The Accidental Bestseller

by Wendy Wax

  —ELINOR LIPMAN

  Kendall’s plane landed at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport just before 7:00 P.M. By 7:30 she’d retrieved her bag and met Calvin outside of baggage claim. She was too tired and too numb to feel much of anything other than the hard knot of anxiety in the pit of her stomach that had been with her since she awoke this morning in Chicago.

  With her bag stowed in the trunk of his BMW, Calvin merged out of the airport and headed north on Highway 85. The drive to Athens, which was northeast of Atlanta, would take about an hour and a half.

  Kendall watched the familiar landmarks whiz by in silence as her brain continued in its attempts to process the horrific details of her day: Kristen Calder’s surprise attack, the even more surprising revelations that followed. The meltdown of her friendship with Mallory and Faye and Tanya.

  Dominating all of this was the coming conversation with her children during which she’d have to explain things that she still didn’t understand herself.

  Kendall closed her eyes and searched for calm. “Did you reach the kids?” she asked. “I was never able to get through.”

  “Yeah,” Calvin replied. “And they’re royally pissed at both of us. At me for, and I’m quoting Melissa on this, ‘being an asshole and only thinking with my dick.’ And at you for not telling them what an asshole I am. Melissa had a four P.M. class but apparently everyone in her dorm watched Kristen Calder today and couldn’t wait to give her a blow by blow.”

  Kendall groaned. “I just can’t believe any of this. I feel like I’ve been trapped in a nightmare since WINC in New York, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to wake up.”

  “I know what you mean,” Cal said.

  Kendall turned in her seat to look at him, something she had not intentionally done for a long time. His dress shirt appeared rumpled and his tie had a food stain on it. She realized, with some surprise, that he needed a haircut.

  “What do you mean, you know what I mean?” she asked.

  He shrugged, but without his usual cockiness. “Just that things haven’t exactly turned out the way I expected.”

  Anger burned away some of Kendall’s numbness. “Gee,” she said. “Let me get out my violin.” She saw his face flush and hoped it was from shame. “But don’t you dare try to tell me that your abandonment of your family has been as hard on you as it has on me. Or will be on your children. Don’t you dare!”

  He took his gaze off the highway to look at her. The rhythmic spill of streetlights lit the hollows of his cheeks. “I did the wrong thing. I know that,” he said. “I just . . . well . . . Melissa wasn’t all wrong. I wasn’t using my head.”

  Kendall closed her eyes again, not wanting to hear what part of his anatomy had held sway. He’d had to choose between his dick and his head. When had his heart been taken out of the running?

  “And now you are?” she asked. “Using your head?”

  “Laura, the whole . . . thing . . . was a huge mistake,” Calvin said quietly. “I wish I’d never gotten involved with her.” He swallowed. “I shouldn’t have ever gotten involved with her.”

  The flare of westbound headlights flickered on his face. Light and dark. Truth and consequences.

  She sensed what was coming before he said it; it was just one more surreal part of a science fiction kind of day.

  “I’m sorry, Kendall. Really sorry. I want to put things back the way they were.” He paused, apparently waiting for some sort of reaction from her. When she didn’t respond, he forged on, laying out his plan, though she suspected he was making it up as he went.

  “We could start fresh tonight,” he said, talking himself into it even as he tried to convince her. “When we get there I’ll apologize and ask their forgiveness. Oh,” he added hastily, “and yours, too. And then we could try to start over again.”

  She realized that he’d only apologized to her as an afterthought because he assumed she’d need little convincing. He undoubtedly assumed she’d been dragging through her dreary life praying that he’d come back.

  “What’s happened to Laura?” Kendall asked. “How does she feel about this . . . fresh start you’re proposing?” She was almost too weary to dredge up a sufficient amount of sarcasm. Almost.

  “It doesn’t matter what she thinks.” He shrugged and she could picture him dismissing her to Laura in the same way nine months ago. “It’s over.” His tone suggested this was a minor point, hardly pertinent to the conversation. “I want you to come home where you belong. You know that’s what the kids will want, too.”

  Kendall turned away from him. She’d taken so many emotional blows today that this one almost didn’t register. He thought he could just say, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake,” as if he’d brought home the wrong brand of toothpaste. “Let’s forget it ever happened” and she would be so relieved that she’d take him back. With some horror, she realized that even a few months ago she would have leaped at the offer.

  Despite all the years they’d spent together, he didn’t know her at all. And couldn’t be bothered to.

  Kendall closed her eyes as the pain of the last nine months washed over her. The demise of her career followed by the disintegration of her marriage had sent her hurtling over the edge of her known life and into a pit of despair and self-doubt so deep and so wide that she hadn’t thought she’d ever claw her way out of it.

  But she had.

  Kendall’s eyes flicked open as the truth resonated within her. She’d leaned too heavily on her friends and developed a somewhat unhealthy power tool dependency in the process, but she had completed the climb.

  She was still weary and bruised, but she was alive. She had survived. And so much stronger than she’d ever realized.

  Calvin waited expectantly for her answer; his assumptions filled the car.

  Kendall hesitated, wanting to be sure that her response wasn’t simply a knee-jerk reaction to those assumptions or a misguided attempt to strike back.

  But no, there was no mistake. She was horribly afraid of damaging her relationship with her children, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to exist without Mallory and Faye and Tanya, but she’d already learned to live without Calvin. She was more herself without Calvin than she’d ever been with him.

  And when she thought the word “home,” she no longer pictured their house in the suburbs. The word conjured the soul-deep silence of her mountaintop house. With the occasional whine of her electric saw floating on the wind.

  She shook her head. “If there’s anything I’ve learned from everything that’s happened, it’s that no good can come from pretending.” She met his gaze and saw surprise register in his.

  “We’re done, Calvin,” she said. “But we’ll always be Melissa and Jeffrey’s parents. We need to try to make things right with them.”

  But in Athens, where they spent a terse forty-five minutes with their children, Kendall discovered that the twins were not inclined to pretend to understand. Or begin to forgive.

  Instead Melissa and Jeffrey made it clear that they considered the withholding of the truth as heinous as their father’s infidelity and abandonment. The fact that they’d discovered all of this on The Kristen Calder Show was the most heinous thing of all.

  “I can’t even talk to you right now,” Melissa said angrily. “All I keep seeing is our personal family business coming out of Kristen Calder’s mouth!” Angry tears had rushed down her cheeks.

  Jeffrey had been less vocal but no less hurt. “Everyone on this campus knew you were getting a divorce before we did! How do you think that makes us feel?”

  And that had been the end of the conversation.

  Drained, Kendall slept in the car most of the way back to Atlanta. At her old house, where she’d left her car before the book tour, she climbed into Melissa’s bed and willed herself to sleep. In the morning she’d drive back to the mountain house where she could lick her wounds. She could only pray that her children’s hurt would fade and that they would ultimately be
ready to listen.

  Mallory let herself into the brownstone late that night and although she put on pajamas and got into bed, she didn’t waste time or energy even trying to fall sleep.

  Their takedown on The Kristen Calder Show was a top story on all of the network news programs and the lead on Entertainment Tonight. Leno and Letterman both poked fun at her self-plagiarism and her secret past. Conan O’Brien did his entire monologue on what might drive a pastor’s wife to write erotica. Another late-night show ended with a “How many authors does it take to write a novel?” joke that gleefully bashed all of their genres.

  In the morning she used makeup and dark glasses to try to hide the ravages of the last twenty-four hours, but the first thing her agent said to her when they were seated at the restaurant was, “You look like you didn’t sleep a wink. But who can blame you?” Patricia Gilmore had always been one to speak her mind. In the past Mallory had thought it a positive quality.

  “So where do things stand?” Mallory asked, her stomach clenching. “How bad is it?”

  “It’s bad,” Patricia replied. “Partridge and Portman wants to sue Scarsdale for a percentage of profits as I’m sure Masque will. Psalm Song, Faye Truett’s inspirational publisher, will want the book taken off the shelves as soon as possible. It’s going to be a huge legal pileup.

  “And the bloggers and review sites are having a field day with you, Mallory. There’s a lot of negative sentiment out there. Some of the big box retailers are already talking about cutting their orders.”

  “Why do you think I kept my past quiet all these years?” Mallory said. “People don’t want to know the real you. And when they do, they want to pick the real you apart. What they really want is the fantasy. They want—”

  “Mallory,” Patricia said. “They’re not turned off by your past. I actually think people are inclined to sympathize with all you went through and root for you all the more. Just like they did for your Sticks and Stones character, Miranda.” She paused to let her words sink in, although Mallory didn’t want to hear them, let alone acknowledge them.

  “Readers want to feel like they know their favorite authors,” Patricia continued. “They’ve believed your PR all these years. They’re hurt and angry that you didn’t think enough of them to share the truth.”

  The words thudded against Mallory’s brain, trying to gain admittance.

  “I understand how they feel,” Patricia said. “I’ve been representing you for a decade and I didn’t even know you.”

  Mallory felt the weight of her agent’s disapproval. Patricia’s words were disturbingly similar to Kendall’s and Faye’s and Tanya’s. She imagined Chris learning about her real identity and her sordid past from the media or through someone else. A casual, “Wow, I don’t know how your wife kept her past secret all those years!” Or even an admiring, “Incredible that she accomplished what she did given her past!” would have been devastating blows to her husband.

  Chris had been up front about needing more of her time and attention and had moved out over her inability to give it. How would he feel when he was confronted with how little of her real self she’d given him? She couldn’t bear to think about it.

  “Look, Pat,” Mallory said. “You’ve done a great job for me. But you’ve also made a ton of money doing it. What I choose to share with people is my own business.”

  “Not really.” Patricia gave her an enigmatic look. “Not anymore.”

  The waiter came to take their orders. Patricia asked for scrambled eggs and toast. Mallory stuck with coffee. The way her stomach was roiling, she was afraid to put anything in it.

  “So do you want to know what you need to do about this?” Patricia asked.

  “Not really,” Mallory said. The only things she wanted to do were go home, crawl into bed, and pull the covers over her head. She’d love to talk everything out with Kendall and Faye and Tanya, except they weren’t speaking to each other. The loss of their friendship was a gaping hole deep inside. She could feel its yawning emptiness right next to the one that had ripped open when Chris left.

  Mallory set the coffee cup back in its saucer with a rattle of china against china. She’d lost everyone important to her by the time she was eighteen and somehow she’d recovered. But she was considerably older now and not so optimistic. She’d learned how to write upbeat, satisfying endings, but she had no idea how to live one.

  “I can understand why you’re upset,” Patricia said. “And I suppose you’d be entitled to wallow in self-pity for a day or two.” Patricia’s sympathetic tone forced Mallory’s head up. She clasped her hands together in her lap to keep them from trembling.

  “But I heard from publicity at Partridge and Portman,” her agent continued smoothly. “They want you to start blogging about this. Bare your soul to your fan base. Take them into your confidence. They’re putting together a list of sites and a tentative schedule of ‘appearances.’ ”

  Mallory was already shaking her head. Every instinct she had shouted for her to retreat and regroup. “They’re not serious.”

  Patricia gave her a long, level look as the waiter delivered her breakfast and refilled Mallory’s coffee. “You don’t want your readers angry with you, Mallory. You’re already looking at a certain amount of slippage. No writer is too big to take a serious fall.”

  “God forbid my sales should drop off.” The words were bitter on Mallory’s tongue. “Next thing Partridge and Portman will be throwing me under the bus like Scarsdale did Kendall.”

  Patricia dug into her food when it arrived, but Mallory could barely digest her coffee. She felt like she’d already lost everyone who mattered. Now they wanted her to run after her readers and beg them not to desert her, too?

  “Well,” Patricia said, after a sip of orange juice and a bite of whole wheat toast, “things could definitely be worse. You could be Faye Truett right now. Or Faye Truett’s publisher.” She cocked her head knowingly. “Or Faye Truett’s husband, the charismatic Pastor Steve.”

  Faye hadn’t spoken to Steve since The Kristen Calder Show yesterday. He’d called from California more times than she wanted to count, but she hadn’t picked up for fear of being forced to discuss the disaster on the phone. If ever anything required a face-to-face conversation, Faye knew that her “outing” as Shannon LeSade was it.

  She would have liked to get out for a walk along the lake or a drive to almost anywhere, but she hadn’t been able to leave the house due to the gaggle of reporters that had been camped out in her driveway since last night. When she’d tuned into the local news this morning, she’d actually seen a shot of their house with the drapes closed and speculation that she was hiding inside. She had no idea what the Chicago Tribune had to say, and she wasn’t about to face down the pa parazzi in order to find out.

  The calls she had taken had only made her feel worse. At 10:00 A.M. her agent had informed her that her inspirational publisher, Psalm Song, had dropped her effective immediately and were considering legal action to recoup potential lost revenues.

  Even Midnight Jade, who published Shannon LeSade, didn’t seem at all happy about the revelation of Faye’s true identity. The fact that their hottest author was a prominent pastor’s wife struck them as “sexually off-putting,” a phrase Faye had never heard before. They thought LeSade’s readers might feel guilty and/or conflicted. They were panicked about sales.

  When Sara’s caller ID appeared on her phone, Faye answered eagerly only to discover that the last thing Sara was planning to offer her mother was her support.

  “How could you do this to me?” was her daughter’s shrill greeting. “Do you have any idea how humiliated we are?”

  Faye recoiled from the venom in Sara’s voice.

  “I will never forgive you for this,” Sara shrieked. “Never!”

  “Sara, honey,” Faye began. “There are things you don’t understand. It’s not—”

  “I don’t want to understand them,” her daughter said. “It makes me sick to think of y
ou writing that filth. Sick!”

  “Why don’t you come over so we can talk about this. Bring Rebecca with you and—”

  “Do you honestly think I’d subject my daughter to any of this?” She let that hang in the ether, a condemnation and a threat. “As far as I’m concerned I don’t have a mother anymore. Which means Becky doesn’t have a grandmother!” Sara slammed down the phone, but not before Faye heard her begin to sob piteously.

  Faye could hardly breathe from the stab of pain that pierced her chest.

  After that, Faye simply left the phone off the hook. Ditto for the computer and the television. She desperately wanted to call Mallory and Tanya and Kendall, but that door had been slammed shut.

  Unsure what to do, she paced the house like a caged animal. Until early afternoon when the front door opened and shut and her husband strode into the house.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he asked by way of greeting. His tone was that of a parent speaking to a child. Or an adult with all his faculties speaking to one without.

  “I’ll tell you what you’ve done,” he said, not waiting for an answer. “You’ve jeopardized everything we’ve built—the church . . . our ministry . . . your charities. Everything.”

  She could feel him attempting to restrain himself. The vein in his temple bulged and there was a tic in his cheek, but he didn’t shout. “Everything we’ve built is at risk because you decided to write pornography!”

  “It’s not pornography!” Faye’s response was automatic.

  “Well it is to the people I’m talking about.” He looked at her as if he didn’t recognize her.

  With a start, she realized she didn’t recognize him, either. Always before when she’d looked at him Faye had seen Steve, her husband, wrapped in the accoutrements of Pastor Steve. Now she saw only the well-groomed televangelist; she wasn’t even sure if her husband was still inside.

  “And what about you?” Faye asked. “Aren’t you interested in hearing what it is I actually write and why?”