by Harper Lin
Gretchen, as usual, had cut the cake into eight pieces. Why she did this, I could never figure out, because that last slice of cake always ended up sitting on the plate for the rest of the meeting. No one ever took it. Not that anyone was watching their figures too closely at this late stage of life; it was simply that taking a second piece would be rude, and rudeness was something that just wasn’t done in Cheerville. You wouldn’t want to irritate anyone, after all.
But that extra piece irritated me almost more than I could bear. I hadn’t made it through a Cold War and several hot ones by being sloppy and wasteful, and leaving an extra piece no one had the gumption to eat was the epitome of sloppy and wasteful.
So I frowned at it again. The icing spelling out the words “crashing wave,” the only words left, seemed to mock me. In a few minutes, Lucien would clear the table and toss out the spare piece.
I had received the piece that read “renewed,” but Cheerville was doing anything but renewing me. In fact, I had developed a deep fear of fossilizing.
I wished the reading group had continued with Behind Open Curtains, this month’s first choice until everyone cracked the cover. It had been billed as “romantica,” a subgenre everyone thought was some new spin on romance. Nobody had bothered to Google it. If we had, we would have found out that it was an amalgamation of “romance” and “erotica.” Pearl, another member of our group, who at ninety-six years of age should have seen it all by now, had nearly had a coronary at the phrase “throbbing man root.”
“Throbbing” was a word often seen in Behind Open Curtains, as was “pulsating,” “yearning,” “moaning,” and “clenching.” There were even a few yelps and ululations. Just who the heck ululates in bed, anyhow? And there was so much fire symbolism in Behind Open Curtains that those curtains must have been made of asbestos.
I fully intended to finish reading that one. I needed to get to the bottom of this ululation business. Had I been doing it wrong all these years?
“Barbara?”
The voice sounded insistent, as if it had spoken my name before.
I looked up to see everyone staring at me. How long had they been saying my name? How long had I been thinking about that stupid slice of cake and strange bedroom noises? I was losing my edge, getting soft. When I still worked for the CIA, nothing ever went unnoticed around me.
“Yes?” I answered.
“What do you think about Victor’s betrayal? How could he leave his wife after twenty years?” asked Pauline, a plump woman of seventy-two with thick cat’s-eye glasses. The ache in Pauline’s voice told me that she’d felt that same betrayal in her own life, meaning the question was loaded and couldn’t be answered the way I would have liked.
Evon, Pauline’s best friend and a spinster ex-schoolteacher, reached over and pointed to my book. She had a bad habit of doing that, as if everyone was a slow pupil.
“The scene is on page seventy-one,” she said. “What do you think about it?”
Judging by the smiles on the faces of my fellow book club members, everyone loved Endless Beach. Even Lucien and Charles, the two men in our group, had enjoyed it, or at least pretended to. I didn’t. I especially didn’t like Marcella, the lead character. Marcella’s husband, Victor, had walked out on her after twenty years. This “betrayal” happened early in the novel and was the catalyst for Marcella coming out of her shell to find new and lasting love. The problem was that Victor was painted as the bad guy, a selfish cad, while the author put Marcella on a pedestal as the paragon of faithful wifehood.
But Marcella had no sense of adventure, no passion, no initiative. It wasn’t until Victor left for his own adventures in Paris that Marcella could even conceive of the idea of abandoning the comfort of her hometown and think of her dreams as anything more than just fantasies.
If I had been married to someone like that, I would have left in the first year, not stuck around for twenty. Not that my James had ever been boring. A bit too turned on by demolition operations, perhaps, but never boring. However, for this group, that was the wrong answer.
I turned to the page, put on my reading glasses, and tried to hedge my bets.
“Well, Marcella had loved him unconditionally for twenty years, so to leave her just because he thinks he can be a painter in Paris is, um…”
“Maybe he was gay. That’s why they called it ‘Gay Paree,’ isn’t it?”
This was from Pearl, who sat slumped in an easy chair like a Gothic ruin.
“It’s Barbara’s turn, Pearl,” Gretchen told her, almost shouting so that Pearl’s ninety-six-year-old ears could hear her. Gretchen always hosted and had decided that this meant she was in charge.
I tried to think of a way to finish my sentence that would be a reasonable compromise between how I actually felt and something these small-town conservative senior citizens could accept.
But what could I say, that I had ditched my college boyfriend of three years right after graduation, the boyfriend who had gotten down on one knee and proposed marriage, because I’d preferred to join the CIA and hunt terrorists and narcotraffickers? The worst of it all was that I had actually said yes to him and then changed my mind and never regretted that, heartbreak or no heartbreak. Painting in Paris seemed tame compared to what I had done.
“He’s a quitter. A selfish jerk. Marriage is forever, and you have to stick with it through thick and thin.”
That came from Lucien Rogers, Gretchen’s husband, mumbled through the last bite of his slice of lemon cake. His response actually made me wince, and I hoped no one noticed.
Lucien was a bit dim, but nice—too nice, really. I could stand up and put him in a chokehold until he passed out, and he’d probably thank me, assuming I had done it out of the best intentions. The fantasy of doing just that briefly flickered through my mind. I had to give him credit, though. His being such a sweetheart did come in handy. As much as I hated to admit it, there were plenty of things I could no longer do, and more and more got added to the list every year.
When a tree had fallen and blocked my driveway after a snowstorm in my first week in Cheerville, Lucien had swung into action, chainsaw in hand. I knew how to use one as well, if not better, than Lucien, but I’d have had to cut that tree into pieces not much bigger than sawdust in order to move them without hurting my back.
Lucien didn’t even know me at the time. He had simply been driving past my house and saw the fallen tree. His chainsaw happened to be in his trunk. I got the sneaking suspicion that, once the snowstorm had finished, he had driven around the neighborhood looking for people who needed help. After he invited me to the reading group and I got to know him better, that suspicion turned into a near certainty.
This guy was remarkably fit for his age. He wasn’t hard on the eyes, either, so nobody objected to his patrolling the neighborhood offering to help out. Nobody female, anyway.
Lucien, obviously feeling pleased with himself by closing the conversation with such a sparkling insight into Endless Beach, started to clear the table, collecting plates and forks and the platter with the lone piece of lemon cake with its mournful phrase, “crashing wave,” on it before disappearing into the kitchen. I watched it go, knowing it was destined to be eaten by some undeserving rat in the town landfill.
That was a shame, because Gretchen’s cake really was delicious.
The chatter continued as the other members of the club freely spoke their minds on the tragedy of giving up on something you’ve been building for twenty years. Everyone agreed that Victor had acted like a cad.
“The author should have written a sequel in which Victor fails as a painter and drinks himself to death with absinthe,” Charles proclaimed, emphasizing his point by thumping his cane on the carpet. Charles was the local funeral director. For some reason, no one objected to his presence. While I had been dancing with death all of my professional career, most people liked keeping anything associated with the Grim Reaper at arm’s length.
I sighed and leaned back in my cha
ir. They’d skipped my turn, but I didn’t mind at all because it let me off the hook. It was the end of another faintly amusing but really quite dull meeting of the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society. I had grown tired of Cheerville so quickly—tired of the people, tired of living alone, tired of the prosperous, straight-laced dreariness of it all.
I changed that prognosis immediately when Lucien fell dead in the kitchen.
Granny’s Got a Gun is available everywhere
