The Dirty Book Club(24)
“Thirty-six?” Britt snipped.
“Thirty-two,” M.J. lied. “Anyway, I thought Gloria might want some cake,” she said as she stepped into the foyer, which was now a balmy seventy-six degrees. The macaroon cookie smell had been replaced by a putrid combination of gardenia-scented candles and ammonia, the living room, stripped clean of its dated tchotchkes. “Is she here?”
“No.”
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“Thanksgiving.”
“You’re seriously not going to tell me?”
The dimple below Britt’s lip twitched. “I just did. Gloria moved to Paris. Dot and Liddy picked her up in a Lyft two hours ago.”
The cake became heavy. M.J. placed it on the foyer table beside a ceramic peacock business-card holder. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.” Britt plucked a card from the peacock and offered it to M.J. “I’m listing the house.”
“She didn’t say good-bye.”
“Sorry,” Britt said, a bad actress trying to care. “Were you close?”
Snap.
“I guess not,” M.J. muttered, vision coning as she stepped back out into the gray afternoon, leaving her birthday cake and all hope for companionship behind.
* * *
M.J. RETURNED HOME to a garden gnome. Cocksure and squat, it stood on the front porch mocking her with his jubilant smile and whimsical swimwear. Had a friend with an ironic sense of humor delivered him, M.J. would have kissed his cherubic cheeks and positioned him on the deck with a view of the ocean and a permanent seat for cocktail hour. But the sky-blue card lodged between his chubby knuckles suggested a different kind of messenger: one who legitimately thought this smug little bastard was cute.
As suspected, he was a “gifty” from Kelsey, there to invite M.J. to the Downtown Beach Club’s new-recruits luncheon on June 16.
“Then tell me, lass,” she imagined the gnome saying, and with a leprechaun’s Irish accent of all things. “If I brought tidings of the Beach Club luncheon, what was in that black envelope you chucked in the rubbish?”
“Good question, Smug Little Bastard,” M.J. told him. Then she hurried inside, rummaged through the recycle bin, and pulled out the answer.
Dearest M.J.,
I am currently en route to what I hope is no longer called “Gay Par-eee,” since I am unattached for the first time in fifty-one years and have a suitcase full of lingerie (black, of course, because I am mourning).
My Leo is gone and my boys are grown, so I’m going to live the rest of my life with the women who have helped me brave it. One of whom once said, “Men come first, so men go first,” and on May 18, 1962, had us promise that when the last of our husbands “croaked” we’d move to France. Of course, we didn’t believe her prediction would ever come true. But she was right. We’re all single now.
The weight of my sorrow is crippling. When Leo died, he killed us both. Everything I have ever known is gone. And yet, I have to keep going and doing because there’s a young girl inside of me, tugging on my pant leg, reminding me that she’s in there and that her story isn’t over. I need to start a new chapter—one that’s all about her this time—and I need to start it now. Because every moment wasted is another blank page falling away and one less chance for her to leave her mark.
M.J., I will miss the secrets and martinis we could have shared had I stayed. I will miss giving you unsolicited advice about your love life the way Liddy, Dot, and Marjorie gave unsolicited advice about mine. Most of all, I will miss watching your story unfold. As it does, don’t ignore the young girl tugging on your pant leg, help her become the woman she wants to be. Start by showing up at:
The Good Book
Saturday, June 4
7:00 PM
The key will get you in; discretion will keep you in.
That’s right: don’t tell anyone. Not even the handsome doctor.
Au revoir,
Gloria
The enclosed key had been the one Gloria wore the evening they met. Bronze, with an oval bow and two wards jutting from the shaft, it hung from a tarnished chain that smelled like pennies and Coco Chanel.
M.J. lowered it over her head and gently positioned it in the dip between her clavicle.
You are so not wearing that in public, said the young girl inside her, tugging.
“I won’t,” M.J. promised as she held the key against her chest like a hug from someone she didn’t want to let go.
CHAPTER
Nine
Pearl Beach, California
Saturday, June 4
New Moon
SLENDER, WITH A white door and solid black facade, the shop’s exterior resembled a nun’s habit, the gold block letters on its sign a King James Bible. Nestled between an ice-cream parlor and the sea glass–colored caftans in the window of Misty’s, the Good Book was an ebony bead on a rosary of Swarovski crystals.
What if Gloria wasn’t really Jewish but rather a Christian missionary heaven-bent on luring lonely, unemployed, out-of-towners into her frankincense-and-myrrh-scented trap? Or maybe this was a surprise party, set up by Dan, who wasn’t really in Java. And maybe Gayle was there, too, forked tail between her legs with a cake shaped like a giant apology.