man who lived in her zip code, or even a contiguous one, was rejected out of hand, although she might assign him to one of her associates.
She hadn’t factored in divorce. Perhaps that was an oversight that only the never-married could make.
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
“Nice to meet you.” He smirked.
This was trouble. What kind of trouble, she wasn’t sure yet, but definitely trouble.
WHEN HELOISE DECIDED TO MOVE to the suburbs, shortly after Scott was born, it had seemed practical and smart, even mainstream. Wasn’t that what every parent did? She hadn’t anticipated how odd it was for a single woman to buy a house on one of the best cul-de-sacs in one of the best subdivisions in Anne Arundel County, the kind of houses that newly single mothers usually sold post-divorce because they couldn’t afford to buy out the husband’s 50 percent stake in the equity. She had chosen the house for the land, almost an acre, which afforded the most privacy, never thinking of the price. Then she enrolled Scott in private school, another flag: what was the point of moving here if one could afford private school? The neighbors had begun to gossip almost immediately, and their speculation inspired the backstory she needed. A widow-yes. A terrible accident, one of which she still could not speak. She was grateful for her late husband’s pragmatism and foresight when it came to insurance, but-she’d rather have him. Of course.
Of course, her new confidantes echoed back, although some seemed less than convinced. She could almost see their brains working it through: if I could lose the husband and keep the house, it wouldn’t be so bad. It was the brass ring of divorced life in this cul-de-sac, losing the husband and keeping the house. (The Dunwood school district was less desirable and therefore less pricy, which explained how Bill Carroll’s ex maintained her life there.) Heloise simply hadn’t counted on the scrutiny her personal life would attract.
She had counted on her ability to construct a story about her work that would quickly stupefy anyone who asked, not that many of these stay-at-home mothers seemed curious about work. “I’m a lobbyist,” she said. “The Women’s Full Employment Network. I work in Annapolis, Baltimore, and D.C. as necessary, advocating parity and full benefits for what is traditionally considered women’s work. So-called pink-collar jobs.”
“How about pay and benefits for what we do?” her neighbors inevitably asked. “Is there anyone who works harder than a stay-at-home mom?”
Ditchdiggers, she thought. Janitresses and custodians. Gardeners. Meter readers. The girl who stands on her feet all day next to a fryer, all for the glory of minimum wage. Day laborers, men who line up on street corners and take whatever is offered. Hundreds of people you stare past every day, barely recognizing them as human. Prostitutes.
“No one works harder than a mother,” she always replied with an open, honest smile. “I wish there was some way I could organize us, establish our value to society in a true dollars-and-cents way. Maybe one day.”
Parenting actually was harder than the brand of prostitution that she now practiced. She made her own hours. She made top-notch wages. She was her own boss and an excellent manager. With the help of an exceptionally nonjudgmental nanny, she had been able to arrange her life so she never missed a soccer game or a school concert. If sleeping with other women’s husbands was what it took, so be it. She could not imagine a better line of work for a single mother.
For eight years, it had worked like a charm, her two lives never overlapping.
And then Scott ran into Bill Carroll’s son at the soccer game. And while no bones cracked and no wounds opened up, it was clear to her that she would bear the impact of this collision for some time to come.
“WE HAVE TO TALK,” said the message on her cell phone, a number that she never answered, a phone on which she never spoke. It was strictly for incoming messages, which gave her plausible deniability if a message was ever intercepted. His voice was clipped, imperious, as if she had annoyed him deliberately. “We have to talk ASAP.”
No we don’t, she thought. Let it go. I know and you know. I know you know I know. You know I know you know. Talking is the one thing we don’t have to do.
But she called him back.
“There’s a Starbucks near my office,” he said. “Let’s meet accidentally there in about an hour. You know- aren’t you Scott’s mom? Aren’t you Billy Jr.’s dad? Blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
“I don’t think we really need to speak.”
“I do.” He was surprisingly bossy in his public life, given his preferences in his private one. “We need to straighten a few things out. And, who knows, if we settle everything, maybe I’ll throw a little business your way.”
“That’s not how I work,” she said. “You know that. I don’t take referrals from clients. It’s not healthy, clients knowing each other.”
“Yeah, well, that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about. How you work. And how you’re going to work from now on.”
HE WASN’T THE FIRST BULLY in her life. That honor belonged to her father, who had beaten her when he got tired of beating her mother. “How do you stay with him?” she had asked her mother more than once. “You only have one true love in your life,” her mother responded, never making it clear if her true love was Heloise’s father or some long-gone man who had consigned her to this joyless fate.
Then there was Heloise’s high school boyfriend, the one who persuaded her to drop out of college and come to Baltimore with him, where he promptly dumped her. She had landed a job as a dancer at one of the Block’s nicer clubs, but she had gotten in over her head with debt, trying to balance work and college. That had brought Val into her life. She had worked for him for almost ten years before she had been able to strike out on her own, and there had been a lot of luck in that. A lot of luck and not a little deceit.
People who thought they knew stuff, people on talk shows, quack doctors with fake credentials, had lots of advice about bullies. Bullies back down if you stand up to them. Bullies are scared inside.
Bully-shit. If Val was scared inside, then his outsides masked it pretty well. He sent her to the hospital twice and she was pretty sure she would be out on the third strike if she ever made the mistake of standing up to him again. Confronting Val hadn’t accomplished anything. Being sneaky, however, going behind his back while smiling to his face, had worked beautifully. That had been her first double life-Val’s smiling consort, Brad’s confidential informant. What she was doing now was kid stuff, compared to all that.
“Chai latte,” she told the counterwoman at the Starbucks in Dupont Circle. The girl was beautiful, with tawny skin and green eyes. She could do much better for herself than a job at a coffee shop, even one that paid health insurance. Heloise offered health insurance to the girls who were willing to be on the books of the Women’s Full Employment Network. She paid toward their health plans and Social Security benefits, everything she was required to do by law.
“Would you like a muffin with that?” Suggestive selling, a good technique. Heloise used it in her business.
“No thanks. Just the chai, tall.”
“Heloise! Heloise Lewis! Fancy seeing you here.”
His acting had not improved in the seventy-two hours since they had first met. He inspected her with a smirk, much too proud of himself, his expression all but announcing: I know what you look like naked.
She knew the same about him, of course, but it wasn’t an image on which she wanted to dwell.
Heloise hadn’t changed her clothes for this meeting. Nor had she put on makeup, or taken her hair out of its daytime ponytail. She was hoping that her Heloise garb might remind Bill Carroll that she was a mother, another parent, someone like him. She did not know him well, outside the list of preferences she had cataloged on a carefully coded index card. Despite his tough talk on the phone, he might be nicer than he seemed.
“The way I see it,” he said, settling in an overstuffed chair and leaving her a plain wooden one, “you have more to lose than I do.”
“Neither one of us has to lose anything. I’ve never exposed a client and I never will. It makes no sense as a business practice.”
He looked around, but the Starbucks was relatively empty, and in any event, he didn’t seem the type capable of pitching his voice low.
“You’re a whore,” he announced.
