Ladies' Night

by Andrews, Mary Kay

  “Wow. And Stackpole owns three of these?”

  “Judge Stackpole? Your divorce judge?” Rochelle had come up behind them while they were studying the printouts. She leaned over Camryn’s shoulder, staring at the photo of Altadora Commons.

  “That’s right,” Camryn told her. “According to my real estate agent, the original sales price, back in 2007, was between 875,000 and 1.6 million dollars for the biggest units, which were actually two town houses joined together. Then, well, you know what happened to real estate around here. You couldn’t give a town house away. Stackpole bought three units from the developer, at what looked like fire-sale prices, in 2010. He paid 420,000 dollars apiece. Which would have been a great deal…”

  “Except?” Grace asked.

  “Except that the county’s tax digest was reworked in 2011, and now those units are only appraised at 120,000 apiece,” Camryn said, sounding absolutely elated. “He’s underwater, in a major way.”

  “But he can’t be broke,” Grace objected. “He lives at Longboat Key, and you told us his wife’s family has gobs of money.”

  “The wife’s family has money. Stackpole doesn’t have squat,” Camryn said. “I checked. The house is in her name. And incidentally? It’s apparently a lot bigger than it looks from the street. It’s on the market for 3.2 million.”

  Rochelle had eased herself onto a chair. “Bring me up to speed here, Camryn. What does any of this mean to you and Grace?”

  “It’s just a wild theory we’ve been tossing back and forth,” Grace cautioned.

  “It’s not a wild theory,” Camryn said, tapping the documents on the table. “These printouts prove it. Stackpole’s in debt. His wife has money, but he probably can’t touch it. He’s having an affair with Paula Talbott-Sinclair, and one of them comes up with the idea to mandate women going through his divorce court to seek counseling from Paula, his girlfriend. She gets to soak each of us three hundred dollars per session, for a total of six sessions. There are five people in our group alone, and on the one day I watched her office, I saw three other groups arriving for divorce counseling. Do the math, Grace. They’re getting rich off our misery.”

  “You should do a story about this on the news,” Rochelle said excitedly. “Blow the lid off the whole big scam.”

  “I intend to,” Camryn said.

  “Isn’t it a conflict of interest for you to report on a story you’re involved in?” Grace asked.

  “It’d be a first-person piece,” Camryn said. “And if the story’s big enough, I don’t see how my station manager can turn it down.”

  “Look, I’d love it if we could prove those two were in cahoots,” Grace said. “But I talked to Mitzi about this yesterday. Even if you did see all those people going into Paula’s office, how do you know they didn’t go there of their own free will?”

  “Can’t you just ask her other patients whether or not Stackpole ordered them to attend therapy with her?” Rochelle asked.

  “I wish,” Camryn said. “I told you I hung around outside Paula’s office last Friday. What I didn’t tell you was that she apparently saw me standing there in the parking lot. She came outside and asked me what I was doing! I made up some lame story about looking for a diamond earring I’d dropped Wednesday night but I think she realized there was something fishy going on.”

  “Mitzi did say she’d take a look at Stackpole’s dockets and talk to any attorneys she knows that have had divorce cases before him,” Grace said.

  “But who knows how long that will take?” Rochelle demanded. “We need action!”

  Grace gave her mother the look. “What kind of action would you suggest?”

  Rochelle thought. She smiled. She walked away from the table, and when she returned, she brought a handful of flyers, which she offered to Grace.

  Come play in the Sandbox. Good for one free appetizer or drink

  “I remember these. Dad hired kids to put them on car windshields at the new Publix, right after it opened.”

  “Until I made him stop, because we were nearly run out of business, giving away all those free drinks and stuffed potato skins,” Rochelle said.

  “So?” Grace asked. “Am I missing something?”

  “I’m not. Rochelle, if you ever get tired of running this bar, you might have a future as an investigative reporter. This,” Camryn said admiringly, “is brilliant.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Grace said, looking from one woman to the other.

  “It’s simple,” Rochelle said. “Tomorrow morning, I go over to Paula’s office. I watch cars pulling up and pay attention to who goes inside. Then, I plaster these coupons all over their windshields. When they bring in the coupons for their freebies, you two swoop in and ask them what you need to know.”

  “And how do you know they’ll use the coupons? Or when they’ll use them?” Grace asked.

  “I’ll just write on the bottom of each coupon that the deal’s good for one day only,” Rochelle said. “Trust me. Nobody turns down a free drink in this town.”

  46

  Paula Talbott-Sinclair clasped her hands together prayerfully as she stood in the front of the room. She took a deep breath and let it out so s-l-o-w-l-y that the members of the group all subconsciously held their own breaths, wondering what would happen next.

  “Hi friends.” Her voice was clear and unusually calm. “I want to start our session tonight by talking about personal responsibility.” She looked around the room. “All of you are here, in a way, because you were forced to take personal responsibility for some action you took against your partner.”

  “Ashleigh, you were stalking your husband’s new lover. You vandalized her home in what was a very terrifying and thoughtless act of vengeance.

  “Wyatt, you punched out the window of your wife’s boyfriend’s car so violently that you smashed his window and injured your own hand.

  “Grace, you deliberately drove your husband’s car into a swimming pool and destroyed it.

  “Camryn, you discovered a provocative and salacious video of your husband and put it on YouTube, thus exposing him to public ridicule and humiliation.”

  Paula nodded at Suzanne. “Suzanne, we’ve all been very patient, waiting for you to admit to us the actions you took that caused you to join this group. Because I’m such a strong believer in personal responsibility, I’ve been reluctant to force your hand. Up until now.”

  Suzanne lifted her chin. “I’m ready, Paula. I want to tell the group…”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No,” Suzanne said, with a nervous laugh. “I’ll never be ready. But I’m willing, and that’s the best I can do.”

  * * *

  “Did I tell you all that Eric, my husband, is also a professor at Ringling?” Suzanne didn’t wait for a reply. “He’s in the English department, too. Anyway, I discovered, by accident, that he was sleeping with a co-worker, a woman who’d been my grad assistant last year.”

  “How’d you figure it out?” Ashleigh asked.

  Suzanne’s smile was wry. “Modern technology. Eric had gone out for a run. I was doing the laundry and found his phone in the pocket of his pants. As I was putting it on the counter, it pinged, and I saw he’d gotten a text. Darby was at soccer practice, and she was supposed to text one of us to let us know she was on her way home. I just assumed the text would be from her, so I read it. It wasn’t from Darby. It was from her.”

  “The other woman?” Camryn asked.

  “Yup. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty. Let’s just say she was suggesting a time and place for their next assignation. ‘Come horny,’ the text said, so that let me know I wasn’t overreacting. Just to be sure, I scrolled down the other texts from her. They were all just as graphic, if not more so. And it had been going on for months.”

  “Did you confront him?” Grace asked.

  “No.” Suzanne’s hands shook as she uncapped the bottle of water she’d been clutching all evening. “I … I guess a part of me still didn’t want t
o believe it was true. But another part of me, the cold, analytical researcher, needed data. While I was going through his phone, reading the texts, I found texts from other people, women, but I had no idea who they were.”

  “He had more than one girlfriend?” Camryn asked. “Just like my cheating husband.”

  “It gets better, or worse,” Suzanne said sadly. “I went online and found something called keystroke software. It’s a program you can surreptitiously load onto somebody’s computer, and once it’s activated, everything that person does on their computer, every e-mail they write or receive, every Web site they visit, you have access to.”

  “You became your own private detective,” Camryn said. “That’s so smart!”

  “Not really,” Suzanne said. “Remember, Camryn, when you said you wished you could take Scopolamine, to forget about your daughter catching Dexter in bed with her roommate? Well, I learned so much about Eric’s secret life, I wish the data bank in my head could be wiped clean. But I’m afraid now it’s hardwired into my brain.”

  She took a sip of water. “Those other women? He was meeting them on Craigslist! For hookups.”

  “Dear God,” Grace muttered.

  “Exactly,” Suzanne said. “He was meeting strange women in sleazy motel rooms for casual sex. And when he wasn’t meeting them in person, they were sexting back and forth. It had been going for years.”

  “That’s just nasty,” Ashleigh said. “At least Boyce…”

  Camryn reached over and grabbed Ashleigh’s arm. “Let Suzanne get through this without editorializing. Okay? Otherwise, I will have to pinch your head off of your scrawny little neck.” Ashleigh jerked her arm away.

  “Camryn?” Paula’s voice had a warning note.

  Camryn glared at Paula. “I am dead-dog serious. I will hurt her if you do not make her be quiet.”

  “And I’ll help,” Grace offered, glaring, in turn, at Ashleigh.

  “Everybody?” Suzanne looked amused. “I’m fine. Really. I’ve been living with this for months and months now. Now? I don’t want this slime taking up any more room in my brain. You know?”

  They all nodded in unison. They all did know.

  “You wouldn’t think this could get worse,” Suzanne said with a self-conscious laugh. “But it does! Not long after I found out about Eric, I had a regular check-up with my gynecologist, and I had an abnormal pap test.”

  She looked at Wyatt and blushed. “I’m sorry you have to hear such personal stuff. About my lady parts. But there’s just no way to get around this.”

  “I’ll survive,” he said, his voice gruff.

  Suzanne took a gulp of water. And then the words came tumbling out in an unstoppable torrent. “I had HPV. I didn’t even know what it was. My doctor—the same doctor who delivered Darby, who’s known me since I was a teenager, had to explain it to me. It was an STD. A sexually transmitted disease.”

  Grace had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from gasping aloud.

  “Eric … having unprotected sex with those women. He’d given me an STD. I thought I would die of humiliation, the day my doctor told me. Of course, he was as embarrassed as I was. Long story short, I had cervical cancer.

  “I had a total hysterectomy, because my husband gave me a sexually transmitted virus. Which, incidentally, could still come back, as something like anal cancer. My doctor had been quietly urging me to tell Eric what was going on, so he could at least notify the women he’d had sex with. You know, so they could see a doctor. I was so calm on the outside, it was frightening. I scared myself. One day, a week before I was scheduled for surgery, I went on Craigslist. I posted a picture of Eric and advised that any woman who’d ever had a hookup with him should get themselves checked. Because he had an STD. And they were at risk, too.”

  Suzanne gulped more water. “Then I texted my colleague at the college. I told her I knew about her and Eric. But here was a piece of news she wasn’t privy to. And I told her. The day I was scheduled to have my surgery, I told Eric what I’d done. And I told him I wanted him out of our house by the time I got home from the hospital.”

  “Does Darby know?” Camryn asked. “Why you split up?”

  “No,” Suzanne said. “I couldn’t do that to her. It’s bad enough I have this stuff in my head. She’s only eighteen. I don’t want her hating men for the rest of her life. I don’t even want her hating her father.”

  “But…” Ashleigh sputtered. “You let Eric off the hook. He doesn’t even have to take responsibility for what he did!”

  “He’s not off the hook,” Suzanne said. “His girlfriend filed a grievance against him with the college, and he was fired. One of the women he met on Craigslist claims he gave her HPV, too, although I don’t know how someone who’s in the habit of having unprotected sex with strangers can ever figure out how she got an STD. She’s hired a lawyer. And so it goes. I think it’s safe to say his life is ruined.”

  “And yours isn’t?” Wyatt’s face was pink with indignation. “I’m sorry, Suzanne. As a man, I’m sorry. As a husband, I’m sorry.” He looked at the others. “We’re not all like that. I swear.”

  “I know you’re nothing like that, Wyatt,” Suzanne said. “And I don’t think every man is like Eric. But you’re wrong about one thing. My life isn’t ruined. I’m not about to give him that power.”

  “Right on, sister,” Camryn said fiercely.

  “Thank you, Suzanne,” Paula said quietly. “I can see now why you needed time to find the words to tell your story. We’re all full of admiration for your honesty. Right, friends?” She started clapping her hands, slowly, until the others in the semicircle joined in. Paula motioned for Suzanne to stand, and she hugged her. One by one, the others stood and joined the group hug, awkwardly at first, and then, as the moment grew, they stood together, their first real campfire moment.

  The members of the group drifted back to their chairs. Paula went on.

  “We’re in week five of our sessions, and we’ve got lots of work yet to do before we conclude next week. Tonight, I’m going to ask all of you to think about writing an action plan.

  “It’s a sort of manifesto for yourselves,” Paula explained. “You’re all starting a new chapter of your lives. I’d like you to put some thought into how you’ll move forward, personally and professionally, physically and emotionally, in a really mindful way.”

  She glanced at her watch. “This has been pretty intense tonight. Let’s take a ten-minute break, and when we come back, we’ll talk. Okay?”

  Camryn blew her nose. “What’s Suzanne’s action plan gonna be, Paula? What’s she gonna do, grow a new cervix?”

  47

  Wyatt was the first one to arrive at their table at the Sandbox. He pulled Grace’s chair out for her, letting his hand rest, just for a second, on her arm. “Thanks,” she said, shooting him a quick, private smile.

  Rochelle was at the table in a shot, bringing a pitcher of beer and menus. “Where are the others?”

  “They’re on their way,” Wyatt told her. “I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need a lot of alcohol tonight, Rochelle. In fact, why don’t you go ahead and bring Suzanne whatever it is she usually orders?”

  “God, yes,” Grace said emphatically. “I think she drinks wine spritzers. And I’m gonna need a big old glass of wine myself.”

  “Why?” Rochelle asked eagerly. “Did something happen tonight? To Suzanne?”

  Wyatt’s voice was solemn. “Suzanne finally shared tonight. Her husband was having unprotected sex with total strangers he met through Craigslist. He gave her an STD.”

  “You mean, like venereal disease?”

  “Something like that,” Grace said. “Only this disease can’t be cleared up with penicillin. Suzanne had to have a hysterectomy because of it, and it could still come back.”

  “Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Rochelle exclaimed. “This really happened to our darling Suzanne?”

  “Yes. And she just pulled into the parking lot, so plea
se don’t mention it. I mean it, Mom. Not one word.”

  “I would never,” Rochelle said indignantly. She sketched a quick cross on her chest. “So help me.”

  * * *

  Suzanne looked from the wine spritzer sitting on the table to Grace. “Thanks.” She took a sip. “I needed this.”

  “You were amazing in group tonight,” Ashleigh said, leaning across the table.

  “You’re our she-roe,” Camryn chimed in. “You’re like a divorce superhero.”

  Suzanne sipped her drink. “Not at all. The rest of you spilled your guts that first awful night of group session, when we were all total strangers. It’s taken me five weeks to get up the nerve. I’m the biggest wimp in the world.”

  “No, you’re not,” Wyatt said. “You’re … an inspiration.”

  “Okay, enough,” Suzanne said. “You’re going to make me start blubbering again. Can we please talk about something else? Anything else?”

  Camryn and Grace locked eyes, then looked away. But their expression didn’t escape Ashleigh.

  “What?” she cried. “You guys know something. Come on, spill. Is it about Paula?”

  Grace shrugged. “Camryn found out some stuff about Paula’s past.”

  Suzanne regarded Camryn carefully. “This has something to do with why Paula isn’t licensed to practice therapy in Florida, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Camryn said, surprised. “How’d you know?”

  Suzanne hesitated. “Okay, one more thing I’ve been keeping from you guys. I swear, it’s the very last secret. Or, the last one that concerns you. Here it is. Stackpole didn’t send me to Paula. I came on my own.”

  “You mean, you came voluntarily? Why would you do that?” Ashleigh asked.

  “After I found out what Eric had done, I was so angry, in such a rage, I scared even myself,” Suzanne said. “I had all these awful ideas about how to get my revenge. Fantasies about physically harming him. That’s when I knew I had to get help. I went online and googled divorce and therapy and Sarasota, and Paula’s name popped up.