Life is Sweet (10 page)

After a moment's hesitation, Becca sped up again. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought I saw something.”

They drove in silence for the moment. Matthew stayed focused on the road.

“Nicole . . . that's Olivia's mother?” Becca asked after a bit. “Your girlfriend?”

“Yes.”
Girlfriend
always seemed so high-schoolish. Then again,
partner
sounded like they ran a law firm. Also, they just didn't seem to be together enough to be real partners. Especially lately. After Saturday morning, they hadn't hung out at all over the weekend, and they'd barely talked when he'd driven her to the airport early this morning.

“You said Nicole's away on business. Is she some kind of corporate high flyer?”

“She's an energy research engineer.”

From Becca's reaction, you would have thought he had announced that she was a drug dealer or something. She swallowed. “And she's out on the West Coast?”

“Right. But it sounds as if the project's moving to Hawaii.”

“Hawaii? Really? People get to go on business trips there?”

“Could be why she's not in a hurry to wind things up,” he said, joking. “Or maybe it's just me.”

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have pried.” Becca pressed against the seat back. “I bet it's hard for her to be away from Olivia.” Hastily, she added, “And you.”

“I know we miss her,” he said. “I hope she misses both of us.” Although, as he voiced the words, he felt even less certain that Nicole thought of him much at all while she was away.

“I hope so, too,” Becca said.

Matthew was too busy scanning the road for fleet-footed critters to be puzzled by her response.

Chapter 7

When Pam came into work the next morning, Becca felt skittish. After learning during their drive back to town that Matthew was the significant other of the notorious Nicole, she had contemplated calling Pam right away. But she hadn't. Gossiping about Erin didn't feel right, especially now when she realized that Matthew was caught up in the situation, too. On the other hand, it didn't feel right
not
to talk to her about it.

“Where's Walt?” Pam asked, looking around.

“I haven't seen him yet today.” Something wasn't right about that guy. “Do you think he moonlights?”

“Moonlights as what? An armed burglar?”

Becca rolled her eyes. Unfortunately, Walt was a worry. He was an okay worker the first thing in the morning, but he tended to fade after an hour. She spent a lot of his shift trying to get him to eat something and bringing him beverages he never drank.

“Erin told me she was going to drop by today,” Pam said.

Oh God. Erin. Becca tried to push her uneasiness for her friend out of her mind. She preferred worrying about Walt.

“So how did Cal take meeting Matthew?” Pam asked. “When I was talking to him Sunday night, he was freaked out over meeting his rival.”

Becca turned back to the bowl of cookie dough she was scooping onto baking sheets. “He was fine, and I don't know what you're talking about. I divorced Cal. That's history. Matthew is not his rival. I hope you told him that. There's nothing going on with either of them.”

Before, she thought the teasing about Matthew was humorous. Now it seemed more dangerous. Becca would admit she had a little crush on him. Although it wasn't a crush, exactly. Matthew was just one of those guys whom she looked at wistfully sometimes and thought
all the good ones are taken.
And he was taken by the woman who was evidently at the center of Erin's marital mess.

“Pam, Matthew has a girlfriend. You know that.” With vehemence, she dropped a melon baller of dough onto the cookie sheet. “Also, his girlfriend has a daughter whom he looks on as practically his own.”

Heartbreak potential all around.

She slapped the spatula harder against the dough than was called for. These poor cookies were going to end up snickerdoodle wafers. Well, too bad. She picked up the pan, took it to the oven, and heaved it onto a rack with more force than usual.

Pam scurried after her and gently shut the oven door. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“You never abuse dough. Or kitchen equipment. Plus, you've been distracted ever since I got here.” Even though they were alone, Pam lowered her voice. “He didn't make a pass at you yesterday, did he?”

Becca drew back. “Who? Matthew?”

“Cal,” Pam replied, then did a double-take. “Did Matthew try something?”

“Of course not. Neither of them did, or would. Cal . . . well, that's impossible. And Matthew—”

“I know, he's practically married. And we all know that married guys never misbehave. You do sort of like him, though, don't you?”

It was almost as if she was rooting for an inappropriate entanglement. Why? “Not the way you're thinking.”

“Okay, but it's clear that
something
happened out there,” Pam insisted.

Becca grabbed her friend's arm. Quite possibly, she was about to make a colossal error. No one would call Pam the world's most discreet woman. In fact, she was practically the WikiLeaks of Leesburg. But Becca didn't know who else to turn to, and she was about to burst.

“Pam, Matthew's girlfriend's name is Nicole.”

Pam blinked. “Do you think she's Ann Taylor?”

“Matthew's Nicole works as an energy research engineer, just like Bob. And for the past month she's been on a business trip on the West Coast.”

As each new revelation sank in, Pam sucked in her breath a little more. Finally, when she was puffed up like a full tire, she expelled her air and asked, “What should we do?”

Becca took it as a good sign that she hadn't bounded across the room for her cell phone yet. “I don't know.”

“Did you ask him about Bob?”

She shot Pam a look. “How was I going to work that question into casual conversation? ‘Oh, is your absent girlfriend working with a serial wife betrayer named Bob?' What kind of person would do that?”

“My kind,” Pam said.

“We were already driving back from the barn when all this came up. There wasn't much time. And I was so stunned. When he mentioned Nicole, I nearly drove us into a ditch.”

Pam mulled over their quandary for a moment. “We've got to tell Erin.”

“Tell her what? What do we know now that adds anything except color commentary? She's already aware that there's a woman named Nicole working with Bob.”

“You're right. And she knows that Bob is a cheater. She knew that from the beginning.”

Becca shook her head. Why Bob? Erin never had trouble meeting men. They practically flocked to her. “Why did she marry him?”

“Because she was in her late twenties, and the late twenties are the Bermuda Triangle of dating. Everybody thinks it's the sweet spot, the perfect time to tie the knot, but that's exactly wrong. Women in their late twenties are just panicked about turning thirty, and plus they convince themselves that they've started hearing that old biological clock
tick-tick-tick
ing away. High school and college sweethearts have young love propelling them to the altar. Women over thirty . . . well, they're lucky to find anyone. But marriages between people in their late twenties? Nothing but hormones and fear. Makes for disastrous decisions.”

Like a lot of Pam's theories, it sounded reasonable if you didn't think about it too hard. Or at all. Becca nibbled her lower lip. “Maybe it's Matthew who should be warned.”

“He might already know. Could be why he's mooning over you.”

“He's not mooning.”

“I've seen the way that man looks at you. Like he's smitten.”

“It's just a residual TV effect,” Becca assured her with a dismissive wave. “People have a hard time looking away. I'm pop culture roadkill.”

“Poor guy. Taking care of that little girl, and all the while the mother is cheating on him.” Pam tapped her fingers. “We could drop him an anonymous note.”

“That would be awful. Can you imagine receiving a note like that?”

“Wouldn't you want to know?”

It was such a
Dear Abby
conundrum. “An anonymous note isn't knowing,” Becca said. “It's just knowing that someone else thinks he or she knows. And what if we're wrong?”

“How could we be? There aren't any variables left.”

Becca took a moment to think. “Matthew did say that Nicole had been transferred to Hawaii.”

Pam straightened. “Bob's not in Hawaii.”

“See? We could have it all wrong.”

The bell rang, and Erin breezed in. She greeted them with a bright smile that Becca couldn't remember seeing for weeks. She had the straightest, whitest dental presentation in Leesburg.
Maybe we really do have it all wrong about Nicole,
Becca thought. As Erin approached, swinging a shopping bag, she looked positively joyous.

Maybe even a little manic.

Instinctively, Becca and Pam stepped away from each other, chuckling nervously. They provided a tableau vivant of the term
guilty secret,
which did not escape Erin's notice.

“What's going on?” she asked. “You two look like you're plotting world domination.”

“We were just talking about . . .” Mid-sentence, Pam's gaze became deer-in-the-headlights vacant. She swung toward Becca for rescue.

“About my drive out to the barn with Matthew,” Becca finished for her.

“The hottie who's
practically
married?” Erin asked. “So what happened?”

“Nothing!” Pam blurted, her spill-all impulse apparently evaporating.

“Nothing,” Becca echoed. “He's hosting a birthday party at Butternut Knoll. Which reminds me . . . I might need to borrow Lulu for an afternoon the Saturday after next, if we're a horse short.”

“No problem,” Erin assured her. “It's weird that the guy is having to arrange all this, isn't it? Where is this practically-a-wife of his? We're sure she actually exists, right?”

“Oh, she exists,” Pam muttered.

Becca glowered at Pam and struggled to segue to a different topic. Her gaze alit on Erin's shopping bag. “Did you buy something?”

“Wait till you see!” Erin practically cackled as she produced a scrap of black nylon. “Bathing suit. I've decided to surprise Bob.”

“Is he coming back?”

“No—he's in Hawaii.”

Only the most rigid discipline kept Becca from looking at Pam. Her neck muscles practically groaned with the effort it took to keep smiling at Erin's new bathing suit and not pivot toward her other friend.

“Hawaii!” Pam exclaimed, too brightly.

“Can you believe it?” Erin asked. “He called me last night from Honolulu—no warning that he was being moved there at all.”

Becca and Pam continued to gape at her until Becca felt Pam goose her with an elbow. The only thing she could think to say was to repeat, “Hawaii!”

Erin nodded. “And after I hung up with Bob, I thought,
What better time to go pay him a visit?
I'm not doing anything here except wondering if my marriage is falling apart. Why should I let that happen if I can do something about it?” Mad optimism burst out of her like sunbeams. “My plane leaves tomorrow morning.” She appealed to Pam. “You wouldn't mind giving me a ride to Dulles, would you? Even if it's insanely early?”

“No, of course not,” Pam said. “But you're really just going to jet off like that? What about . . .”

“Ann Taylor?” A hint of a dark cloud threatened all that sunniness, but Erin shrugged it off. “I've been thinking about that ever since I talked to you guys that night at Not-Book-Club. I could be all wrong about her. Maybe I'm just overreacting.”

“But if you're not?” Becca blurted out.

Erin laughed. “Well, okay. Maybe he's having a hot fling with Nicole, the sky-high-IQ coworker. Should I just cool my heels here and let her steal my husband?”

Becca grappled with the question. To her, Bob's having an affair seemed more like a welcome emergency exit than a conjugal roadblock. But Erin obviously didn't see it that way.

Pam also remained silent. It was easy to dislike Bob and think Erin would be better off without him. It wasn't as easy to tell her so.

“Besides,” Erin continued, “it's a trip to Hawaii, right?” She lifted up the scrap of silky nylon and netting. “Emilio Pucci. If nothing else, I'll be able to work on my tan.”

The conversation lagged after that, and finally Erin announced that she had a ton of packing to do, and that she needed to meet her trainer, Mike, who'd said he could squeeze her in for a last workout before her vacation. After extracting a promise from Pam to pick her up the next morning at five, she breezed out.

Becca sank against one of the counters as Pam rushed over to help a newly arrived customer. Her whole body was tense from the effort of not betraying what she knew about Nicole. But why hadn't she?

She felt torn, and guilty. After the customer paid, she turned to Pam.

“I think we've just failed a friendship test,” Becca told her.

Pam lifted her arms in frustration. “I know! I didn't know what to say. So I said nothing. And now I've got to drive her to the airport.”

“What kind of friends are we? We're letting her jet off directly into Hurricane Nicole.”

“But it's like you said,” Pam said. “What could we really have told her?' ”

“That there really is a Nicole, and that she's in Hawaii right now with Bob?”

“But she knows that. Well, not that Nicole's in Hawaii, but she knows the woman exists and is a threat. She even said she's going there to save her marriage. There's nothing we could add. It's not as if Matthew told you that his practically-a-wife was a cheating whore.”

When Pam was arguing for discretion, the world was out of whack.

“I still worry. We're letting her run off to Hawaii armed with nothing but an Emilio Pucci bathing suit.”

“Who knows? Maybe Emilio Pucci can save a marriage.”

“Maybe.” When it came to rescuing troubled marriages, Becca tended to be skeptical. It seemed to her that by the time people realized there was a problem, the troubles were like the asteroid heading toward the doomed planet. Not a lot to be done but run screaming down the street.

Which probably explained why she had ducked out of her marriage at the first sign of trouble. Preemptive marital asteroid evasion.

But what about Matthew? Disaster was heading right toward him, and as far as she knew, the poor man had no idea.

 

After receiving Nicole's go-ahead in an e-mail, Matthew told Olivia about the plans for the party and handed her the invitations to fill in. No lottery jackpot winner had ever responded with such unbridled elation. “Seriously?” she asked, after the first wave of shrieking and Tigger-hopping around the kitchen had subsided.

Matthew's hearing might never be the same, but Olivia's joy was worth a burst eardrum or two. The kid was happiness on legs.

“Mom actually agreed to this?”

“She actually did.”

Olivia spun around and then stopped again even more abruptly, gasping. “Does this mean that she's going to buy me my own horse?”