The Accidental Bestseller (13 page)

“Cal said he and Kendall have split up. He claims he doesn’t know where she’s gone.”

“Do you believe him?” Tanya asked. None of them were big Calvin fans, having heard one too many stories that demonstrated just how clearly Calvin Aims’s life revolved around Calvin Aims. “I mean, you don’t think he’s
done
anything to her do you?”

“You mean like stuffed her in a trunk or tied a concrete block to her foot and dropped her in the closest body of water?” Mallory’s tone was dry. “What are you, a writer or something?”

“No,” Faye said. “We’re not going to be seeing old Calvin on
America’s Most Wanted
. He sounded too irritated to have done her in.”

They all digested the “irritated” part.

“So what do we do?” Tanya asked, over the clatter of dishes and the clank of silverware. Out on the floor Belle poured coffee at two of Tanya’s tables. Any minute she’d be back here looking for her.

“Well, both Faye and I think she’s got to be at the mountain house,” Mallory said. “And we think one of us needs to go there.”

“Oh.” Tanya wished she could volunteer to go, but she couldn’t even stay on the line much longer. “I could maybe go next weekend if that would help,” she began. “You know, maybe drive up Saturday and come back Sunday night.” It would be ten hours each way from St. Pete to Kendall’s mountain place, a weekend spent mostly driving, but Kendall and Faye and Mallory had always been there for her.

“I could probably go by midweek,” Faye said. “Steve and I have a fund-raiser Monday night and I’ve got to get my proposal in by Wednesday. But after that I could . . .”

“No, I’ll go,” Mallory said. “I can go first thing in the morning.”

Tanya was surprised at Mallory’s offer. It wasn’t that Mallory wasn’t one to help; it was just that her offers normally came in the form of money or a gift—something that didn’t eat into her writing time. She was the most prolific of all of them and other than when she was on a book tour or making an appearance, she seemed to spend most of her time working. “But you never . . .” Tanya began.

“Are you sure you can take the time?” Faye asked, getting to the words faster than Tanya. “I know you have a deadline coming up.”

“I’ll just take my work with me,” Mallory said. “Maybe I’ll even stay a few days once I make sure Kendall’s OK. Just stay and write there for a while with Kendall.”

Was that a wistful tone Tanya heard in her voice? No, it couldn’t be. Mallory could write all day every day already if she wanted to. She didn’t have Trudy or Loretta or Crystal or two jobs and a double-wide to take care of. She just had herself and that good-looking husband of hers who waited on her hand and foot.

Tanya tried to picture that, someone else taking care of her—fussing over her—but she just couldn’t imagine it. Not even a little bit. If Tanya had a setup like Mallory’s she’d never leave it. She’d bury herself in that beautiful office and write nonstop forever.

“My flight gets into Atlanta late tomorrow morning. I’ve reserved a rental car so I can drive up to Kendall’s. I, um”—she cleared her throat—“found the directions in the bottom of my desk.”

Was that a note of embarrassment in Mallory’s voice?

“I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes, am I?” Mallory asked uncharacteristically. “Is someone else able to go sooner?”

Than tomorrow? Tanya bit back a flip comment about her private jet waiting outside the diner to fly her up there.

“No,” Faye said. “I’m glad you can go. But you have to promise to call us as soon as you get there and tell us what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Tanya added, popping her head out to scope out her tables, while trying not to let Belle see her on the phone. “After you give her some shit about avoiding us like she has.”

She saw Jake raise a hand and make the scribbling motion for a check. Another one of her customers got up to take a container of artificial sweeteners from another table. She needed to get back on the floor.

“Don’t forget to let us know how she is and what has to happen. It would be hard for me to get away right now,” Tanya said. “Unless it’s an emergency.”

In which case, she’d put her kids on her back and walk through Florida and Georgia to get there if she had to. As far as she was concerned, she owed Kendall, Faye, and Mallory pretty much everything. And she didn’t intend to ever forget it.

10

—FRAN LEBOWITZ

 

 

 

Kendall lounged on the deck, her feet propped up on the railing, and stared out at the distant peaks. It was Sunday right around 1:00 P.M. and she was still wearing her pajamas and drinking coffee in hopes the caffeine might somehow jolt her out of her reality and into some kinder, gentler universe. It was beautiful here, soothing, contemplative even, but if she allowed her inner voice to have its say, she’d have to admit that she’d done little more than trade the family room couch for the strapped outdoor chair she was sitting in and the television for a breathtaking mountain view.

The thing was, no matter what she fixed her attention on, the shards of her broken life kept poking through: Calvin’s defection, the need to tell the kids, the demise of her career, the triumphant face of husband-stealing Realtor Laura Wiles, the book she had to write. Like Pig-Pen from the Charlie Brown comic strip, her cloud hovered over her, dark and daunting and devoid of a silver lining.

She yawned and waited for the caffeine to kick in, hoping it might at least propel her inside to her laptop, but she was tired, so tired. She had sat up all night flipping channels on the satellite TV—as always amazed that there could be so many options and so little to watch. Exhausted, but unable to sleep, she’d been drawn inexorably to HGTV, where she’d watched episode after episode of people fixing things, thereby changing their lives. Flip that house and prove how smart you are; change the water heater yourself and improve your self-esteem; redecorate your neighbors’ living room for under a thousand dollars and cement that friendship. The channel was filled with thirty-minute programs that could pave your way to happily-ever-after.

She’d nodded off in her deck chair when a stray sound broke the quiet and nudged her out of sleep. A car came up the drive, its tires crunching on the gravel road, and stopped at the side of the house. The engine went off, and a car door opened and closed. Footsteps sounded on the gravel and then on the kitchen steps. Kendall sat frozen on the deck, unsure what to do. There was no time to go inside for a robe and nowhere out here to hide.

“Kendall?” A female voice rang out in the silence, and for a split second, she was afraid that Cal had given Laura Wiles a key for the mountain house, too. She had vowed that if she ever saw that woman again she would be wearing clothes.

There was a loud rapping on the kitchen door. “Kendall?”

Kendall considered her options. This took about one second because she had none.

“Kendall Aims, I left my house at 5:00 A.M. this morning and have spent most of this day traveling to get here. You damned well better answer your door!”

Certain she couldn’t be hearing the voice she was hearing, Kendall crossed the deck and entered the kitchen.

“Kendall, I’m not kidding! Open up! Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll . . .”

Kendall pulled open the kitchen door and there stood Mallory in her low-slung designer jeans and high-heeled boots. “Blow my house down? Right now that would be completely anticlimactic.”

“Would this be the time to mention that it’s afternoon and you’re not dressed?” Mallory stepped through the open door. “I’m pretty sure even the three little pigs would have pulled on their little clothes by now.”

Kendall stepped forward and into Mallory’s open arms. Her friend smelled of the big city and expensive perfume; Kendall most definitely did not. “I’m so mind-bogglingly glad to see you!” She clung to Mallory in the doorway, not wanting to let go. “I don’t even care that you just called me a pig!” She stepped back and swiped at the tears on her cheek with the back of her pajama sleeve. “How did you find me? What are you doing here? Oh, my God, I’m so glad to see you!”

She was crying freely now, all the tears she’d been holding on to so tightly pouring out of her like a damned waterfall. When she’d finally sniffled to a stop, Kendall led Mallory into the house. “I just can’t believe you’re here,” she said, swiping once more at her face.

“One of us would have been here sooner if you’d let us know where you were and what was going on.” She leaned against the kitchen counter and folded her arms across her chest. “Speaking of which, what
is
going on, Kendall?”

Mallory looked her up and down, and Kendall became fully aware of the picture she must be presenting: the wrinkled, ill-fitting pajamas; the greasy hair; the dark circles under her eyes that attested to her HGTV nights.

Mallory sniffed pointedly. “Is there something wrong with your plumbing?” She winced. “You do still have indoor plumbing, don’t you?”

Kendall gave a final swipe at her tears. She felt as if she’d been toting a full set of emotional baggage around on her shoulders and someone had offered to carry some of it. “Let’s go out on the deck. And to start with your last question first, nothing’s wrong with the plumbing, though I think I could probably fix it if there were after all the HGTV I’ve been watching. And to your first question?” She pulled a second chair next to her old standby and motioned Mallory into it. She drew the mountain air into her lungs and tried to order her thoughts. “Everything’s wrong. It’s like I slipped when the Zelda didn’t happen and then I started rolling down the mountain and everything I thought I could cling to ripped out of my hands.”

She told her then about her conversation with Sylvia Hardcastle and her need to leave New York, her desperation to get home only to be forced to confront the truth about Calvin. She described the call from Jane’s assistant and Cal’s B-movie dialogue, his Realtor girlfriend and demand for a divorce. It all poured out of her along with another stream of tears.

“I don’t know what to say to Jeffrey and Melissa. When they went away to school a month ago everything was fine. Suddenly their father has a girlfriend, their mother doesn’t have a career, and their parents are getting a divorce. I don’t understand how all of this happened. How can they?”

Mallory stared out over the deck railing, listening without comment.

“It’s all so overwhelming I can’t seem to clear my head long enough to think. I keep telling myself I don’t have to
do
anything about Calvin right now. There isn’t really anything to do, anyway. But I am supposed to write a book and I don’t see how that can possibly happen. Definitely not now. Maybe not ever.”

Mallory turned and looked at her but the “That’s ridiculous, of course you’ll write” that Kendall was expecting didn’t come.

“I mean, what’s the point?” Kendall asked. “Even when I thought my personal life was OK, my career was dying. In fact, of all the writers I know, you’re one of maybe two hand fuls I can think of who have real, big-time, name-recognition careers. You know?”

“But, I . . .”

“No, I don’t hold it against you, Mal. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying what are the odds of really making it? What if I somehow, miraculously, got my life back together and managed to write a really incredible book? What are the chances that something major would happen? A billion to one? A trillion?”

“I . . .”

“You know, the writer who most inspired me, other than you guys, is a woman who helped found the local writers’ group I belong to. She wrote for years, one book after another, just trying to get somewhere. At one point, despite all the roadblocks her publisher put in her way, she hit the
New York Times
list and got a multimillion dollar contract with another publisher.”

Mallory listened, her attention rapt, but she didn’t interrupt.

“When I was trying to get published, she once said to me, ‘The published people are simply the last ones standing.’ And I believed her. I put the line on a Post-it note and taped it to my computer screen and on my bathroom mirror. I looked at it every day. I repeated it to other aspiring writers who were getting tired and wanting to give up.

“I understood what she was saying. The publishing business is brutal but if you just keep at it you can beat it. You just have to stay on your feet, never give up. That’s what she said and I believed her.”

“That’s good, Kendall. That’s right. It’s all in the head anyway. Sometimes it’s hard, unbelievably hard. You just have to—”

“That woman is selling houses now, Mallory,” Kendall said quietly. “She’s in real estate!” She grimaced. “And I’m not feeling too kindly about that field right now.”

Mallory had thought she’d toss and turn all night, distraught over Kendall’s situation, but she’d slept like the proverbial baby; a result no doubt of the crisp mountain air. Or the two bottles of wine that she and Kendall had consumed.