wondered about the Richland Garza house in Stone Oak.

“Are you hoping to try to take over my house as well as my husband?”

My words were deliberately cutting.

“Oh!” she said. “Please don’t worry about your house, Mrs. Lofton. I could never live here.”

Her tone was conciliatory. I chose to take offense.

“That’s a comfort to know,” I said sarcastically.

She looked at me, wide-eyed. She wasn’t sure, but she obviously thought that remark might have been insulting. But she decided to give me the benefit of the doubt.

“I’m really excited to meet you at last,” she told me. “David talks about you a lot. He says I remind him of you. I never liked hearing that, but now I see what a compliment that is.”

There was nothing disingenuous about her words. In fact, there was so much sincerity, I felt a rush to protect her. Someone was going to eat this little naive girl alive. And it could easily be her boyfriend’s wife.

“David thinks you and I are alike?” I said. “I can’t imagine that.”

“Me neither,” she said. “Especially now that I see you. I mean, I knew you were, like, smart and educated and everything. But I didn’t know how sort of sophisticated you are. I
know you know about antiques and architecture and stuff, and I’m really an idiot about those things. I think Mr. Garza, the man who designed our house, would just get exhausted having to explain everything to me. Where I grew up there were only two kinds of houses, singlewides and doublewides.”

Mikki laughed at her own little joke. The self-effacing humor was charming, but it was the kind of thing that would put her at a distinct disadvantage at the club. I quickly reminded myself that she was never getting into the club. She was only getting David over my dead body. Unbidden, the memory of the car crash came back to vividly taunt me. Chester had been right. If I had been killed in that accident, David and Mikki would not have had to worry about me.

And vice versa, I would not have had to worry about them. I had wanted to live. I had begged to live. I had bargained to live. And I hadn’t made any stipulations that life be easy, painless and without complications.

“Okay, Mikki,” I said. “I’m fairly certain that David didn’t send you here to talk to me. So, I think I can assume this was your idea.”

She nodded.

“David told me that you’d come around,” she explained.

“Oh?”

“I’m sure he’s right,” she said. “David knows you so well and he is very savvy about people.”

I was astounded. That my husband of twenty years might presume to understand me was reasonable, of course. But beyond that, I didn’t believe David was particularly savvy about anything. Or perhaps I had simply never trusted his opinion.

Either way, I clearly needed to dissuade both David and young Mikki from any idea that I would give up my marriage without a fight.

“I have absolutely no reason to divorce David,” I explained
to her. “I know all about you and the women that came before you. His little flings are no reason to give up a very satisfactory marriage.”

Mikki looked momentarily puzzled.

“But it’s not a satisfactory marriage,” she told me. “David says that you never really loved him and that the two of you have nothing in common.”

“Of course I love David,” I insisted quickly. “Perhaps I am not the most demonstrative woman in the world and I could never be a clinging-vine type, but I do care about him. And as for having nothing in common, it’s not my fault that he has no interest besides golf.”

Mikki’s tone was soft yet some how accusatory. “If you loved him,” she said, “you’d learn to play golf.”

It was all I could do not to groan and roll my eyes.

“David and I have our own interests,” I said. “That is a plus in a long-term marriage. It is how we’ve stayed together so many years.”

Mikki shook her head in disagreement.

“I think you’ve stayed together all this time because David doesn’t like to fight, and divorces almost always mean a lot of fighting.”

The accuracy of her statement was intimidating. I was counting on David’s aversion to conflict as an advantage to me. If Mikki was already aware of it, then she’d undoubtedly already figured out how to compensate for it.

“Then you’re ready to do battle?” I asked.

“I don’t think we need to fight,” she said. “David and I are willing to give you whatever you want, the house, your car, half of the investments. David’s even willing to fund a trust for you so that you’ll not have to worry about the future. And of course, he will pay for all the expenses involving Brynn.”

“This is not about money,” I stated honestly. “I have been making a very good living for the last few years all on my own. I don’t need David’s money to keep me afloat.”

Mikki shrugged. “Then put it away for Brynn,” she said. “You’ve been David’s wife most of your life, you’ve earned a share in what he has. Nobody is saying that you need it, just that it’s yours.”