Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

I said it again, he might have to wash my mouth out with soap like he did when you were a kid.”

Now Wyatt did laugh. “I’ll tell you a secret on your granddad, Bo. He’s all hat and no cattle.”

“Huh?”

“That means he just talks a good game. He never washed my mouth out with soap. Not ever. Now, what kind of name did you call your mom? Just between us guys?”

Bo dropped his voice to a whisper. “I called her a shit.”

Wyatt was glad for the cover of darkness, because his grin split his face in two. Then he forced himself to sound stern.

“Well, son, that’s not a very nice thing to call your own mother.”

“I was very, very, very mad at her.”

“I know you were. But you can’t go around calling people a shit, just because they made you mad.”

“She called me a shit first,” Bo said.

“When was this?” Wyatt asked, surprised.

“Right after I told her I wanted to stay with you this weekend and go to Scout’s birthday party. She said, ‘listen, you little shit. I am picking you up Friday right after school and that’s final.’”

Wyatt tried to choose his words carefully. Betsy had warned him that he was on thin ice with Callie, now more than ever.

“I don’t think your mom should have called you that, Bo,” he said finally. “But that doesn’t make it right for you to use bad words. Right now, your mom is really mad at me, too, because I don’t want her to take you so far away from me. So, she might say some stuff to you that she doesn’t really mean, because she’s actually just mad at me. But, Bo, even if she says mean things sometimes, your mom really loves you. We both do. Right?”

“I guess so. But I still don’t want to go to stinkin’ Birmingham.”

Wyatt leaned over and kissed his son’s cheek. “Sleep now.”

He climbed into the matching twin bed and pulled the worn sheet over his chest. The old walls in the mobile home were paper-thin, and he could hear his father snoring in the room right next door. A moment later, he heard the soft in and out of his son’s drowsy breathing. For once, he was glad of the cramped quarters in their makeshift house. He reached out his hand and let it rest lightly on Bo’s wrist. For tonight, anyway, Callie could not pull them apart.

14

On only their second night of what she’d begun to think of as divorce camp, their counselor, Paula Talbott-Sinclair, looked, Grace decided, a hot mess. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her thick black mascara smeared. She seemed not to notice that her haphazard topknot of blond curls was coming undone or that a fine sprinkling of crumbs adorned one strap of her turquoise tank top.

She’d lit a stick of incense, and the pungent white smoke drifting through the room made Grace’s eyes water and her nose itch.

“Everybody here?” Paula asked, looking around the room. She gave Wyatt Keeler a droopy-eyed wink. “Wyatt, I see you made it on time this week. That’s good. Verrrry good.”

She was slurring her words, Grace thought. Was she drunk, stoned? She looked around the therapist’s office. Nobody else seemed to notice Paula’s condition. Maybe it was just her imagination.

“Now,” Paula said, giving her hands a clap that sent her half dozen bracelets a-jingle. “Who wants to read from their recovery journal?”

Silence.

“Nobody?” Paula frowned. “Friends, we have to share here. It’s part of our healing process. So who will break the ice? Am I going to have to call on somebody, or will you volunteer?”

“I’ll go,” Camryn said. She was dressed in gym clothes tonight, a snug-fitting fuschia Nike shirt, black bike shorts, hot pink running shoes. She’d wrapped a hot-pink scarf around her hair and had ditched the false eyelashes.

Camryn opened her black-and-white notebook and cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said hesitantly. “Here goes.”

She traced a line of writing with her fingertip, took a deep breath, and began reading.

“I feel like a victim. It’s my job as a journalist to interview people, to tell their stories, convey their experiences. So here is my experience, and I am going to tell you exactly how it happened and how it makes me feel, and the hell with anybody who wants me to say I am sorry, because I am not sorry.

“My husband, Dexter Nobles, is scum. He lied to me, he lied to our daughter, he lied to all our friends. Bad enough he cheated on me, but no, he had to do it with our daughter’s best friend. A twenty-year-old! So how do you think that makes me feel when I look in the mirror? When I look at this picture of myself, I’m reminded of the victims I interview at a crime scene. Like the old lady who gets pistol-whipped by a thug on a street corner, or the guy whose car is jacked at a gas station. I used to wonder, what was that old lady doing out that time of night? Or why did that guy drive through that part of town in a new Mercedes? Were they that clueless? But now I know, a victim isn’t asking to be jacked or pistol-whipped, or cheated on by somebody they used to love. I know it because I’m a victim. I’m somehow less than I used to be. And I don’t like it worth a damn.”

Camryn paused and looked up at the others, and then at Dr. Paula Talbott-Sinclair. “There’s a lot more, but you get the idea.”

Paula’s eyelids drooped, then fluttered. “Very … revealing.” She was quiet for a moment, her blond topknot resting against the leather armchair’s headrest, her eyes closed.

“Are we supposed to talk about what Camryn wrote?” This from Ashleigh, who was leaning forward, her hands clamped on her knees.

Paula’s eyes remained closed. She waved her hand. “Go ahead.”

“Your ex actually did that? Screwed your daughter’s best friend? Like, even in your house?”

“Repeatedly,” Camryn said. “In my