The Accidental Book Club

by Jennifer Scott

  “Easy,” May said. “Truth, truth, big lie.”

  Loretta pointed at May. “Nope, smarty-pants. Truth, lie, truth.”

  “What? Hasn’t it been years?” Jean asked, stunned.

  Loretta winked. “Now you know how I talked him into being our designated driver tonight. Somebody else go.”

  “Wait, not so fast. I want to know when else you’ve been to Electric Oregano,” May said.

  “Need-to-know basis,” Loretta answered. “Next.”

  “I’ll go,” Janet said. She took a deep breath. “My husband talked me into joining the club so I would make some friends, and I’m really glad he did.”

  “That’s only one,” Mitzi said. “You’re supposed to give us three.”

  Janet shook her head. “I don’t want to lie to my friends.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” May said. “You’re off the hook. I’ll go.” She situated herself. “That cake that Bailey destroyed? I didn’t make it. I bought it from a bakery. I got a new cat. And I met a guy a few weeks ago, and I really like him. I think he might be the one.”

  Jean smiled. “I’ve got this one. Truth, truth, lie.”

  “Nope,” May said.

  “You bought that cake? I feel so betrayed,” Mitzi said, and May smacked her arm.

  “Yes, I bought it.”

  “You told me you got the recipe off a baking blog,” Jean said.

  “I did get a recipe off a baking blog. And it didn’t come out. So I replaced it.”

  “Is that against club rules?” Mitzi asked Jean.

  Jean shook her head. “Only club rules are no green salads, no vampires, no Thackeray.”

  “So it’s truth, lie, truth?” Janet asked, and May nodded.

  Jean’s mouth dropped open. “You met a guy? But I thought you were happy by yourself.”

  May shrugged. “I was. Until I met him. His name’s Tony. He’s a contractor. He’s the one who remodeled my bathroom.”

  “Ooh, remember when Flavian was a contractor?” Loretta purred. “So sexy, with that tool belt.”

  “Tony has one of those,” May said.

  “You should have him wear it and nothing else,” Loretta suggested.

  “Already have.” But she could barely get the words out before the hoots and catcalls drowned her out.

  “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were in love,” Jean said.

  May sipped her coffee. “Maybe,” she said. “Hard to tell just yet. But I’m open to it.”

  Jean smiled. How things can change so suddenly. How happiness can be redefined.

  “Okay, I’ll go,” Mitzi said. “I hate this game. I hate this game. But I liked dancing.”

  “Those are all true,” Dorothy said, and tossed another throw pillow. It glanced off Mitzi’s shoulder and nearly toppled the coffeemaker. “Just ignore her. Jean, it’s your turn.”

  Jean thought. She wasn’t used to opening up like this to anyone but Wayne. But she couldn’t deny it—tonight the club had turned a corner. They were more than just book friends now. And Wayne was no longer around. She couldn’t stay closed up forever.

  “Just one,” she said. “I miss Bailey. I didn’t think I would say that, especially when she first got here and was doing the most embarrassing things. But now that she’s gone, I miss her. And I don’t know what I would do without you guys, because the time we’re all together is the one time I can forget how alone I am. So . . . that’s all. Truth.”

  There was a beat of silence. May leaned over and patted Jean’s shoulder. Mitzi smiled at her sadly.

  “To books,” Loretta said, raising her coffee mug.

  “To books,” everyone responded, and they all drank.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Wayne died right smack in the middle of the day. Not too long after lunch, not that Jean had eaten any lunch. Not that she had any appetite to speak of. She’d been having to force herself to eat something in the evenings for weeks, even though nothing had taste and everything sat in her stomach disagreeably. Sometimes she was certain that living through a loved one’s death without slipping into death yourself was nothing short of a wonder.

  The nurse had told her about twelve hours before that it could be any minute, and Jean had kept vigil by his bedside all night, waiting until he took his very last breath. She didn’t want to miss it. She didn’t want to miss that chance to say good-bye, even though she had said good-bye months ago when he was still lucid. They’d both said it, her sturdy hands gripping and dwarfing his veiny, blue hands, professing their forever-love, promising to meet up again on the other side, thanking each other for a great life, even if it was cut too short. It had been one of the worst nights of Jean’s life, and sometimes she dreamed it, exactly like it was, and woke up crying.

  But still she didn’t want to live her life knowing she had been in the kitchen making a tasteless ham sandwich the moment the love of her life took his last breath. Wayne had been in a morphine stupor for so long, he hadn’t so much as opened his eyes for days. She supposed she might have been hoping for a dramatic moment, where he would suddenly rouse and call her Jeanie, pat her cheek, stare into her eyes, tell her something profound and lovely, instruct her not to worry about him, anything. But he didn’t. He simply opened his eyes, turned his head, then closed them and stopped breathing. Done. Jean hadn’t even been sure if he’d seen her when his head turned. He looked rather as if he were seeing something a thousand yards behind her.

  Sometimes she dreamed that Wayne was being taken from her suddenly, in the middle of the night. It was one of the reasons she’d had such trouble sleeping at first. She would be in that happy, everything’s-just-fine dreamland. She would be just settling in bed and the phone would ring. Her heart would leap into her throat, adrenaline coursing through her so hard she could feel it in her fingertips and on the back of her neck. And in her dream she would pick up the phone, and a voice on the other end would say, “Mrs. Vison, it’s your husband. I’m afraid he’s gone.” She would wake up, sweating and crying out the word no every single time, and then she would feel silly and defeated. He was gone. He had been gone.

  So three weeks after Laura and Bailey left, when the phone rang at midnight, ripping Jean out of a dreamless sleep, she wasn’t sure if the pounding heart and rushing electric feeling was a dream or real. She sat up and fumbled in the dark for the phone, knocked it off the nightstand, and had to lean over the side of the bed to pick it up again. This detail had never appeared in her dream before, a realization that rattled her into reality.

  “Hello?”

  “Jean? It’s Curt.”

  “Curt? What’s going on? What’s wrong?” She sleep-slurred the words out, laying her hand over her heart without even realizing it, as if she could hold it in her chest. As if she could soothe it back into a regular beat.

  “There’s been an accident,” he said.

  Jean pulled herself up further. “Oh, God, is everyone okay?”

  She could hear a page over an intercom in a background, as if Curt were calling from somewhere public, echoey. A hospital. Of course, again a hospital. “No. I’m afraid she’s been banged up pretty bad.”

  “Oh, no, should I come? What happened? Was she drunk again?”

  “I . . . normally wouldn’t ask you to come all this way again,” he said, “but she asked for you. Before the surgery, she asked me to call you. She wants you here.”

  Jean slid sideways so that her legs hung over the side of the bed. Her feet searched for her slippers. Laura had asked for her? For her? “Surgery?” she asked slowly. Everything seemed so confusing and her half-asleep brain couldn’t take it all in.

  “She busted up her arm,” he said. “They’re gonna have to put some pins in it. She’s still up there right now, I think. She’s going to have to stay overnight too, because she hit her head and has a concussion. She had b
een drinking, yes, but that doesn’t matter right now. She’s pretty scared, so we’ll deal with the drinking later. She’s going to be in a lot of trouble. Thank God she only ran into a tree, and thank God she was wearing a seat belt. But it’ll be a long time before she can get her license now.”

  Jean closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “They took her license. Of course they did. DWI. I suppose that’s probably a blessing in disguise. Will she have to go to jail?”

  “Jean,” Curt said, “it’s not . . . It wasn’t Laura.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t Laura driving the car,” he said. He paused long enough for Jean to hear another page over the intercom. “The person in the accident was Bailey.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jean reached the hospital in record time—three hours and five minutes. She probably broke many traffic laws on the way, and may have been lucky to have made it there alive at all. But there were hardly any other cars on the road, and besides, she had brought Dorothy with her to keep her calm and alert.

  She couldn’t really explain what it was that had made her pick up the phone in the middle of the night and call Dorothy after talking to Curt. By all expectation, if she were going to ask a friend to come along to hold her hand on something like this, it should have been Loretta. After all, Loretta was her best friend. And Loretta seemed to really like Bailey, even when Bailey was at her worst. Loretta seemed to be able to relate to the girl.

  But there was something that told Jean she could trust Dorothy to be strong at a time like this. To lend Jean strength to spare. If anyone knew about children who were lost in their own familiar worlds, it was Dorothy.

  “Of course I’ll go with you,” Dorothy had said, her voice scratchy with sleep, though Jean could hear deep, rowdy voices in the background, as if the boys in her house had never gone to sleep. “Just let me get a few things together and I’ll be right over.”

  On the way to St. Louis, Jean filled Dorothy in on everything, from Laura’s refusal to stick around after Wayne’s death, to Bailey’s troubles at home, to spying Bailey in the loft of her house and saying nothing. She told Dorothy details about Wayne’s last days—things she’d never even told Kenny and Laura or Loretta. About all the dignity he lost and how she always left the room when the nurse had to do something particularly humiliating, even though he wasn’t coherent enough to know, just to let him keep his pride. About how he begged for asparagus with butter over and over again and how she’d finally relented and made him some, and how he hadn’t kept it down, but how he’d thanked her for doing that for him, and told her it was the best last meal anyone could hope for. About how she’d taken a baseball bat to his aftershave bottles the morning he died. She had lined them up in the garage and had smashed them, one by one, until the smell consumed her and she had to go back inside.

  And she told her how at first she’d been so frustrated by Bailey. How she’d been convinced that Bailey hated her, but how worried she’d been that something exactly like this would happen. And how she wanted to stay out of this mess—she wasn’t comfortable with drama—but she felt a necessary part of it now. This mess was hers. She just had to own it.

  Three hours and five minutes wasn’t much time to get between Kansas City and St. Louis, not by a long shot, but it was plenty of time to purge a soul.

  “Well, if we’re going to talk kid worries,” Dorothy said once Jean had talked herself out, “I’ve got more than my share of those.” They were on a stretch of I-70 that was pretty isolated. Jean knew that soon St. Charles would bloom up on them, and that would mean they weren’t far at all, but for the time being, it was just them, their thoughts, and the night road. Dorothy tucked a strand of silvery hair behind her ear. “I worry that not a one of mine will even be alive in five years.”

  Jean glanced at her, admiring how smooth Dorothy’s skin looked in the night light. “You shouldn’t say that—of course they will.”

  Dorothy shook her head. “Then they’ll be in jail. All of them. Every last one. They’re criminals. They were bad before Elan left, but now they’re just . . .” She turned her head to the window and shook it again.

  “They’re boys. They’ll turn around,” Jean offered.

  “I doubt it,” Dorothy mumbled. “Although Noah did keep a job this whole summer. I was shocked.”

  “Which one is Noah?”

  “Second-to-oldest. He’s lifeguarding at your subdivision pool.”

  Jean’s eyes went wide. “At the Bay Ridge pool?” she asked.

  Dorothy turned to her. “Yes. Why?”

  “What does he look like?” And while Dorothy described him, the image of the handsome boy at the deck table plucking a soaked pair of Bailey’s shorts off his chest formed itself in Jean’s mind. She couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing.

  “What?” Dorothy asked. “What’s so funny?”

  But it was several moments before Jean had the power of speech again, her stomach aching from laughter. She took a few deep breaths and told Dorothy the whole story, from the striptease to the slow walk to the car.

  “Well, now I know why he was taking so many shifts,” Dorothy finally said. “Boy was probably in love. Or at least in lust. Who would have guessed: my problem child and your problem grandchild, a love connection.”

  “Bailey did spend a lot of time at the pool,” Jean agreed, and they fell into giggles again.

  Finally, when they were laughed out, Dorothy wiped underneath her eyes and pressed her back into the car seat. “It’s good to have someone who understands you can’t always control them,” she said.

  “Ever,” Jean corrected. “You can’t ever control them.” Not even, apparently, when they were forty years old and raising children of their own.

  “I suppose in the end they’ll be good people. It’s just hard in the meantime. I feel so . . . judged.”

  “Oh, honey,” Jean said, squinting in the headlights of an oncoming car, “you shouldn’t feel judged. We’ve all got our stuff. Until recently, Loretta’s husband hadn’t touched her in years, Mitzi needs Prozac, and Janet’s boss treats her horribly. And then there’s me.” Jean gave a sardonic chuckle and head shake. “There’s my family.”

  “Wait. Janet’s boss treats her horribly? Why?”

  So Jean told Dorothy about what she’d seen at the supermarket, and by the time she was finished talking, they could see the arch up ahead.

  “You know the book club is probably the only social thing she ever goes to, right?” Dorothy asked as Jean directed her car toward the hospital. She’d gotten quite used to the route by now.

  “Who?”

  “Janet. She’s so painfully shy. The club is good for her. Even if she doesn’t ever talk.”

  “You think?” Jean turned into the hospital parking lot.

  “It’s good for all of us,” Dorothy said. “I think it was one of those serendipitous things that came up right at a time when we all needed it. Think about it. Your husband dies right at the same time that mine cheats on me? Right at the same time that May’s got all these date disasters? Right when Mitzi most wants to hear herself talk?”

  Jean laughed. “And don’t forget. Right at the time Loretta discovers Flavian Munney.”

  “Oh, God, don’t remind me.” Dorothy giggled, holding her stomach. “His abs are so chiseled, you could break a tooth on them. She knows they’re painted on, right?”

  “Break a tooth—that’s too funny. You should send that to the author. She might use it. After all, she had his butt literally bust through a pair of jeans at a rodeo. You remember that one?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Dorothy said, pointing at Jean. “He nearly killed the horse with that weapon.”

  But the laughter dried up as Jean pulled into the underground garage, all lit up with sickly orange lights that made everyone look green, no matter how well they were. Jean found a parking space
and pulled in.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Jean said. “About the club, I mean. I know it’s good for me. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t gone with me tonight.”

  Dorothy patted Jean’s arm. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t asked,” she said.

  • • •

  Dorothy stayed in the main lobby while Jean raced up to the third floor, where Bailey had apparently just come out of surgery and been brought back to her room. Visiting hours were long over, and the halls and rooms were all dark and sleepy. Jean’s vision felt grainy, her eyes dry and scratchy, as she headed up in the elevator. Yet somehow she felt energized, as if a weight had been lifted from her, and she couldn’t quite pinpoint it, but she couldn’t shake a delirious feeling of being . . . necessary. And not just for Bailey. Or even for Laura. But also for Dorothy, and maybe even the others as well. Dorothy was right—maybe the club was about more than just books and food and a good time for everyone, not just for her.

  The elevator doors opened, and right away Jean knew she was in the right place, by the sound of huskily whispered arguing voices coming from down the hall. She headed toward them and found herself in Bailey’s room.

  She took one look at Bailey’s shaved and nicked-up head, and sucked in her breath. “Oh, my God.” She pushed right between Laura and Curt and went to Bailey’s bedside. “Her concussion was that bad?”

  At first Curt and Laura looked at each other confusedly, forgetting to fight for a minute. Then it seemed to dawn on Curt what Jean was talking about.

  “No, believe it or not, that haircut is my daughter’s idea of fashion.”

  Jean gazed at her granddaughter in wonder. She’d shaved her own head? When had she done that? And, more important, why? She could see a few scabs crusted over on the dome of Bailey’s white head, along with a new cut just above the left eyebrow, swollen and puckered around some stitches. Her left eye was bruising, and she had a smaller cut high up on her left cheekbone. The whole effect was grisly, making Bailey look as if she’d just come back from the brink of death. And maybe she had. Maybe she was still trying to—in more ways than one.