mama and me time to smooth this all over. We’ll tell people that you were playing around with a new way to send the newsletter, wrote up a funny gag version of your e-mail and accidentally sent that out to the mailing list instead of the real one. And that you’re very sorry for the misunderstanding. And now you two are on a second honeymoon to try to forget the whole thing.” She flipped her phone open. “I’ll just call my travel agent and set this whole thing up. Do you want Jamaica or Nassau?”
“Wynnie, a cruise isn’t going to fix this. The only way Mike would get on a boat with me is if I were being used as an anchor. Your son obviously doesn’t want to be married to me anymore and I definitely don’t want to be married to your son.”
“All my boy did was play the field a little bit. Why’d you have to make such a fuss? He’s just a man, Lacey. They’re all just men. You’re a big girl. You know what men are like. You’ve seen other women go through this. But what you did, Lacey, how could you? This could have been handled quietly, within the family.”
“Within the family. I was supposed to tell on him? What were you going to do? Send him to time-out?”
I didn’t think it was possible, but Wynnie’s lips thinned even more. “You think I didn’t know it when Jim took up with that waitress from the club? You think I didn’t hear people suddenly stop talking when I came into church? You think going to the beauty parlor was easy when I knew they’d been talking about ‘poor Wynnie Terwilliger’ the second before I walked in? But I held my head high. I didn’t roll around in the mud, making a fool of myself. I never even told Jim that I knew. Because at the end of the day, he came home to me, to our family, and that’s what mattered.” She sniffed. “And before you climb up on that high horse, I think there’s something you should consider, that maybe if you’d kept Mike a little more occupied at home, he wouldn’t have strayed.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I think there’s something you should consider. Beebee could be your next daughter-in-law. She and her cleavage will make a lovely addition to the family Christmas card photo.”
Wynnie turned an exquisite shade of tomato red. “There’s no reason this has to come to divorce. That won’t improve anything. My boy knows the difference between the kind of girl you bring home and the kind of girl you just play around with. He wasn’t thinking of marrying her. He was just thinking…”
“With Little Mike,” I suggested.
Wynnie glared at me. “If you would just be reasonable, talk to him. A good Christian wife would know how to look past this and forgive him.”
“Well, I will start looking into Buddhism as soon as possible.”
“This isn’t the time for your inappropriate jokes. I don’t think you appreciate your position here, Lacey,” she said, her tone sweetening to a wheedle. “When I was your age, Jim had no idea whether I knew about his little dalliances. He was always so guilty, so nervous that he’d be caught, that I had whatever I wanted without even asking for it. I always knew when he’d been with her because he’d bring me home flowers, a sweet little piece of jewelry, or he’d take me on some wonderful trip to make up for it. For my fiftieth birthday, he took me to New York City to see Cats. Do you think he would have done that if he wasn’t cheating on me? And Mike’s already been caught! He’s got that much more to make up for. You could end up with an entirely new wedding set or maybe even a car!”
I stared at her. “Are you on medications that I’m unaware of?”
“Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”
“Yes, you think I should let Mike humiliate and betray me repeatedly for the sake of the presents.”
“Well, if you’re going to think about it that way, I’m not going to be able to help you,” she grumbled.
“I think you need to leave now,” I told her.
Wynnie could whip up tears in a second’s notice. Her eyes glistened. Her lip trembled. She fished around in her enormous teal handbag for a monogrammed hanky. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe how ungrateful, how unfeeling you’re being after all these years. I can’t believe you’re being so hard-hearted. This isn’t the Lacey I know. I’m ashamed of you. You’re not the girl I welcomed into my family.”
Under normal circumstances, that kind of disapproval would have sent me scrambling to make up for whatever I’d done. I would have apologized automatically. Wynnie was looking at me with the kind of contempt my father reserved for straight-ticket voters. She was probably angrier with me than, well, arguably anyone, had ever been in my life. And the world wasn’t ending.
I was fine. My stomach wasn’t churning. I wasn’t tearing up. My hands weren’t even shaking.
I’d spent so much of my time worrying about whether I was liked, whether other people were happy with me. I took stupid, mind-numbingly tedious assignments at club meetings because women with bigger shoulder pads told me gathering twelve different kinds of coleslaw recipes would be “just perfect” for me. I let Wynnie keep a key to our house, because Mike said it would hurt her feelings if she didn’t feel free to let herself in, even if we weren’t home. People had certain expectations of me and I rushed to meet them, because if I didn’t… Well, I didn’t know. I never figured out that it wasn’t the end of the world if I disappointed someone or made someone angry.
Honestly, how much worse could it get? What was Wynnie going to do? Ground me? It’s not like I was going to be married to her son for long. I didn’t have to worry about getting her approval or making sure Thanksgiving went smoothly. I didn’t have to swallow “that’s just the way she is” because that made Mike’s life easier.
I was free. So I shrugged and said, “Okay.”
“I don’t ever want to see you again,” she said, obviously confused when her proclamation of shame failed to induce wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part.
“I understand.”
Wynnie stared at me, bewildered. Finally she flushed red and ground out, “When you can stop being hateful - when you can find it in your heart to be a good and forgiving wife to my son, I’ll be willing to talk to you.”
Wynnie stormed out of the house. It would have been a much more effective exit if she hadn’t slammed the door on her purse strap, forcing her to open it to extract herself. She scowled at me as I struggled to keep a straight face. “You just stay here and think about what you’ve done!”
I watched her stomp out to her town car and screech out of my parents’ driveway. I sighed. “I’m going to miss her most of all.”
A half hour later, the doorbell rang again. I jerked the front door open, yelling, “Wynnie, I told you I’m not going on any damned cruise!”
“Well, that’s good to know,” Mama deadpanned, her arms full of luggage, her elbow firmly planted against the doorbell. “Because given the circumstances, I don’t think you deserve a cruise.”
“Mama.” I laughed. My mother set her bags on the floor and held out her arms. I folded into them and for the first time since sending the e-mail, cried in earnest.
“Baby,” she murmured against my hair. “I’m so sorry.”
I sniffled, my tears forming a seal between my cheek and her neck.
“I’m going to strangle that little -” Mama grunted, patting my back. “I knew I should have said something earlier, but I thought you knew about Mike and Beebee.”
“You knew? You knew?” I cried, pulling away from her.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t know anything,” Mama said, throwing up her hands. “I heard rumors. I suspected something was going on, but I thought after that birthday party, so would you. I thought you were just trying to put on a brave face. To keep your head up while you sussed out how to hit him where it hurts.”
Mama led me into the kitchen and poured me a cup of coffee. She forced me to sit at the breakfast bar, searched in the cabinet for Bisquick. “So when you finally figured out you were married to a cliched little man, you didn’t think to call me?” she asked, her tone mildly exasperated. “Instead, I get phone calls in Hilton Head telling me to come home as my youngest child has clearly lost her mind.”
And suddenly I was four years old again, with her pinking shears in one hand and the remains of my curls in the other.
“I may have sent out a little divorce notice,” I said, measuring “little” with my fingers.
“In the form of a brag letter?” Mama asked, beating Toll House chips into pancake batter a little harder than was necessary. “Lacey, I’m all for healthy expressions of your feelings, journaling, creative ceramics -… If you’d wanted to, we could have made a Mike - pinata and beaten the living hell out of it. But we probably wouldn’t have sent pictures of the pinata party out to every person we know.”
“I know, I know. It was a crazy thing to do. But I just - it was the only way I knew how to hit back. To hurt him as much as he hurt me.”
