Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part 3

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part 4

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books by Lorna Landvik

  Praise for Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

  Reading Group Guide

  Copyright

  To Lori Naslund

  and

  Betty Lou Henson Long

  For years of deep friendship and big laughs

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A BIG THANKS to the many book clubs who’ve invited me to their meetings and shared their food, libations and conversation—what fun women you are! Thanks to my own book club and its members: Susan, Camille, Julie, Gloria, Isla, Lizabeth, Joyce, Terri and Amy—long may we read, converse, laugh, wine, and dine.

  And speaking of sisterhood (I was, you know), I’d like to reach back to my childhood to thank the mighty Mellstrom sisters—Joyce, Carla, Marilyn and Debbie—who taught me about the power of women early on, and the Eggerts—Judy, Candy and Becky—whose Toni perms I coveted and whose Friday night breaded-shrimp dinners were exotic to a Lutheran girl. Thanks to Darcy Allison for all those hours we spent drawing and writing stories. Also thanks to my mother, Ollie, and her band of sisters—Gola, Amy, Vellie, and Orpha—and to the memory of Gladys, Viola, and Beata—wonderful aunts all.

  Thanks to Wendy Smith, Kim Hoffer, and Judy Heneghan (when are you going to move back here?) for being such good and fun friends. Thanks also to Mike Sobota for your visits, to Melissa Denton and Dana Farner for that incredible church service, and to Mary Jo Pehl for letting me crash at your apartment, man.

  Thanks to Tom Winner, Mark and Kathy Strandjord, and Dick Farrell for your help in getting us set up in a house with an office.

  A deep and grateful thank-you to Leona Nevler and Betsy Nolan—the editor and agent who held my hand from the beginning—and an equally deep and grateful thanks to Maureen O’Neal and Suzanne Gluck, those responsible for holding my hand now.

  And to my dazzling daughters, Harleigh and Kinga, and my wunnerful, wunnerful husband Chuck—for everything, thank you.

  PROLOGUE

  September 1998

  FAITH

  I knew all about having my life saved. When I was three years old, I broke free of my MawMaw’s callused grasp to chase a paper cup skittering across the street at the same time a jalopy full of new army recruits careened around the corner. A sailor coming out of Knapp’s Drugs and Sundries, with reflexes I hope served him well in his tour of duty, threw his bottle of Hires root beer to the sidewalk and raced out into the street, scooping me up in his arms. I can still hear the cacophony of squealing brakes, honking horns, and my grandmother’s scream, feel the sailor’s rough cotton uniform on my cheek and smell the soda pop on his breath. Thereafter, root beer would replace Nehi as my favorite soda, and of course I would forever believe the navy superior to the army because that’s what the sailor said, in so many (profane) words, once he found out what field of service the scared young men in the rusty Nash had joined that morning.

  When I was eleven, DellaRose Pryne and I had taken a walk along a country road to smoke the Viceroy I’d swiped from MawMaw’s pack. When the wind began whipping up and the sky turned green, it seemed a great adventure, until DellaRose spotted the moving black smudge beyond the line of telephone poles and screamed, “Tornado!”

  We jumped into a ditch and lay there, arms entwined around each other, as the locomotive of wind roared over us. Even in my terror, I couldn’t resist looking up to see the tornado throwing up parts of the earth—and the Dobbses’ chicken coop—all around us.

  And then there was the time when I was sixteen and drank too much on Student Skip Day and had to be fished out of the Tallahala River after bashing my head against a rock. I woke up to find myself being given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by Billy Lawler, whose resemblance to James Dean had not gone unnoticed by every girl in the tri-county area. But this was not the way I had fantasized about kissing him, his anxious face mottled with the blood that streamed from my hairline, and I turned my pounding head to vomit in the scrubby grass, embarrassed and ashamed.

  I didn’t become a teetotaler that day (I hope that I never have to join that club), but I did revise my standards as to what social drinking was, and never again drank to the point of passing out. My life may have been saved by that adjustment; certainly excessive drinking had led to my mother’s death, and if anything, I did not want a death like my mother’s, let alone a life.

  I took a sip of the brown swill the hospital claimed was coffee and regarded the four women in the room.

  But it’s you, I thought. You who’ve saved my life more times than I can count. Who forced me to tell the secrets that were eating me up, and still loved me.

  As if hearing my thoughts, Audrey looked up from her knitting, adjusted her reading glasses, and winked.

  She was completely silver-haired now, and at least fifty pounds heavier than when I had first thrown a snowball at her, but there was an easy elegance to her that neither age nor weight could diminish. In the days of miniskirts, Audrey could be counted on to wear the miniest, as well as necklines that plunged inches past propriety, but to me, she always looked . . . well, regal. Audrey had laughed when I told her this, had even slapped her thigh and claimed it was nothing but “posture, Faith . . . and an attitude. Good posture and an attitude let you get away with anything.”

  Audrey, who introduced herself these days as “a former atheist whose wake-up call just happened to have God on the other end,” was the type of person who got away with a lot simply because she refused to ask permission for the privilege of being herself. It was certainly not an attitude I came by easily.

  “You’ve got to start living up to your name,” Audrey had told me long ago. “Have a little faith in Faith.”

  It was as if she had asked me to break the sound barrier on foot.

  “How’m I supposed to do that?”

  “For starters, stop trying so hard to be perfect. No one’s perfect—except maybe Donna Reed, and she doesn’t count, because she’s only perfect on TV.”

  I smiled at the memory of that conversation and of those gentle television sitcoms. We mocked the beautiful mothers in shirtwaist dresses as they poured milk from glass bottles and dispensed wisdom in their showplace kitchens (in high heels, of course), but at least their kids acted their age. Not like today, when the laugh track is cranked up high in response to every sexual innuendo lisped by some wide-eyed moppet. Don’t get me wrong, sexual inn
uendoes have their place—but not in conversation with a second grader. I guess I’m getting old, longing for those days when kids on TV called their dads “sir” and Shindig was considered racy.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” asked the woman who still held the honor of being the loveliest woman—including Donna Reed—I had ever seen.

  “I was just trying to remember if you ever wore miniskirts.”

  “Good Lord,” said Merit, closing her book. “I hope so.”

  “Miniskirts,” said Audrey with a long sigh. “How I loved my miniskirts. And hot pants. Remember those white vinyl hot pants I used to wear?”

  Nodding, I tossed my Styrofoam cup into the wastebasket. “I’m sure every man in Freesia Court remembers those hot pants.”

  Merit frowned, her slight fingers probing the dimple in her chin. “You know, come to think of it, I don’t think I ever did. I don’t think I was allowed. To wear a miniskirt, that is.”

  Another memory made goose bumps rise on my arms.

  “Maybe Kari can sew you up one,” whispered Slip, nodding at the dozing woman.

  “How about it?” I asked as she opened her eyes. Everyone took turns snoozing during this vigil and had a knack for waking up whenever the conversation called for it. I was the only one who wouldn’t sleep. I was used to staying alert; to be awake was to be armed, and if the Grim Reaper even thought about making an appearance, he was in for a fight from me. “How about you make us group miniskirts, Kari?”

  “I imagine it would take a lot more fabric than it did in the old days,” she said, “but sure, I’ll get right on it.”

  Kari was the oldest of the group by a dozen years, but as far as looks went, she had been blessed with an aging clock that was set slower than the rest of ours. We all got older and Kari stayed the same.

  “No, I think my miniskirt days are over,” said Merit.

  “Never surrender,” said Audrey, pointing a knitting needle in Merit’s direction. “In fact, I vote that we all wear miniskirts to the next AHEB meeting.”

  The laughter that greeted her nomination was short-lived, as reality reminded us that the next AHEB meeting was in question. The room fell back into a silence muted by the clicking of knitting needles and the rustle of turning pages.

  I studied one of the photographs I was considering using for our scrapbook. It was a picture of Kari holding a tray of cookies at one of her annual Christmas parties.

  “How are we supposed to stand things?” I had once asked her at the peak of one of the many crises that conspire against anyone with the temerity to be alive and breathing.

  A glaze came over Kari’s blue eyes, the glaze of a person ready to tell a story.

  “Once my mother and I were having lunch in this fancy hotel in Fargo and the waiter served us walleye that was undercooked—honestly, it was sushi before the days of sushi. We had him take our plates back to the kitchen but when he brought them back, the fish was now not only undercooked, but cold. He left us to attend to his other customers, completely ignoring us as we called, ‘Waiter!’ He had absolutely no time for us or our complaints.”

  Kari’s got a wonderful laugh—as deep as Santa Claus with a cold. Looking at my face, she let it rip.

  “My point is, sometimes life’s like a bad waiter and serves you exactly what you don’t want. You can cry and scream and order him to take it back, but in the end, you’re the one who has to deal with what’s finally set before you.”

  All of us women in the room have had our share of surly waiters serving bad entrees, but for over thirty years, we have helped one another up from the table, passed along antacids and after-dinner mints, offered shoulders to cry on, stiff drinks, and desserts whose butter content was exceeded only by its sugar load. But this . . . this cancer thing—could we survive something that seemed so grimly devoted to taking one of us away?

  “I remember you had a miniskirt,” I said to Slip. “We bought it together in the kids’ department of Dayton’s. You told me your dream was to buy adult clothes you didn’t have to alter.”

  I doubt she was the five feet she claimed to be, but still, Slip was the one you called when you needed help moving something heavy, the star acrobat in the neighborhood circus, the one who daily used the chin-up bar lodged in her son’s bedroom doorway. Slip had hard, defined muscles before it was fashionable; she ran back in the days when people thought you were either crazy or being chased, and became a vegetarian when the rest of us were sawing into porterhouse steaks and thought a pitcher of strawberry daiquiris satisfied our daily fruit requirement.

  Audrey pushed back her reading glasses and shoved her knitting paraphernalia into the wicker bag at her side.

  “I’ve always envied your body,” she said, touching Slip with her manicured, ring-studded hand.

  “Yeah, right,” said Slip. “You who could fill out Marilyn Monroe’s and Jayne Mansfield’s clothes?”

  “Jayne Mansfield,” said Merit. “I haven’t thought of her in years. Poor thing—I heard she had a really high IQ.”

  “Slip has such a boy’s body,” Audrey said, uninterested in debating Jayne Mansfield’s Mensa eligibility. “So little and flat-chested and hipless. I’ve always thought it must be so freeing to have a body like that.”

  “I’d give anything for your breasts,” Slip said. “Just for a day—one day on a nude beach.”

  “But you’d tip over,” said Merit, and the idea of Audrey’s mammoth breasts on Slip’s tiny little body made us all laugh.

  A male nurse with a wispy blond mustache and ponytail came in and began his business of checking vital signs and IV drips.

  “You ladies sure like to laugh,” he said. “I’ve never heard so much laughter coming out of a hospital room.”

  “Really?” said Audrey. “You should have heard us when we visited this one in the slammer.” She nodded in Kari’s direction. It was an old joke of Audrey’s to introduce Kari to strangers as an ex-con.

  “Slammer.” The nurse nodded. “That’s funny. It’s nice to hear sisters get along so well.”

  “We’re not sisters,” I said.

  “Really?” said the nurse.

  “Nope, just friends,” said Merit.

  “Really?” said the nurse again. “Because—wow—you sure look alike.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Kari, smiling.

  “I won’t,” said Audrey, who then looked imperiously, as only Audrey could, at the nurse. “It’s just that you’re young and male and blinded by a culture that says the only females worthy of attention are eighteen-year-old nubile pinups.” She paused to take a breath. “So naturally, you think every woman over the age of fifty looks alike.”

  “No . . . I . . . my mother . . . it’s . . . ,” stammered the nurse, whose blush was the color of boiled shrimp. His brow furrowed and he looked at the chart like an actor staring at a script whose lines he doesn’t know. “Uh, Dr. Sobota will be here in about a half hour if you have any questions.” He hustled out of the room, holding his ponytail as if he feared we’d pull it.

  “Holy diatribe,” said Slip, trying not to smile. “The poor guy makes a little observation and he gets treated to one of your rants.”

  “Aw, I was just having some fun,” said Audrey, picking up her knitting again. She giggled. “I guess this is sort of a sisterly scene. Right out of Little Women.”

  “I’m Jo,” I said, putting my dibs in first.

  “I want to be Jo,” said Kari.

  “You’re Meg,” said Audrey. “And Merit’s Beth.”

  “But Beth dies,” said Merit. “I don’t want to be Beth.”

  Audrey shook her head. “You’re the sweet one. Beth was the sweet one. Therefore you’re Beth. And Slip, you can be Marmee.”

  “If I’m Marmee,” said Slip, “then that makes you Amy. Spoiled, blond, selfish . . .”

  Audrey returned Slip’s smile with one of her own. “So I’m not blond.”

  “I don’t want to be Beth,” said M
erit softly.

  We bickered a few minutes over who was most like what character—hardly the only time we’d argued about a book—and then Slip asked if anyone had a quarter.

  “I think we should flip for Jo,” she said, giving me her famous I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong look.

  “Let’s call in the nurse,” I said. “We can ask him who’d make a better Jo.”

  “As if he’d know,” said Audrey. “He doesn’t strike me as a man conversant with Little Women.”

  “Yeah,” said Slip. “He looks like a man conversant with where to score the best dope.”

  Merit nodded. “He reminds me of those Deadhead friends of Melody’s.”

  “Get you!” said Audrey.

  “What?”

  “Well, that you even know what a Deadhead is! You’ve come a long way, sister.”

  “Remember when we threatened to burn her Mitch Miller and Mantovani records?” I asked.

  “Someone had to drag her into the swingin’ sixties,” said Slip.

  “You guys dragged me into a lot more than that,” said Merit, and we all sat for a moment, reflecting on how true the statement was for all of us.

  “Hey,” said Audrey finally, “while we’re waiting for Dr. What’s-His-Face to give us the latest verdict, refresh my memory: what’s this month’s book?”

  “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I said. “My choice for our greatest-hits year.”

  “I love rereading all our favorites,” said Kari. “I can’t wait to dive into Jane Austen again.”

  Slip looked at Audrey. “You’re not planning to do Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex again, are you?”

  “That,” said Audrey with a smile, “is one subject I can honestly say I know enough about.” She looked at the clock next to the TV mounted on the wall. “Say, wasn’t Grant going to stop by?”

  “He’d better,” said Slip. “He said he was bringing chocolate.” She yawned into her closed fist. “Hey, while we’re waiting, how about a song? A nice cowboy song?”

  It was Slip’s little entertainment lately—she thought it cheered everyone up—to request group sing-alongs.