wouldn’t approve of her husband’s name for the dessert. She’d retorted that she didn’t care. I fitted the electric mixer with a flat beater and recalled how breathless Patricia had been with her news yesterday about John Richard’s impending financial demise.
“We were right there when they auctioned off his Keystone condo,” she’d squealed. “It went for sixty thousand below market. This must be the juiciest revenge you’ve ever envisioned,” she’d added with glee.
Not quite. John Richard still had the Aspen Meadow house, a condo in Hawaii, white and silver Jeeps with personalized license plates-the white one said OB and the silver said GYN, just in case anyone wondered what kind of doctor he was ? and a wealthy, beautiful, smart, new girlfriend whom I grudgingly admired.
The beater began its slow circuit through the pale, unsalted butter. John Richard’s girlfriend, Suz Craig, was the executive vice-president of the AstuteCare Health Maintenance Organization. I didn’t know if Suz’s feelings for John Richard were being affected by Patricia’s suit against ACHMO. I did know that as of four weeks ago, John Richard and Suz were nuts about each other. To celebrate going together for six whole months, he had given her a full-length mink coat, bought on sale at the beginning of the summer, Arch had informed me. Suz had even modeled the coat when I’d catered a corporate lunch at her home in July. And why shouldn’t I have catered for her? Suz had unabashedly informed me that she was a great businesswoman. Well, so was I.
Suz was young, thin, blond, a whiz at her job ? by her own accounting ? and eager, I thought, to show me that she wasn’t going to make the same relationship mistakes that I had. What that meant, I didn’t know, and didn’t want to ask. Suz had confided that she’d given John Richard a solid gold ID bracelet as a way of showing her six- month-old affection. I’d tried not to roll my eyes. The only stage of relationship John Richard did well was infatuation. But if John Richard and his girlfriend wanted to act like high school sweethearts, I wasn’t going to stop them. His relationships never lasted very long. No, Patricia McCracken hadn’t been quite on the money when she’d said John Richard’s financial crash was the juiciest revenge I’d ever envisioned.
John Richard had not yet lost the malpractice suit. His girlfriend hadn’t renounced him. He wasn’t in jail; he hadn’t even been publicly humiliated. A declaration of personal bankruptcy, which was what I was assuming was about to happen, was not the kind of revenge I’d always hoped for.
But it was close.
2
When I opened the oven to take out the cupcakes, the scent of chocolate drenched the kitchen. I drank it in and immediately felt better. Thinking dark thoughts was unappealing; thinking dark chocolate thoughts was vastly better. That was the conclusion I’d come to yesterday as I whipped up a batch of fudge. Stirring the sinfully rich pot of candy, I’d decided I really didn’t want to get a blow-by-blow description from Patricia of John Richard’s condo being auctioned off, after all. Listening to sizzling gossip while grilling tuna during the parry tonight could lead to frayed nerves, scorched fish, or worse.
Nor could I quite picture hearing about the woes of John Richard Korman while catering to a large group of hockey aficionados. The fans would be hollering with blood-mania at slow-motion videos of battered hockey players slamming other bruised and injured players into the glass ? while I celebrated a vengeance I’d tried to put behind me years ago? Something about that didn’t quite work.
I straightened and rotated my shoulders. My right shoulder was scarred from the time John Richard had shoved me into a dishwasher and I’d landed on a knife. I’d fallen on my left shoulder when he pushed me down the stairs in a drunken rage. Both shoulders seized up with pain from time to time. Yesterday, when I was making the fudge, the ache in my upper back had been unbearable. Of course I’d suspected it was because my body didn’t want to be reminded of John Richard. Let go of it, I’d admonished myself. I’d called Patricia in Keystone and said I didn’t want to hear any more about the Jerk.
“You don’t want to hear before our hockey game about your ex-husband’s ruin? Don’t you want to hear what he said to my lawyer about the money the suit is costing him?” Patricia had shrieked. When I’d said no, she seemed stunned by my lack of interest. “You’re crazy. This whole thing is a huge come-down for him.” Then she said ? I swear she said this ? “You must be out of your pucking mind.”
Maybe so. But my shoulders felt better today. I swirled thick whipping cream into a mountain of snowy confectioner’s sugar for the cupcake frosting. Yes, I could wait to hear the news. Now I could wait, that is. Tom Schulz, even if he was my husband, had always felt that justice would eventually triumph. I guess that’s why he’s in the business he is.
It is going to happen, Tom had frequently assured me. John Richard Korman will go too far, get caught, and be nailed. In fact, I had been vaguely aware that John Richard was having financial problems. After all, I hadn’t received a child support payment in three months. He was usually late, but not this late. Despite Patricia’s dire news about the Keystone condo, I’d actually been hoping that John Richard could talk to me this morning about his money situation, without lawyers, without lying, and without loudness. Fat chance.
But, as they say, I was going to be in that neck of the woods, so I might as well try to chat with him. With Arch as a buffer, and before John Richard had had a drink or two, we could occasionally communicate. Besides, if I thought we could get something settled, it would make the chauffeuring job this morning less irksome. The house where Arch was staying was only two miles from John Richard’s neo-Tudor monstrosity, while it was close to ten miles from our place.
I was doing the pickup because Arch had been desperate to attend the party. The poor kid had not made many friends at the private school he’d started attending two years ago. Now that he was going into ninth grade, he relished the idea of someone inviting him over, even if it was because he was one of the few kids not currently away on an exotic summer vacation. An invite is an invite, Arch had reminded me seriously as he nudged his tortoiseshell glasses up his nose and donned a too-large pair of denim shorts to go with a raggedy nut-brown shirt that matched his hair. And I’m going.
I slid the bowl of frosting into the walk-in, set the cupcakes on racks to cool, and scribbled a note to Tom to have one for breakfast if he craved an early-morning chocolate fix. I would be back soon, I wrote. Tom had been out past midnight working on a case. In the hours before dawn he had crept in and tried not to wake me. But whenever he pulled the Velcro straps off his bulletproof vest, I woke in a sudden sweat. For over a year, he’d been telling me I’d get used to it. I never had.
I tiptoed upstairs to check on our boarder. Recovering from mononucleosis, nineteen-year-old Macguire Perkins was spending the summer with us until his father came home from teaching a course in Vermont. A tousle of red hair, a patch of pale skin, and loud snores indicated that Macguire was sleeping, as usual. Arch’s bloodhound, Jake, dozed at Macguire’s side, while our cat, an adopted stray named Scout, kept a watchful emerald eye from his perch on the dresser.
I finished getting ready and quietly crept out our front door. Another fresh morning breeze whispered through the aspens. After a nastily wet spring, we were enjoying what the locals call a one-in-ten year for wildflowers. This was probably going to be a one-in-ten year for the elk population, too, but I didn’t mind. I revved up Tom’s dark blue Chrysler sedan that he’d left in the driveway behind my van. Backing out, I tried to avoid blue flax, blush-pink wild roses, and brilliant white daisies, all nodding in the warm wind.
Actually, one of the reasons I’d come to admire John Richard’s current girlfriend, Suz Craig, was that she had learned the names of nearly a hundred different kinds of flowers that were being put in as part of an elaborate landscaping project at her country-club home. While I was setting up for the business lunch in July, Suz had taken the time to point out the varieties of campanula and columbines that her landscapers were planting between the quartz boulders and striped chunks of riprap rock. Even businesswomen who were vice-presidents needed a hobby, I supposed. The lunch had been a going-away gig for some AstuteCare people visiting from out of town. As ACHMO’s regional veep, it was Suz’s job to provide their “day in the mountains,” a de rigueur excursion for visiting out-of-staters. The buffet as well as the day had been Colorado picture-postcard perfect: sapphire-blue sky, sweet mountain air redolent of pine, platters of chilled steamed Rocky Mountain trout, and luscious chocolate truffles.
The only mishap of the catered lunch had occurred when Chris Corey, the overweight head of ACHMO’s Provider Relations, had taken a spill down an incomplete set of stone steps. Chris had sprained his ankle and Suz had vowed to fire the landscapers. One of the guests had taken a bite of trout, winked at me, and commented that firing people was what Suz did best. I’d made a mental note. Maybe she’d dump the Jerk before too long. I wondered how he would react.
The sedan’s engine purred as I passed Aspen Meadow Lake, where the early-morning sun and whiff of breeze
