Читать книгу Trouble Down The Road - Bettye Griffin - Страница 10

Lisa Canfield tore open the printed invitation. She knew her first husband’s birthday was coming up, and she knew he’d be fifty. It didn’t surprise her to see that he and Suzanne were giving a party to mark the milestone.

“What’s that?” her mother-in-law, Esther, asked. “Is someone getting married?”

“No. It looks like a wedding invitation, but it’s actually for Brad’s fiftieth birthday party.”

“Oh, yes. Arlene mentioned it when I ran into her at Walgreens. She said it’s going to be the party to end all parties.”

Esther, who lived with her only son and his family, and Suzanne’s mother, Arlene, who visited Suzanne so often she might as well live with the Betancourts, both had an interest in gardening. Over the years they’d become, if not exactly friends, congenial acquaintances. Lisa had to admit that Arlene Hall did have a green thumb. The Betancourts’ house had the nicest landscaping on the block, plentiful without looking like a jungle.

Lisa rolled her eyes. “I guess that means Stevie Wonder will be providing the entertainment. Can you believe it? They actually included admission passes. Who does Suzanne think she is, Oprah?”

“You mean we can’t get in without a pass?”

“That’s right. They sent four of them. One for Darrell and me, one for you, and one each for Paige and Devon and their dates.” Lisa and Darrell had a remarkably easy time blending their families, as their daughters were just three months apart and loved the idea of becoming sisters. The twin boys they had together, now fourteen years old, completed the unit.

“I’m sure it’ll be lovely. But speaking of dates, do you think Paige will invite her new young man?”

“I can’t imagine her not inviting him, Ma Canfield.”

“Don’t you think that’ll be a little awkward, under the circumstances?”

“I’m sure it will be,” Lisa replied easily. “But they’re all adults now. They can handle it.”

Esther flashed a knowing smile. “Come on, Lisa. You know this will make Suzanne furious. Aren’t you enjoying that thought just a little?”

“I cannot tell a lie,” Lisa replied, laughing. “But I’ll tell you. I always figured it would happen eventually. I just didn’t know if it would involve Paige or Devon. And I can’t wait to see the look on Suzanne’s face when she sees who Paige shows up with.”

Flo Hickman dropped the rest of the day’s mail when she saw the Betancourts’ return address on the square beige envelope. Not bothering to retrieve the other mail at her feet, she instead tore open the envelope in her hand, holding her breath as she read it.

Oh, my God. An invitation to Suzanne’s house.

This had to mean that she and Ernie had truly made a comeback. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d been invited to that gorgeous showplace of a house around the corner. She’d tried to talk herself out of wanting to be part of that crowd after Ernie was downsized three years ago. Their financial situation took a dangerous dip that would have been fatal to many, but she and Ernie rolled up their sleeves and tackled the problem. They filled an empty bedroom with a boarder to help pay the mortgage, plus they went into financial counseling to pay off mounds of credit card debt from purchases of big-ticket items they really couldn’t afford. She’d taken all the overtime she could at her job doing medical coding, and even with the replacement job Ernie landed, which paid much less than the one he’d lost, he still had to work part-time at a restaurant to meet their substantial monthly obligations.

But Ernie insisted he had to get his bachelor’s degree if he didn’t want to moonlight in a restaurant kitchen forever. His layoff came after the company he worked for merged with another, leaving two people in each management position. Since he only had an associate’s while his counterpart had a full four-year college education, he’d been the one eliminated. Ernie cried racism publicly, but privately he told Flo that without his degree, he’d never get another human resources manager position. Flo couldn’t argue with his logic, but she didn’t like the stress that put on her. In the end she started moonlighting with a part-time job and Ernie quit his second job and spent his evenings taking night classes. With his new degree plus his experience, he landed a manager position at a newly built hospital in the next county.

The final step back, after Ernie’s new job, was refinancing their house. They took all the cash they could out of it, which they used to pay off their creditors and get the financial counseling people off their backs. This step resulted in their having virtually no equity in a home they’d lived in for nearly ten years, but they both felt it was the right thing to do.

They couldn’t possibly have foreseen the real estate crash that was just around the corner. It worried Flo that they owed more on their house than it was worth, but Ernie assured her the market would rebound eventually and that they could live like they used to. So she quit her second job and they told their longtime renter—a college student they’d told neighbors was the son of family friends—that he’d have to leave at the end of the semester. Flo missed the check he gave them every month, although it did feel nice to have just themselves and Gregory living in the house with no outsiders.

Flo and Suzanne Betancourt had gotten to be pretty chummy before the bottom fell out for her and Ernie. They would go out to lunch and afterward go shopping, even if Flo ended up taking her expensive purchases back to the store for a refund when Suzanne wasn’t looking. Even then, Flo and Ernie had been on the road to financial ruin, but they’d worked hard to project wealth and status to their neighbors and to be recognized as the black couple with an enviable lifestyle. They found it upsetting when the Betancourts bought that expensive new house on the shores of the St. Johns River, just across from downtown Jacksonville. Ernie insisted that Brad and Suzanne didn’t have anything they couldn’t afford to buy themselves if they wanted, and when Flo told him that was ridiculous, reminding him that Brad was a radiologist, he stubbornly held on to his belief.

They both agreed to befriend the Betancourts and to link alliances, feeling this was their only option, but Flo had been much more successful with Suzanne than Ernie had with Brad. Suzanne opened up to Flo, confiding how unhappy it made her to have Brad’s former wife and their daughter living right next door to them.

Flo liked to tell herself that Suzanne dropped her socially because with Ernie’s job loss they couldn’t keep up financially, but in the back of her mind she knew Ernie probably played a role in it. Flo loved her husband unconditionally, but knew that he could sometimes be a tad overbearing. She feared he’d alienated Brad Betancourt from the start, asking inappropriate questions about financial matters and hinting for an invitation to the Betancourts’ cabin up on a Maine lake. Flo had hoped that with their son Gregory dating Suzanne’s sister, Kenya, Suzanne would at least invite her and Ernie over for dinner or something, but that hadn’t happened.

But at least they’d been invited to the party. She’d have to get a new dress, and a manicure and pedicure as well, so she could wear open-toed shoes. Her eyebrows would have to be waxed. She studied her hairline. Thank God her weave was only six weeks old and still fresh looking.

The Hickmans were about to reenter the Jacksonville version of high society.

Micheline placed the invitation on the refrigerator, holding it in place with a decorative magnet. An invitation to the Betancourts’. The timing couldn’t be better.

In the three months since she and Errol had hosted a Super Bowl party, she’d seen Brad a number of times at the golf club. She and Errol often had dinner there, since meals were included in that outrageous annual membership fee he paid. She played the part of beautiful, charming, and cultured wife, hoping to make Brad envious of Errol.

She wondered how Brad stood being married to an air-head like Suzanne. During a boring halftime performance by an over-the-hill rock ’n’ roller they’d talked about the latest political happenings, and Suzanne had a look on her face that said she wished they’d change the subject. That girl had just plain lucked out with Brad. She was probably all over him like a cheap plaid suit from the day she’d been hired to work at his place of business. Why else would a cultured, educated man like Brad even notice her?

Micheline thought she’d bust out laughing in the kitchen that day when Suzanne haughtily defended being a stay-at-home mother to teenagers by saying that a woman had to be a mother to understand. Suzanne obviously felt that giving Brad a couple of kids elevated her to demigod status. It had been a dig intended to get her where it was supposed to hurt. Suzanne probably decided that Micheline had no children after three years of marriage because she had difficulty conceiving and wanted to rub salt in the wound. The truth was that Micheline had no desire for motherhood. She’d been tempted to shoot this back at Suzanne, but a wiser head prevailed and she kept her mouth shut. That was a detail about herself that she’d shared with no one, not even Errol. The key here was to listen and learn, not to strike back.

She grinned. When she did strike back, Suzanne wouldn’t know what had hit her. And neither would Errol.

Married life had turned out to be a real bust. When Errol proposed to her, he said he wanted to be the one to make all her dreams come true. She believed him, but before the first year of their marriage was over she’d become convinced he wasn’t the man of her dreams after all. He complained incessantly about the money she spent, which was ridiculous. He could spend thousands to join a golf club, but he squawked if she bought a few outfits or pairs of shoes?

In their newlywed days he’d insisted she not go right back to work after the “trauma” she suffered. Micheline had actually gotten pregnant as the result of a torn condom during a one-night stand with a married man, but she told Errol the pregnancy had resulted from a rape and that she planned to give up the baby for adoption. That part had been true, and it had been a lot easier than Micheline had anticipated. When she informed the man she’d slept with of her pregnancy, he immediately offered to take the baby. It turned out his wife had fertility problems, and the resulting stress on their marriage had been what had led him to sleep with Micheline in the first place. That had been a complication with a happy ending, but the more complex circumstance, the one that haunted Micheline to this day, was that the baby’s adoptive mother was a close friend of Micheline’s sister, Cécile.

Even Micheline hadn’t planned that little twist. She didn’t know if Vic Bellamy had ever told his wife that the child they were raising was biologically his, or if he’d convinced her that someone left the baby on their doorstep. The latter scenario was ludicrous, of course, but adoptions had become big business, and women who wanted babies and were unable to have them could be desperate. Vic had made it sound like his wife was about to go off the deep end. Micheline hadn’t realized that pregnancy would come as easy to her as it had for Cécile, who had four kids. One thing for sure—she never planned to have another pregnancy. Micheline knew she possessed neither the patience nor the nurturing skills necessary to raise children. Maybe that would change, but she doubted it. She was already thirty.

Cécile just about had a cow when she found out the part Micheline played in the drama. Micheline merely shrugged and went on. Let Cécile and her friends live their boring little lives, lives filled with raising brats and having same-old sex with their husbands.

No, that wasn’t true. Norell’s husband, Vic, had been a fabulous lover. She thought he might be good because he was so fit and trim, but because he’d been past fifty, it came as a pleasant surprise to find out just how good.

That was one bright spot in her marriage to Errol. His sexual appetite was as voracious as hers, and the action in their bedroom was never boring. But in every other way he was all wrong. He’d even suggested to her that she go back to work to take her mind off of her inability to get pregnant.

She chuckled at the irony. That inability was pure fiction. She could probably get knocked up faster than a person could say “nine months.” The unexpected pregnancy from one incidence of a torn condom attested to that. She simply made up fertility woes so that Errol, who wanted children, would keep her at home longer.

He’d begun to show a little impatience with the situation lately, though, and she couldn’t blame him. She was only thirty, but Errol was thirty-eight. They hadn’t been trying for their entire marriage, but for at least half of it. Lately he’d expressed that they should begin a workup to investigate the problem. Errol was a good guy, and Micheline knew she wasn’t being fair to him. She reasoned that it would be even less fair for her to have his babies feeling the way she did. If it weren’t for the occasional social event at Cécile’s that Errol insisted they go to, she would never even see the baby girl she gave birth to three years ago. It satisfied Micheline to know the child, who’d been named Brianna, was being raised by loving parents in a good home.

Micheline knew she wouldn’t be able to string Errol along forever. The time had come to find a new husband, one who wouldn’t object to a little clothes buying on her part, and one who already had kids—kids who lived with their mother and wouldn’t get in the way, of course—and didn’t want any more. Her gut told her that the still handsome and sexy Brad Betancourt was a prime candidate.

She smiled dreamily at the invitation. Brad was about to turn fifty himself. Something told her his bedroom skills were every bit as sharp as Vic Bellamy’s.

Micheline intended to do everything in her power to find out.

All she had to do was get rid of Suzanne.