The Dirty Book Club(28)

Our secret letters, our forbidden library—they belong to you now. Why have we named you the beneficiaries of our bawdy pasts? Let the bricks fall where they may and you’ll figure it out.

Welcome to the Dirty Book Club.

The Ten Tenets

1. Trust each other.

2. Share everything when together; share nothing when apart.

3. Gather every full moon.

4. Wear your key.

5. Close each meeting with four lit cigarettes. Inhale and say: “The smoke entering our bodies carries secrets that will stay locked inside us forever.” Then turn the key around your necks and exhale. Four beams of smoke should cross, blend, and rise up as one. (Is it schmaltzy? Yes it is. We were kids when we wrote it. Forgive us. And about the cigarettes: light a goddamn smoke once a month. One puff won’t kill you. We’re still here, aren’t we?) 6. We had a rule: Whoever chooses the book, writes about the meeting. We thought it would be neat to read the notes when we were older and then burn them during some dramatic ceremony in the desert. Then we got older and realized we didn’t want to relive our pasts and the desert is too hot. Besides, everyone we were hiding from is gone. So the letters are yours. You could add to them by writing your own, but we know how anti-paper you modern girls are, so we’ll let this one go. All we ask is that you start each meeting by reading them aloud.

7. Your books are with Easton. (In boxes, of course.) Make sure the seals have not been broken. He’s a curious one.

8. Membership is optional, substitutes are not. If one of you quits, all of you quit.

9. Once you have agreed to the above, Easton will bring the first box.

10. We saw Thierry first. He’s ours!

Times have changed, women have not. You’ll see.

—The DBC



* * *



ADDIE UNRAVELED THE key from her wrist and slammed it on the coffee table. “I’m out.”

Jules’s eyelashes fluttered. “You’re leaving?”

“There is no DBC. The club, the secrets, the whole sisterhood-of-my-traveling-aunts crap—it’s bullshit. They made the whole thing up.”

“Why would they do that?” M.J. asked with a pinch of irritation.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Addie rolled her eyes as they shook their heads, no. “They want you to be my new best friends.”

“Us?” Britt swiped her bangs to the side. “What’s so special about us?”

“Nothing. That’s the point.”

They watched Addie nibble on her thumbnail, waiting for a punch line that never came.

M.J. thought of the team-building retreat she and her coworkers went on last winter, and how they were asked to describe her in a single word. They used: witty, inspiring, talented, stylish, emaciated, and tone-deaf. Now, only a few months later, she was nothing special? Is that how California saw her? Did unemployment matte her glossy finish or had she been born matte and City made her shine? “Explain.”

Addie leaned back on her elbows and lifted her face to the chandelier. “You have a disease called ‘settling down,’ and Gloria wants me to catch it.”

“I haven’t settled down!”

“I have,” Jules said, “and I couldn’t be happier.”

“Same,” Britt added. “What’s wrong with settling down?”

“The husband, the kids, Costco.”

“I love Costco,” Britt said.

“Yeah, well, while you’re pushing your giant cart through their giant aisles, I’ll be in Europe having sex with hot foreigners who can’t pronounce my name.”

“You’re leaving the women’s clinic?” M.J. asked.

“You know where I work?”

“You told me.”

Addie’s icy expression softened; melted by the heat of humiliation, or maybe, the warmth that comes from being heard. “I’m giving my notice at the end of the summer and getting as far away from Pearl Beach as American Airlines and its Oneworld Alliance will take me.”

“Why?” Jules asked, as if offended. “What’s wrong with Pearl Beach?”

“Autopilot, that’s what. Everyone over thirty has the exact same life—marriage, babies, rescue dog, spin class, date night, school fund-raisers, girls’ weekends in the desert . . . I swear, if I go to one more bridal shower I’m going to shoot myself in the face with a Crate and Barrel registry gun. I need more.” Addie stood, moved by the force of her own conviction. “No offense.”

“Lots taken,” Britt muttered while checking her phone, a watched pot that refused to boil.

“So you think Gloria would create a fake club just to keep you in town.”

Addie popped open her clutch and pulled out a tube of red gloss. “You don’t know Gloria like I do.” She drew the spongy wand across her lips, then kissed the top of her hand to blot. “I grew up without a mother, so she was kind of it,” Addie said. “And she was a saint. So were Aunt Liddy and Aunt Dot. But I don’t need a mother anymore. I need a scotch.” She peered narrowly toward the front of the shop. “Easton!”

“You didn’t have a mother?” Jules asked, hand to heart.

“I was born, she died ten minutes later, her best friends took care of me while my dad was at work, the end,” Addie said. Not knowing that her words hit M.J. like a punch between the ribs. Because, yes, mothers did die, and it sucked in ways that Addie’s glib resignation couldn’t begin to describe.