ONE
“Lizzy, hang on, you’ve got to slow down,” Charlotte said. “All I heard was ‘fucking horse’ and something about thirteen dollars an hour.” She’d shouted that last bit into the phone. She knew that yelling probably wasn’t the best way to handle a hysterical person, but Charlotte Crawford had never really been good in an emotional crisis.
“Fucking whore, not horse. Amber. He’s been having sex with her for a year and a half. While I was paying her! In my house, Charlotte . . . in my house,” Lizzy wailed, and Charlotte struggled to make sense of her friend’s frenetic rant.
“Adam?” Charlotte asked. It was a stupid question. It’s not like Lizzy would be freaking out if she discovered her babysitter was having sex with the mailman or the pool guy. Of course Lizzy was talking about her husband.
“Yes, Adam! He says he loves her—she’s a child!—and he wants a divorce. He’s leaving me, Charlotte. He’s leaving me for that whore Amber, the one we trusted to watch our kids and took to Italy with us on vacation. How could I be so fucking stupid?”
That Whore Amber, which is how they would refer to her for the rest of ever, had been babysitting Lizzy and Adam’s kids since she was fifteen. Even though Lizzy’s daughter Coco was fourteen now herself, they’d kept That Whore Amber around to help take care of the two younger boys. Apparently, they weren’t all she was taking care of.
“I held her hand while they put her dog to sleep!” Lizzy was shouting now, too. “I bought her a goddamned Gucci wallet. I paid for her to take Italian lessons. Was he having sex with her in Italy, too? While I was out buying pottery for his mother and he was supposedly working? That whore. That asshole. Oh my God, this isn’t happening. Tell me it isn’t happening.”
Of course it wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. First of all, Charlotte’s best friend Lizzy was the most beautiful human being she had ever met. And not just in the inside-out, whole-person sense, even though Lizzy was generous and loyal and funny and volunteered all over the place and made her own homemade ravioli. Lizzy was also physically gorgeous. Naturally, and—if all jealousy were put aside—unassumingly gorgeous. And on top of the fact that Lizzy had actually been mistaken for Megan Fox on more than one occasion and had the metabolism of a thirteen-year-old boy with a tapeworm, she and Adam as a couple had it all. The beautiful, showcase home. The smart, athletic, genetically gifted kids. The award-winning purebred golden retriever wagging his tail just inside the crisply painted white picket fence. Who would throw all of that away? Who would throw Lizzy away? It just didn’t make sense.
“What a prick.” Charlotte couldn’t think of anything else to say. It’ll all work out? You’re better off without him? You’ll get through this? You’re still stunning; you’ll have men crawling all over you in five minutes? While all of that was doubtless true, Charlotte was pretty sure the only thing she’d want to hear if she were in a situation like this was what a prick.
“I’m getting a divorce,” Lizzy said, her words dripping with disbelief. “Me. I’m going to be one of those horrible, desperate cougars who wears padded push-up bras under see-through leopard-print blouses and goes out trolling bars every night. No. No, I won’t, because I hate push-up bras and animal prints and I don’t ever want another man and I don’t need another man and oh Charlotte, what am I going to do?”
What could her friend do? Nothing, that was what. Nothing besides try not to go crazy or postal or both while watching some bitch move into her house and take over her life like she was the newest Darrin on Bewitched.
“No shit” was Jack’s response when Charlotte told him about Lizzy and Adam that night. Then he settled himself into bed and switched on the TV as if that was all that needed to be said.
Charlotte had finally gotten the house picked up and the laundry folded and the kids into bed, and she’d been dying to talk to him about it all day. She needed to process the whole thing, which still seemed like a movie or a bad dream. Jack didn’t look as surprised or upset as she’d wanted or expected him to, which made her want to claw his eyes out.
“‘No shit’?” Charlotte said, grabbing the remote from his hand and flipping the TV off. “That’s it? Lizzy is my best friend in the world! This is major! A family is being destroyed here. A family we care about—or at least I care about them. Is that really all you have to say?”
“Well, yeah,” Jack said. “I mean, that and who’d screw around on Lizzy?”
Since that had practically been her own first thought, Charlotte was surprised at how much Jack’s comment infuriated her.
“So you’re saying it would be fine—or at least understandable—for a married guy to be fucking the twenty-year-old babysitter if his wife didn’t look like Lizzy?” Charlotte spat at her husband.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I was saying,” Jack said, flipping back the freshly pressed Jonathan Adler duvet and grabbing his empty water glass. Charlotte sat on the bed and watched him stalk naked across the room to the bathroom. For probably the millionth time, she marveled at her husband’s utter lack of self-consciousness. She never walked around naked, not ever, not even to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Jack had no such hang-ups. He’d strut to the kitchen in the altogether, grab the orange juice from the fridge and drink it straight from the carton, standing right there in the door, illuminated like a gallery sculpture in the refrigerator’s spotlight. She would bet that he didn’t even bother to suck in his stomach when he caught her staring—not that he needed to.
Jack marched back into the room with a fresh glass of water, set it roughly on his nightstand and crawled back into bed, scrunching the duvet extra hard when he did, Charlotte was sure.
“Sorry,” she said now, shaking. She didn’t really mean it but she didn’t want to fight; she wanted to dissect and analyze what was happening to her friend. She needed to wrap her brain around it, make sense of it and tuck it neatly away on a shelf, like the puzzles she used to put together as a kid and then preserve with thick layers of craft glue so she’d never have to go through the trouble of doing them ever again. “I think I’m in shock,” Charlotte added. “The truth is I thought the exact same thing. Lizzy! Loyal, gorgeous, perfectly perfect Lizzy. It’s just crazy.”
All she wanted was for Jack to agree with her, to tell her that of course it was crazy, and then to assure her it would never, ever happen to her. She wouldn’t mind a warm hug and a “This is probably really hard for you, too,” if anybody was asking.
“The babysitter must be ridiculously hot,” Jack said.
“Really? You think so?” Charlotte yelled, enraged all over again. “She can’t be as hot as Lizzy and she’s not the mother of his children and he didn’t swear in front of her family and God and all of their friends that he would love her forever so who cares what she looks like? She’s a filthy whore and a hideous hag as far as I’m concerned. And you’re just an asshole.”
“And you married me,” Jack said, reaching for the remote.
“I guess that makes me an asshole, too,” Charlotte huffed, storming from the room.
• • •
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