An Invincible Summer (Wyndham Beach), Mariah Stewart [best classic novels TXT] 📗

recalled there’d been a few cards in the stack of mail she’d brought in earlier, so she culled them from the pile and opened them to see if she needed to add anyone else to her list. Christmas was still a few weeks away, so she could still mail a few cards. There was one from a friend from college, another from a lawyer who’d left the firm and moved to Memphis right after her father had died and didn’t know that she and Zach were no longer together (“Wishing you both the merriest of holidays! Love, June”), and one from Emma Dean, the envelope of which was marked PHOTOS. DO NOT BEND. She opened the card and let the photos fall onto the counter.

The photos were all from her mother’s Thanksgiving road trip with her friends to Charlotte. There were photos of the three women standing in the front row of the audience as other concert-goers filed in around them. A photo of Chris on stage—she paused over this one and smiled because he was so damned cute and looked so like a rock star. Next, the three women in a horse-drawn carriage. Another at the NASCAR museum. A picture in the tattoo shop—what had ever possessed her mother to go along with that? At least the tattoo was cute and was in a discreet place. Grace would have bet that had been Liddy’s idea, but her mother had said Emma had suggested it. The last one was of her mother and Chris. He had his arm around her, his hand holding a box of Junior Mints. She looked through the pictures a second time before leaving them on the counter with the realization that her mother was having more fun and a way better life than she was. Which she acknowledged was a good thing for her mother. She knew Maggie’d had a hard time since Art died.

It occurred to Grace, not for the first time, that the Flynn women had really, really bad luck with men. Maggie’s husband had died a week before he’d have turned sixty. Grace’s own husband had left her for the office floozy. Natalie . . . well, Nat never had a husband, but her baby daddy—a term Grace would never use in the presence of her mother—had walked out on her, and whether it had bothered Nat or not, the fact remained that if her luck had been better, she’d have gotten involved with the kind of man who would have stayed, who would have wanted the child he’d made with the woman he supposedly loved. One who hadn’t turned out to be a drug addict.

Yeah. Bad luck all around.

She rinsed out her glass, turned off the kitchen light, and settled herself back in the living room. She wanted to take one more look at TheLast2No before she headed upstairs to get ready for bed. She clicked on her blog, scanned today’s entries, and was dismayed to find that not only had BlackWid055 reappeared, but others had joined the conversation after she’d signed off, and it was taking an ugly turn.

LilacLadyNJ: I don’t know . . . I . . .

BlackWido55: Girl, you need to take matters into your own hands and teach that bitch a lesson she won’t forget.

Annie Boleyn: I think that’s enough for tonight, ladies. I’m shutting this down for a while.

LilacLadyNJ: Oh, but Annie, this is my only place where I feel like I can say what I think and what I feel about what happened to me.

Annie Boleyn: I understand that, I really do. But there’s a tone here tonight that is setting off all kinds of alarms, and I need to clear the air.

BlackWido55: She’s talking about me. And by clear the air, she means she wants to shut me up.

Annie Boleyn: Not shut you up as much as tone you down. We’re supposed to be supportive here, help each other vent so we can move on eventually.

BlackWido55: Oh, really? How close are you to moving on, Annie? I bet if you had the chance, you’d deep-six that little hottie that stole your man.

Annie Boleyn: I’d like her out of my life, yes. Or more accurately, out of his life, but not literally. I mean, I don’t want anything bad to happen to her. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.

BlackWido55: Sure you would. If you could get away with it, there’s any number of things you’d do to her. And to him. Want to know what I’m going to do to my ex?

Annie Boleyn: No. And that’s it for tonight, ladies. I’ll be here by 8 on Friday for happy hour if you’re free and want some company.

With shaking hands, Grace closed and locked the blog’s comments for the night, effectively shutting everyone out, and signed off. BlackWido55 always seemed to take things right to the edge. Her story was a familiar one: she was happily married to the love of her life until her ex fell in love with her yoga instructor and left her. She’d quipped that she’d lost not only her man but the best yoga teacher she’d ever had. She’d vented hard, but all Grace’s followers did that, especially in the beginning. It was why they came to TheLast2No, to bitch and whine and put curses on their exes—hence the relatively new feature on the blog, the Ex Hex, where those curses could be spelled out. Once in a while someone got a little carried away with their revenge fantasies, but that was all they were. Fantasies. God knew Grace had had plenty of those herself, none of which she’d shared, but she wasn’t going to judge someone else for having them. And for most of her followers, just putting those fantasies out there had been enough to banish them from subsequent conversations. But BlackWido55 seemed unable to drop the baggage, and her aggressive rhetoric seemed to increase as time went on.

One way or another, Grace was going to have to rein her in. The last thing