Ellie had to take another breath before she could go on. “In the end, to keep control of my books, I agreed to give Martin all the money I’d earned, everything that had been purchased with the money from the books, and I have to support him forever. Lavishly support him.”
“You’re kidding,” Madison said.
“No. That is not something I joke about. He gets his first. I even have to carry a huge insurance policy on my life so that if I die—or go bankrupt—he gets paid.”
When Ellie said no more, neither Leslie nor Madison could think of a reply. Didn’t people who had made as much money as Ellie have all the power in a divorce? Wasn’t it the money that always won?
It was Leslie who broke into the gloom that had descended on the three of them. “How about if we forget about our troubles for a couple of hours and go look at this town? Maybe we can buy each other birthday gifts. Anybody know what she’d like to have for the big four-o?”
“A new start?” Madison asked.
“Hmph!” Ellie said. “I’d just like revenge. No! I’d like to have justice!”
“I think I saw both those items in the little store on the corner. You know, the one by the fishmonger?”
For a second both Madison and Ellie blinked at her; then they smiled.
“Okay,” Ellie said, “I know when I’m losing my audience. Actually, I think I saw a little lamp shaped like an alligator in one window. I’d like to investigate that because my editor collects alligator things.”
“In that case, I met a guy from Fort Lauderdale she might like,” Madison said, smiling as she got up, then pushed the chair back.
“Sounds like the plot of the last book my editor didn’t buy,” Ellie said as she, too, got up. Then, as she turned and looked out the kitchen window, she thought that she felt oddly lighter. Maybe the telling of what had been done to her had released some of the bitterness that filled her because of the injustice of the court system. Of course she’d told every detail to Jeanne, but, somehow, telling someone you were paying a hundred and fifty bucks an hour wasn’t as satisfying as telling these two old friends.
“I’ll go shopping with you two, but on one condition,” Leslie said. When Madison and Ellie turned to look at her, she was standing with her hands on her hips and glaring at them.
“What condition?” both Madison and Ellie asked.
“That no one—and I mean that, no one—asks me to make an intimate, soul-searching exposé of my marriage.”
At that Ellie looked at Madison. “She always has to win, doesn’t she?”
“Mmmmm,” Madison said, then smiled at Leslie. “So what did you say when your husband took over the summerhouse you had restored?”
“While she was pregnant,” Ellie said to Madison. “Don’t forget that part.”
Leslie narrowed her eyes at them. “The next one to talk about me gets to wash dishes tonight.”
“Alligators!” Ellie said. “That’s the only thing that’s going to be on my mind.”
“Is there anything to do in this town?” Madison asked. “I mean, you’ve heard my story and now we’ve heard Ellie’s and if Betty Crocker here won’t reveal anything about her life, what are we going to do with these remaining two days?”
Smiling, Leslie took both women by the arm and led them toward the front door. “How about if we find three sea captains named Josiah and have mad affairs with them?”
“Count me in!” Ellie said instantly, then heard herself laugh. It was the first time she’d had a lighthearted thought about sex in three whole years.
“I’m with you!” Madison said, and they left the house laughing together.
Part Two
Sixteen
In the end, they decided to separate for a little exploring and to get together again for lunch. “That way, maybe we’ll have something to talk about besides the rotten part of our lives,” Leslie said.
Of course each woman agreed because she wanted to have time alone to buy birthday gifts for the other two. They decided to meet at one at The Wharf, and laughing, they challenged each other to eat some of the stranger types of seafood offered in Maine.
Leslie headed toward the used-book store that she’d seen down a tiny alleyway, and she hoped that Ellie hadn’t seen it. So what gift did you buy for an internationally famous person? she thought with a sigh.
She was still wondering as she entered the bookstore. As she closed the door behind her, she felt as though she’d entered another time and place. The walls were lined with packed bookcases, and books were everywhere else, on chairs, on the floor, on and under little tables. The shades had been pulled down to protect the books piled high in front of the windows. There were a few ceiling lights and a couple of wall lights that, unless Leslie’s eye was wrong, were antiques and quite valuable.
“May I help you?” came a voice that sounded ancient.
It took Leslie’s eyes a moment to adjust to the low light, and when they did, she saw a little old man, thin to the point of emaciation, but with thick white hair and such an erect carriage that Leslie knew that he’d once been a heart stopper. Something about him made her feel . . . well, pretty. And, compared to him, she was very young.
She gave him a radiant smile. “I’m looking for gifts for two women friends of mine. They both have birthdays tomorrow.”
He was shorter than Leslie, but she had an idea that no woman had ever felt shorter than he. “Could you tell me something about the women? What do they like?”
“I don’t really know them that—” She broke off. Was she going to say that she didn’t know Madison and Ellie very well? After what she’d heard in the last twenty-four hours? Not quite.
“Healing,” she said, the word popping out of her mouth. “One of them is interested in all things to do with medicine. And the other one . . .” Leslie hesitated. What was Ellie interested in? If it had been for someone other than Ellie, Leslie would have bought her a book on “meditations for women,” something calming, something to take the anger out of her. But Leslie could imagine Ellie scoffing at such a book.
Leslie gave the man a small smile. “You don’t have anything for someone who wants revenge, do you?”
The man smiled in return, as though her request weren’t in the least unusual. “Perhaps,” he said, then turned and walked through the stacks to the back of the store. When she reached him, he was standing in front of a small bookcase that Leslie was sure was Chippendale—real, not reproduction—and holding out a book to her.
Taking it, she looked down at the title. “A Life of Romance,” the title read. Puzzled, Leslie looked at the book. What did this have to do with either revenge or medicine? she wondered. But when she looked up, the man was gone and she was alone in the back corner of the bookshop.
“A Life of Romance,” she read aloud as she held the little book in her hands. It had a green cover, no dust jacket, and it felt old. The shade on the window behind her had been lifted a bit, so there was a ray of sunshine coming through. She could see dust motes dancing in the air.
The title of the book made Leslie think about her own life and whether or not her husband was having an affair with his young assistant. And she thought about what she was going to be forced to do if she did face the issue of his affair. Was she going to have to leave him? Or was the proper thing to do to throw him out of the house he’d come to love as much as she did? Rebecca’s words that the family was going to lose everything because Leslie wouldn’t fight came back to her.
Right now Leslie wished she’d stayed with the other women. At least listening to their problems made her forget her own. Or, if not forget, then at least shelve them for a while.
Maybe it was selfish of her, but Leslie thought that her problems were worse than theirs. They weren’t bound by the chains of love. They were haunted by what had been done to them by two truly horrible men, but they weren’t still pinned to the men by that much-over-used word, love. Ellie certainly wasn’t still in love with her ex, nor was Madison.
But Leslie was as much in love with Alan as she’d been the day she’d met him. Long ago, when she was a young woman, she’d known what awaited her if she married a man she loved as much as she did Alan. And, because of what she saw, she’d tried to break it off. She’d even tried to burn her bridges behind her by jilting him. She hadn’t consciously made a plan, but, now, with the wisdom that age gives one, she knew that she’d publicly humiliated him with the thought that she wouldn’t be able to return to him.
But she had returned. She’d gone to New York and discovered that she might be considered greatly talented in Columbus, but in New York, she didn’t have what it took to be a professional dancer. She had neither the drive nor the talent.
So she’d gone home, home to Alan, and they had married as though nothing had happened. And she had to give it to him, in the years since, he’d never thrown it in her face about what she’d done to him.
But, just the same, Leslie had been eaten with guilt over the years. “Why don’t you stand up to him?” her mother often said. “What is it that you’re afraid of?”
Leslie had wanted to scream, “I’m afraid of losing him. I’ve seen what life is like without Alan and I don’t want anything to do with it.”
But now she was sure that her life with Alan was over. It was only a matter of time.
She had been standing in one place, holding the little book, for several minutes now. Opening the book to the first chapter, she read, “I never married because I knew that love would place chains on me, and, above all else, I wanted freedom.”
Leslie snapped the book shut. The words she’d read were too close to her own life. Turning her head, she glanced toward the front of the store. She heard the tinkle of the little bell attached to the door, so she knew other customers had entered the shop. How had the man known? she wondered.
No, she told herself, he couldn’t have known.
She could hear the people quietly talking in the other room. She couldn’t very well march through the store and say to the man, “I told you I was interested in medicine and revenge, what they want. So why did you give me . . .” Why did he give me what I need? Leslie thought.
She waited a few moments for the other people to leave. She could hear them laughing, so they probably weren’t the kind of people to want to spend very long in a dirty old used-book store. But after several minutes the people were still there, so Leslie looked about her. In the corner, under a foot-high stack of books, was an old wooden chair with a worn-out cushion on it. Removing the books, Leslie sat down. She wasn’t sure why she just didn’t walk through the store and exit, but, somehow, she couldn’t leave. Not yet.
She opened the book and began to read.
“So what did you buy?” Ellie asked Leslie.
They were seated at a long wooden table at The Wharf, half a dozen containers of food in front of them. In the end, they had chickened out on trying sea urchins. “Fry it and it can’t be too bad,” Ellie had said, so in front of them now were three big, white paper containers full of fried seafood, plus three other containers full of slaw, potatoes, and corn.
Madison and Ellie had spent the time between ordering and the arrival of the food showing off their purchases. Madison had bought three sacks full of toys for the children of various friends. “I’m Erskine’s godmother,” she said, smiling. “It’s a rule in town that if you have a baby, then maidenly Madison must be the godmother.”
“They’re probably hoping that you’ll give the child a gift of beauty like yours,” Leslie said, making Madison laugh in a dismissive way but also making her blush with pleasure.
Ellie had bought the alligator lamp and, “a couple of other things that no one can see until tomorrow,” she said, smiling.
Only Leslie had no shopping bags full of purchases. She should have bought gifts for them and for her children and for Alan. And Bambi? she thought, then made herself look up at the others. They were waiting for her to show them what was inside her one little bag.
“Sorry,” she said. “I went to a used-book store with the best of intentions, but I—”
“Found some interesting old book and spent all the time reading it,” Ellie said.
Leslie laughed. “However did you know?” she asked facetiously.
“Occupational hazard. So? Did you buy the book?”
“Oh, yes,” Leslie said. “I did.”
When she didn’t say any more, Ellie pushed. “Are you going to tell us about it?”
Leslie reached to the floor to retrieve the package. When she’d finally gone to the cash register, the shopkeeper hadn’t said a word about the fact that she’d been sitting in the back of his store for about three hours. He obviously wasn’t the type of man to post No Loitering signs.
He’d just smiled at her, taken the ridiculously low price of three dollars that was marked in the front of the book, and told her that he hoped she’d enjoy it.
Now, Leslie opened the little brown bag and put the book on the table. “It’s about a Victorian woman who traveled around the world,” Leslie said. “She had several affairs but one longtime love, a man she had been engaged to when she was eighteen, but she left him to travel the world alone.”
“Sounds like you,” Ellie said, reaching for the book.
“Not quite,” Leslie said quickly, hoping she sounded as though she hadn’t thought of that idea. “I left, but I returned.”
“Would you do it again?” Madison asked as she popped something fried into her mouth. She really did eat more than Ellie and Leslie combined.
“You mean, leave Alan?”
“No. Go back to him. If you had to do it over again, would you leave New York and go back to your hometown boy?”
Leslie smiled. “Let’s just say that New York wasn’t going to throw open its doors for a dancer of my caliber. And I never had talent for anything else.”
“That’s what I thought while I was in art school,” Ellie said. “I lived, breathed, ate art. It was everything to me, but look at me now.” She had been about to bite into a fried clam, but instead she dropped it back into the paper container. “Maybe that was a bad choice of words. Don’t look at me now but look at me four years ago.”
“You mean when you were married to a man who was sick with jealousy over you?” Madison asked as she picked up the clam Ellie had put back.
Ellie looked at Leslie. “She has a streak of pure mean in her, doesn’t she?”
Leslie avoided both questions, the personal one from Madison and the rhetorical one from Ellie. “What about you?” she asked Madison. “If you had to do it all over again, what would you do?”
Before she could answer, Ellie said, “With or without knowledge of what’s happened since?”
“What do you mean?” Leslie asked.
“If you’re suddenly—speaking as a writer, that is—transported back in time and asked the same question as you were then, you’d probably make the same decision. Unless you had different knowledge, that is.”
Madison raised her eyebrows. “So you’re asking me if, knowing how it all turned out, I would take Roger’s call, listen to him beg me to return to Montana to nurse him back to health, then do it?”
“That’s exactly what I’m asking,” Ellie said. “Actually, it’s what you were asking since you started this.”
“Let me think about that,” Madison said sarcastically. “Roger or a life.” She lifted her hands as though they were a balance scale. “Roger. Life. Hmmm. Which way should I go?”
Leslie laughed. “You two have it easy. You know which way you’d go. Madison would stay in New York and become a supermodel before supermodels were invented. And, Ellie, you’d start writing because you’d know that’s where your real talent is. But with me . . . What choices did I have?”
“To meet men other than Alan,” Ellie answered instantly. “You don’t even know what’s out there.”
“Roger and Martin,” Leslie shot back at her.
Ellie laughed. “You d
o have a point.”
Madison twirled her fork in a pile of coleslaw on her plate. “But the men out there aren’t all bad,” she said quietly. “Thomas was out there.”
The way she said “was” made the other two women unable to say anything as they remembered his death.
Madison looked up at Leslie. “I’d go find Thomas,” she said. When the other two looked shocked, she gave them a look of disgust. “No, not like that. Not a séance! I thought we were talking about having a second chance. If I could go back to say, that day the three of us first met, and I knew what I do now, I’d do what I could to find Thomas. I don’t think he was in medical school, then but maybe . . .” Trailing off, she looked down at her plate.
The story she’d told, of how she’d dedicated her life to one despicable man and, as a result, had lost the man she loved, floated around the table like a vile smell. By Madison’s plate was a little wooden frog that clacked when you pulled it along by its string. The toy was a reminder of the children that Madison would never have.
Leslie broke the silence. Picking up the book she’d bought from where Ellie had put it down on the table, she said, “I think I would like to investigate some other choices,” she said softly.
“You’d like to spend spring break with the rich kid,” Ellie said. “Mr. Maybe-Going-to-be-President-Someday, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Leslie said firmly, “I would.”
“What’s that?” Madison asked abruptly.
Leslie looked at the book, which Madison seemed to be motioning toward. Puzzled, she said, “It’s the book I bought.”
“No. What’s that sticking out of it?”
Turning the book on end, Leslie looked at the top edge. There was a small piece of paper barely protruding from the pages. Opening to the marker, Leslie took it out. It was a business card, cream-colored, and Leslie could see that it was in old-fashioned engraving, the kind where someone painstakingly engraves a copper plate.