Tales From a Broad
by Jeannine Henvey
Published by
Melange Books, LLC
White Bear Lake, MN 55110
www.melange-books.com
Tales From a Broad, Copyright 2014 Jeannine Henvey
ISBN: 978-1-61235-911-3
Names, characters, and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America.
Cover Design by Caroline Andrus
Table of Contents
"Tales From a Broad"
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
"The Best Places to Kiss in Paris" by Lucy Banks
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
"Sex Six Tips for the Single Girl in Europe" by Lucy Banks
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Previews
TALES FROM A BROAD
by Jeannine Henvey
If you enjoy new twists on old classics, then Tales From A Broad is a comedic adventure of one woman’s quest to find herself, but the spotlight focuses on her older chaperone, instead.
Forty-two and feeling not-so-fabulous, Lucy Banks allows her older sister to talk her into accompanying her twenty-four-year-old niece on a trip around Europe. In the past year she has lost her fiancé, her job and her fertility. Embracing her role as spinster aunt seems to be Lucy’s only option, until she embarks on a romantic adventure through London, Amsterdam, Munich, Paris and Florence. Will a room with a view and a handsome stranger be enough to open her heart and mind to new experiences?
Tales From A Broad promises to draw readers into a light-hearted tale of emotional development, self-discovery and love.
To Sadie, Chloe and Carter—
For turning the wait to get published into a real live game of
Chutes and Ladders.
You learned math by tracking submissions and rejections, crossed fingers at bedtime, chanted publishers’ names around the house and always made me smile. I love you with all my heart.
Prologue
Friends & Family
Date: 3/19/14 at 11:00 PM
Subject: Wedding
Dear friends and family,
The wedding has been called off by mutual consent.
I apologize for the impersonal nature of this email. We have been blessed with too many loved ones to call individually. Please accept our apology for any inconvenience this may have caused.
With love,
Lucy and Cooper
I paused and held a trembling finger over my mouse. Was it okay to say “mutual consent”? That might be a bit of a stretch, considering I’d been dumped in a taxi and had tossed my three-karat ring out the window somewhere on the George Washington Bridge, but ... whatever. According to Google, this was the most eloquent way to announce the cancellation of a wedding.
I scanned the email for the 10th time and held my breath, hoping the message would send itself. “Here goes,” I whispered and tapped the mouse. By the time the message was sent, I was practically gasping for air.
I took a gulp of wine and leaned on the kitchen island, waiting for the Chardonnay to calm my nerves.
Like it could.
Something stuck to my elbows, and when I lifted them, I saw a filmy substance across the granite countertop. Was it the orange juice I had spilled this morning? Or was that yesterday?
“Who knows, who cares,” I muttered. My voice sounded hollow in the quiet apartment. I hadn’t even brushed my teeth today, so the fact that I’d neglected another daily ritual—circling the island with a bottle of Windex in hand, didn’t exactly come as a shock. What was a little dirt when my entire life had crashed and burned?
I pressed my fingers to my very swollen eyelids as if to counteract the damage that twenty-four hours of crying had done to my face. Even my contact lenses had suffered. They now felt like shards of glass on my eyeballs. I took my thumb and forefinger to carefully extract each one, rolled them into tiny little balls, then tore the lenses into minuscule pieces with my nails. Somehow, performing that ritual gave me a sense of satisfaction.
Ping. I snapped my head up and squinted at my laptop. An email from Aunt Louise. My stomach churned as I stared at my inbox. Ping. Cooper’s cousin. Ping. Ping. Ping. F’ing ping!
Email vultures. It was as if they all had been hovering around their computers for the bad news and couldn’t wait to respond within ten seconds. Each new email made a pinging sound on my computer, scraping at my nerves, and sending my iPhone vibrating on the kitchen counter. The reverberations might as well have been machine gun fire, straight to my heart.
Up until February fourteenth, I’d had a very lucky life. Since then, my whole world managed to unravel over the course of five short weeks.
First, I’d gotten the call that the parenting magazine I’d worked at for the past three years would be going under.
That was a setback, but with a wedding to plan, I didn’t have time to dwell. Anyone who has ever planned a New York City wedding knows that doing so can be a full time job in and of itself. My newfound free time went to perfect use and even allowed me to plan ahead for the future.
I was already thinking about our first anniversary and knew I desperately wanted to give Cooper the baby we both wanted so badly. To hell with the clock, the modern, traditional, first anniversary gift. My own clock was ticking, and losing my job seemed to be one more signal that the time was right.
So when I wasn’t busy with wedding plans, I caught up on all of the medical check-ups I was supposed to do when I turned forty, which had been two years ago. I wanted to get in as many appointments as I could before my kick-ass medical coverage expired. That’s when I discovered that my eggs also had an expiration date, which had already passed. The fertility specialist told me that my body was in early menopause and I could no longer get pregnant. My heart was broken.
And then, I got clobbered with the last straw. I would never, ever have guessed in a million years that the man I’d loved for the past five years couldn’t bear the thought of not having his own biological kids. The news about my fertility issues sent him running. He’d called off the wedding. I suppose it was probably a good thing I got my eggs in a scramble before we made the toast.
Still, it was hard to see the good in anything. As my grandmother always used to say, when it rains it pours. I was in the midst of a full-blown shit storm.
Ping.
“Oh shut the hell up.” I slammed my laptop shut and tapped my shaking fingers on the aluminum case. There were 150 guests on our email distribution list. That probably meant I’d get about that many responses back.
I shook my head in disgust. Why was I the one who had to deal with this? Mutual consent, my ass. I didn’t recall having a say in any of this.
I downed the last drop of wine, stood up to stretch, and blindly felt my way over to the Keurig, w
hich had been an engagement gift from my marketing department. Maybe there was a bright side. Had I not been laid off last month, I would have had to face the office on Monday. That would’ve been a total nightmare.
Besides, at least now I get to keep the Keurig. After all, it was European, sophisticated, and could brew a warm beverage with the flick of a button. I placed an espresso pod into the machine and pressed the lever down. I may have tossed my engagement ring onto a bridge, but give back my coffee maker? No way in hell.
Chapter One
I refuse to empty the dishwasher today. My goal is to use every last utensil in there.
Facebook Status May 19 at 11:20am
I stretched my arm from beneath the down comforter and reached for my cell phone on the nightstand. I had a string of missed calls from my sister Morgan, and it was already a quarter past eleven. How did it get so late? I couldn’t believe the racket on Lexington Avenue hadn’t woken me sooner.
I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of life passing me by. Street drilling, the siren of a car alarm, and the beeping sounds of a garbage truck were comforting reminders that I wasn’t completely alone. I put on my slippers, padded into the living room, and turned on the TV.
“Boy is it beautiful out there,” Kelly Ripa chirped from her seat on “Live with Kelly & Michael,” as her cheerful face came up on the screen. “There’s something about this weather that makes you feel so, so ... alive,” she sang.
“Not feelin’ it, Kel,” I sang back. All I felt was guilt, and I certainly didn’t need to get it from her. It had been two months since Cooper called off the wedding and still, I hadn’t managed to reenter life. I didn’t need to be reminded I was missing another quintessential spring day in the city.
I flipped the TV off, tossed the remote in disgust, and put my feet on the coffee table. Using my toe, I nudged the pile of accumulated crap on the table. It was a mish mash of magazines, unread mail, wedding responses from those who didn’t get the memo, and my beloved journal, which had been oh so neglected.
I reached over and picked it up. A feeling of nostalgia washed over me.
“Bless me journal for I have sinned,” I murmured. “It’s been about a couple of months since my last confession. It’s just that...” I paused to read one of the inspirational messages printed across an empty page, “I don’t really write when I’m down. I eat. And it’s just too darn messy to hammer cheese doodles and write at the same time.”
Maybe I should go hands-free. Siri for slobs? A digital Dictaphone? I pondered whether they made waterproof ones that protected against flying crumbs and sticky fingers when I heard a knock at the door.
I froze for a moment. God strike down the person who invented the drive by visit! Luckily for them, my prayers were rarely answered these days. I tiptoed quietly over to the door and peered out the peephole.
I groaned inwardly. There stood Morgan, and I saw anxiety written all over her face, magnified through the tiny peephole. She bit her fingernail and knocked again, this time a little harder.
“Lu, open up! It’s us!” Morgan sang in a chipper tone.
She may have sounded upbeat, but that didn’t fool me. I knew my sister well enough to know she was nervous. She was probably worried about how her unstable sister would react to her unannounced visit.
She had called the night before with an invitation to take me out for a drink. When I told her that I wasn’t in the mood for a cordial, her reaction was anything but. Over the past two months, the majority of our phone calls had gone in the very same direction. Bother, rinse, and repeat.
But last night, the routine was over. What had started with a friendly hello, ended with a not-so-friendly goodbye—on my part.
I looked out the peephole again and saw Tess, my twenty-four-year-old niece, staring back at me with apologetic eyes. Telepathically I told her, “Don’t worry, Tessie. I know you’re not responsible for this.”
“Lu, we can see you,” Morgan shouted through the door. I quickly ducked my head down. Busted.
I put my hand on the doorknob and froze in contemplation. They had driven an hour, so technically, that couldn’t even qualify as a drive-by visit. Oh, how I wished it were a drive-by shooting instead. And I was the victim.
Then again, I wouldn’t want to be found looking like this. I had been sporting one of Cooper’s very old t-shirts with my pajama bottoms. It had been worn so thin that the grey material had become practically see-through. To make matters worse, I had cried myself to sleep the night before and used the shirt as an eye-makeup remover. Mascara as a pick-me-up is highly overrated.
What wasn’t covered in mascara was covered in ice cream stains from a late night feeding frenzy. Classy. I wasn’t sure what was more humiliating, the way I looked or the fact that I still slept in my ex-fiancé’s shirt. And actually, my pajama bottoms were his boxers.
I swept my eyes around the messy apartment and caught a glimpse of a framed photo that hung in my foyer. Morgan had taken it years ago, but I remembered the moment as if it were yesterday. She and I had been shopping in Soho when we were caught in the storm of the century. In the photo, we were huddled under a plastic bag, soaking wet and giggling like silly schoolgirls.
My heart softened a bit, and I experienced a pang of longing for the simpler days. I knew I should just open the damn door. Morgan wasn’t exactly the type to make a quiet exit. If I didn’t acknowledge her efforts, she’d only try harder.
“Just a minute!” I shouted.
I looked down and knew I had to change my clothes, stat. I started to pull the shirt over my head and heard the doorknob click. I immediately froze as the door swung inward. I stood in the vestibule, topless, with the shirt over my face. I could actually see them staring at me, through the worn out material. Morgan’s hand flew to her mouth, and Tess omitted a quiet giggle. Sheepishly, I pulled it back down.
“Hi,” I said shame-faced. “I was just...” I trailed off. Morgan was speechless.
“We used the key,” Tess said, shooting me a look.
I knew she was mortified for me. Boy, did I regret giving her a key to my crash pad for her twenty-first birthday. I was trying to send the message to drink responsibly. Little did I know that three years later, she would be using it to have an intervention with me.
“C ... can you just give me a s ... second?” I felt like a cross-dresser who had been busted. “Then we can have a proper hello,” I said, walking down the hall towards my bedroom. “Make yourselves at home and I will be right...”
“Lucy,” Morgan commanded. “Wait.”
I stopped in my tracks, did a reverse, and slowly approached my sister. She rushed toward me, her eyes glistening with tears. She gripped both of my elbows and looked into my eyes.
“Lu, I’m really sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to badger you. It’s just that.... I wanted to see my sister. I’ve missed you so much.”
As I stood face-to-face with Morgan, I suddenly felt foolish. I sheepishly ran my hand through my unwashed hair and waved it in the air. “Let’s just forget it. I probably overreacted.”
“No, you didn’t. I was the one who overreacted. Lu,” she paused and placed a hand on her chest, looking me up and down, “I didn’t realize you were still in this much pain. You never even talk about it, anymore.”
“Well,”—I widened my eyes—“I guess you had to see it to believe it, huh? Surprise!”
I held my arms up, and after Morgan’s eyes darted to a hole in my armpit, I folded them protectively across my chest. Morgan’s lips formed a sympathetic pout. I drew in a breath and released a long sigh.
“Look, I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to shut you out. From now on, you have an open invitation to my pity party. Come here.” I tilted my head and stretched my arms out.
Morgan heaved a sigh as she came in for a hug. “I’m always here for you, Lu.”
“I know you are,” I whispered in her ear. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” She gave me a t
ight squeeze.
I drew in a breath of relief myself, and in doing so, I got a whiff of her signature scent. She’d been wearing Chloe for as long as I could remember. I, on the other hand, was aware that I smelled like a dirty sock.
“Now, do you mind if I shower quickly? You guys look so nice, and I just can’t stand the thought of looking like a vagabond in front of you.”
Morgan pulled away and gripped my elbows at arm’s length. “But you look so handsome in men’s loungewear.”
“Shut up.” I gave her a playful punch in the arm. “I can’t even bring myself to hug that one.” I pointed my thumb in the direction of Tess, who looked like her usual gorgeous self. Wearing jeans, a simple tee, and a long scarf, she looked perfectly put together.
“Oh, whatever!” Tess laughed and glanced up from her phone.
She was effortlessly beautiful. In fact, one of the things I loved most about her was that she was completely unaware of her good looks. I’ve come to realize that’s probably why she’s so awesome.
What I haven’t quite figured out, though, is where her looks came from. Yes, my brother-in-law happens to be attractive, and Morgan has always been a pretty woman. She may be eight years older than I am, but for someone nearing fifty, she looks pretty damn good. Now, if she could bring herself to part with the minivan and her love of L.L Bean, she’d probably knock a few years off her look. But even if she were a Corvette driver, she still wouldn’t look like an older version of her daughter.
Nor would I for that matter. Our side of the family just doesn’t produce honey-colored hair and blue eyes. We’re all dark-haired, dark-eyed clones of one another.
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