The Accidental Bestseller (7 page)

She cried and ate stale marshmallows while watching Do ris Day and Rock Hudson trade insults in the romantic comedy
Pillow Talk.
By late afternoon when she began flipping between talk shows, her body had worn a comfortable hollow in the family room couch and Oprah was on her way to becoming Kendall’s new best friend.

Despite her attempts to numb it, her brain raced madly, changing gears so rapidly that she couldn’t hold on to a thought long enough to examine it. She did nothing all day, but felt as if she’d climbed Everest and then been trapped on its peak surrounded by air that was too thin to breathe.

Desperate for sleep and without any plan other than avoiding Cal, she went upstairs at 6:30 P.M., locked herself in Melissa’s room, and took two sleeping pills, telling herself that if she could just get a full night’s sleep she’d be able to think again.

In Melissa’s bed she breathed in her daughter’s still-girlish scent, closed her eyes, and finally fell into a dark cocoon of sleep. For a time she floated in the nothingness, her head bound to the pillow, her fears tunneled far off in the distance. And then there was a soothing, disembodied nothingness that stretched out into infinity.

She woke at noon, slow and dim-witted, and when she ventured out of her sanctuary, the house was silent around her. On the kitchen counter she found a note from Calvin. “I’ll be home early. Don’t bother locking the door. We’re going to talk.”

Four or five times that day she reached for the phone to call Faye or Tanya or Mallory, but she couldn’t make herself dial. She sat at her computer trying to work herself up to writing, but after a full hour the only words on the screen were “Chapter One.” After a second hour she’d added, “Page One.”

When she clicked over to e-mail and saw messages waiting from Faye, Tanya, and Mallory, she cried, but didn’t read or return them.

She was still sitting at her desk staring despondently at the blinking cursor when a phone call came in from Scarsdale Publishing. Too numb to weigh the pros and cons, she answered.

“Hello?” The quiver in Kendall’s voice betrayed her and she followed it up with a sniffle that she hoped would be attributed to a cold or allergies.

“Ms. Aims?” The voice sounded breathy and unsure.

“Yes.” Kendall groaned inwardly. It had to be some sort of bookkeeping or technical question. She should never have picked up.

“Ms. Aims, this is, um, Lacy Samuels. I work for Jane Jensen at Scarsdale.”

The name was vaguely familiar, but she had no face to go with it. “Yes. Have we met?”

“Well, no. I, um, just graduated from Smith. I’m Jane’s new editorial assistant.”

Kendall waited impatiently, much too drained to engage in small talk with Plain Jane’s slave labor.

“So, um, I’m calling because Jane has asked me to take over your next book for her.”

At first the sleeping pill grogginess protected her from the truth. “I’m sorry,” Kendall said. “What did you say?”

“I’ve, uh, been given the honor of editing your next book. I just wanted to, um, introduce myself and let you know how much I’m looking forward to working with you.”

Kendall’s brain was starting to kick in now and she really wished it wasn’t. “Did you say you are going to be my editor? That
you
are going to edit
my
book?”

“Um, yes, yes, I did. Jane apparently, um, feels that I can bring something to your work.”

The silence stretched out and the girl kept trying to fill it. “And, of course, there’s, um, so much I can learn from you.”

Kendall tried to gather her wits about her. It was, of course, a clear indication that Plain Jane didn’t plan to waste a moment of her time or an iota of Scarsdale’s resources on Kendall’s last book for them.

“How old are you . . .” Kendall looked down at the name she’d scribbled on a nearby envelope, not remotely concerned whether the question was PC. “. . . Lacy?”

“Well, um,” the assistant said quietly, “I’ll be twenty-two next week.”

Kendall couldn’t bring herself to speak. She’d thought things couldn’t get any worse than they already were, but she’d been wrong.

“But I was at the top of my class,” Lacy Samuels assured her. “And everyone says I’m very mature for my age.”

Kendall hung up the phone and sat, unmoving, for what felt like an eternity. She didn’t go to the pantry to forage for food nor did she get up to wander the empty house or burrow back into her spot on the sofa. All of those actions were beyond her.

She was still staring out her office window when Calvin drove his BMW up the driveway and pulled it into the garage. It was 3:00 P.M., she hadn’t showered or washed her hair for two days, and she was still wearing her bathrobe. She waited, suspended in time while he entered the house and walked into her office then sat on the loveseat to her left.

After all her ducking and weaving, she still wasn’t prepared for the blow he dealt her. Scarsdale’s repeated jabs had weakened her; Calvin’s uppercut sent her crashing to the mat.

“Kendall?” Her husband’s tone bore not a trace of the quarter of a century they’d been together.

Kendall kept her gaze on the cherry tree outside her window and wished she were the squirrel currently perched in the fork of outstretched limbs. If Calvin noticed her unkempt appearance, he made no mention of it. There was little more than a moment’s hesitation before he spoke.

“Things haven’t been so good between us for a long time,” he said.

Oh, God, she thought, it’s really happening. She drew in a breath and kept her eyes on the squirrel who was gnawing on something he held in his front paws.

“When the kids were at home, it made sense to try to keep up appearances for them.”

So that was all he’d been doing, keeping up appearances.

“But now that they’re gone, well, life’s too short to spend it pretending.”

She had a wild thought that Calvin had been watching Turner Classic Movies, too. Because everything he said sounded like it had been lifted from an old movie—and a bad one at that. Her husband of twenty-three years was dumping her and the best he could do was string a bunch of clichés together?

When she finally turned to face him, she fared no better in the dialogue department than he had. “You’re seeing someone, aren’t you?”

The words hung in the air between them, a trite accusation that came nowhere near addressing the gulf that stretched so wide between them.

“Yes,” he said, without a hint of apology. “But I don’t see any reason to get into that.”

Something hot and heavy surged inside of her at the unfairness of it all. Her publisher didn’t want her anymore and neither did her husband. They both just expected her to do whatever the hell they wanted and then quietly get lost.

The squirrel dropped whatever it had been clutching and used all four paws to spring onto another branch and trip lightly down the trunk of the tree to the ground. Kendall watched it scamper off.

What did it say about your life that you envied a four-legged rodent with a bushy tail?

“No,” she said. “Of course you don’t. You’ve never seen any reason to consider anyone else’s feelings or point of view. You just make decisions and we’re all supposed to go along with them.”

His jaw clenched at her response, but that was his only reaction. She had the feeling he’d rehearsed this whole scene, hackneyed dialogue and all. Probably while she’d been holed up in Melissa’s room. Or maybe for a long time before that.

“I want a divorce,” he continued. “I have an attorney and I think you should find one, too.”

Part of her wanted to shout, “Fine! Who needs you?” and stomp off to find someone who would represent her; someone who would take him to the cleaners and make him rue the day he’d done this to her and the kids. The other part of her wanted to curl up in a tight little ball and pretend this conversation had never happened.
Avoidus, avatas, avant
. She should have stayed in Melissa’s room longer; there was one thing she’d been right about—she absolutely could not handle this right now.

Panic began to kick in; her fight-or-flight instincts stirred. Her fists clenched in her lap as thoughts bombarded her. And then, oh, thank you, God, that soothing numbness took hold, filling and surrounding her. She didn’t black out this time, but everything slowed and went slightly out of focus. Neither of them moved and yet Kendall could feel the distance between them widen.

One singular thought swam through the undercurrents of her brain and broke through to the surface: She didn’t have to do anything about this right now. Not one thing.

She looked into Calvin’s eyes and read the urgency there, his burning desire to be done with her so that he could continue to do as he liked.

But Calvin Aims’s wants and needs no longer had anything to do with her. For the first time since she’d met him twenty-five years ago, she didn’t owe him any special consideration. She didn’t owe him anything.

She felt his growing impatience, but it no longer carried any weight. If she wanted to, she could simply go back and lie down on the couch in the family room and watch Oprah and eat her way through the pantry. Just because Cal wanted an answer didn’t mean she had to give him one. In fact, the very fact that he wanted one was all the more reason not to give it.

“I’ll think about it,” she finally said quietly, grateful for the merciful numbness. “Maybe you should take some things with you when you go.”

Cal’s face telegraphed his surprise. Clearly during his rehearsals he hadn’t wasted any time imagining how she might react. But then imagination had never been her husband’s strong suit.

Slowly she got up from her chair then turned and walked away from him. In the family room, she fit her body into its groove in the couch and pulled the old afghan around her then aimed the remote at the television. Oprah’s theme song came on, drowning out the sounds of Calvin going through dresser drawers up in the master closet as well as his clomping down the stairs and the slam of the garage door as he left.

Then she flicked to
The Kristen Calder Show
, which was also broadcast from Chicago and whose host had been hailed as the next Oprah. Her guests were a woman who’d gone to jail for maiming her abusive husband and another who’d driven the sports car her husband had given to his girlfriend into the deep end of their swimming pool—a crime for which a jury of her peers had refused to convict her.

“Right on, sisters,” Kendall thought, as she lay wrapped in her cocoon on the couch. But in her current numbness she couldn’t imagine ever marshalling the energy to punish Calvin for his crimes. She wasn’t even sure she could make it to the pantry.

At the moment, as far as Kendall could see, she had absolutely no reason to move at all.

6

—ISAAC ASIMOV

 

 

 

Tanya Mason sat at the flaked Formica dinette in the mostly silent trailer. From the back bedroom her mother’s snores sounded in a dead-to-the-world rhythm that originated in a liquor bottle.

From the second bedroom came the occasional snuffle or sigh from her daughters accompanied by the squeak of the metal springs on the old iron bed that took up most of the room. Later, when she finished this chapter, Tanya would squeeze in between them to grab the three to four hours of sleep that would see her through her breakfast shift at the Downhome Diner on Thirty-fourth Street South and the afternoon at the Liberty Laundromat, just around the corner.

Her only light came from the beam of the desk lamp she’d placed on the dinette and a small slice of moonlight that poked between the panels of the once beige curtains, now dingy from years of her mother’s cigarette smoke, that hung at what her mother called the “picture window.” Even though the only picture provided was of the septic tank that served the 1960s-era mobile home park.

Normally, no matter how tired she was after working two jobs, feeding the kids, and helping them with their home-work and then getting them to bed, Tanya was eager to get to her writing, which she saw not only as her ticket out of the life she now lived, but a welcome daily mental escape from reality.

Her books were peopled with women like herself who found themselves alone and facing adversity but who, unlike her, still managed to find themselves
and
true love and got to live happily ever after.

Each night as she worked out her characters and their stories, she lived her heroines’ triumphs and fell in love with the heroes she created for them; honorable men who not only pursued them but once committed stayed put—unlike the not-so-honorable Kyle P. Mason, who had married her and fathered Loretta and Crystal only to crumple at the first signs of real life, admitting as he fled his responsibilities that his first love was NASCAR and the fast cars he sometimes got to work on.