The Girls of Tonsil Lake by Liz Flaherty Page B

be a good stepfather to Tom—who wasn’t having any, thank you.
    We were married for ten years, a typical suburban couple. We lived just two blocks from Jean and David in Willow Wood Estates and did all the right things. We went to barbecues and had barbecues. We belonged to the country club and the big Methodist church out on the edge of town. We went to Sarah’s dance recitals and Tom’s Little League games and to parties held by other lawyers.
    To tell the truth, I hated my life. I was a half-assed mother, not born to it like Jean or even Andie, and I wasn’t that great a wife for a lawyer, either. I was supposed to behave properly at least until he’d been made partner. “Properly” didn’t include being a cosmetics company sales rep, not even when I was promoted to the more prestigious title of consultant.
    Phil was not the type of man to force me to quit, but he did request that I keep a low profile about what I did. I tried to, and things went along okay. But then the Rivers family moved in next door.
    They were a nice couple. Ben was a stockbroker and Kate was a teacher. They had two children and a Dalmatian named Sidney. And they were black.
    Well, this may have been the beginning of the twenty-first century, but let me tell you, some creepy faction in Willow Wood Estates hadn’t yet heard of integration, enlightenment, or diversity. Less than a month after the Rivers moved in, we got up one morning to find their yard totally trashed, windows broken, and an effigy hanging from a willow tree. Someone had spray-painted “niggers, go home” on their white garage door. All that was missing was the burning cross.
    I saw Ben and Kate the same time I saw the mayhem. They were just standing there, hands hanging limply at their sides. I called Jean, yelling, “Get over here now,” and stomped out of my house and into the neighbors’ yard. Jean was there in two minutes, and we got started. Two furious women in pajamas and bathrobes soon became most everybody in the neighborhood and we cleaned that mess up. David even stopped on his way to work and took a can of white spray paint out of his trunk to try to obliterate what had been done to the garage door.
    The picture on the front page of that night’s paper was of Jean and me, flinging broken glass into a trashcan held by Kate Rivers.
    Phil was not pleased. Actually, he was irate. What was wrong with me, he wanted to know. Did I want the neighborhood to be taken over by blacks, gays, and other subversives?
    The kids and I spent the night at Jean’s. The divorce was particularly messy, since Phil was a lawyer, but I ended up with enough money to buy my condo.
    Sarah never forgave me for leaving her father, and Tom never forgave me for anything.
    So why am I digging up all this old history? Maybe because I’m confined in a house with two women who are close to their children in a way I’m not. Maybe because—and let me admit right here and now that Andie’s right when she swears I fall in love at the drop of a zipper—I’m afraid I’m going to fall in love with Jake Logan, who is someone’s ex-husband. No, he’s Andie’s ex-husband, and if there hadn’t been a good reason for divorcing him, she wouldn’t have.
    I’ll just keep telling myself that.
    When I woke this morning, I had a pimple the size of a small city in Vermont on my cheek, right dead in the middle. I panicked, picked a fight with Andie, and covered it as well as I could with the little pat of concealer supplied in the travel-pack of makeup.
    Sitting in the kitchen eating yogurt, looking at Jean’s flat-on-one-side hair, Andie’s dandelion fluff, and the little curls at Vin’s temples that spoke of night sweats or a hot flash, I thought how little some things had changed since Tonsil Lake. We still sat in the kitchen in our nightclothes, still dreamed of the perfect man—whether we’d had him and lost him, still had him, or were sort of hoping—and still got zits.
    Vin
    Jean looked