Danielle thinks that the worst is behind her, but she couldn’t have been more wrong...
As a beauty editor of Denver's hot new High Life magazine, Danielle Starkey didn’t have becoming a widow on her to-do list. Then nine months after her husband’s death, she discovers he booked a vacation with another woman. Suddenly, Danielle sees Adam’s death in a whole new light and has to get over it - for the second time.
Hit with the truth when she least expects it, Danielle brings a fresh, funny, and honest approach to the grieving process as she struggles through online dating, stalking her dead husband’s mistress, and, hopefully, finding the man of her dreams. With her stubborn and sassy best friend April by her side, Danielle refuses to let sleeping dogs lie. Will she finally face the truth about herself and her marriage? Or will she succumb to one of the five stages of grief?
KUDOS FOR 5 STAGES OF GRIEF
5 Stages of Grief—sounds like a self-help book, right? Wrong. Think Chick Lit, surprisingly good Chick Lit. I say surprisingly because I had no idea from the title I’d be so impressed with the story. Bethany Ramos has littered her tale with the kind of feisty and sassy humor that had me laughing aloud and thinking of same situations in my own life...5 Stages of Grief portrays Danielle’s journey with more than smart humor. There’s some pathos, self-reflection, a generous dose of scheming from our plucky heroine, that will have you in fits of laughter, and a hilarious look at the perils of on-line dating...Bethany Ramos has excelled in her debut novel with a fresh style that makes her characters engaging and vulnerable. The reader wants Danielle to be happy, to find her peace, and above all, have a successful date! – Taylor, Reviewer
Normally I don’t read Chick Lit. It’s just not my genre. I’m more in to action and suspense than Women’s Fiction or Chick Lit, so I wasn’t exactly thrilled when asked to review 5 Stages of Grief by Bethany Ramos...However, to my surprise, and delight, I thoroughly enjoyed 5 Stages of Grief...I liked her humor and the realistic way she viewed things. I also liked the hilarious look into the world of online dating. I’ve never tried it, but Ramos gives us some delightful insights on what it must be like to do so. I know I certainly look at eHarmony commercials differently now. Ramos has a fresh and interesting voice. This is her debut novel, and while she still has a bit to learn about writing, for the most part the book is well written and definitely worth taking time to read. – Regan, Reviewer
5 STAGES OF GRIEF
Bethany Ramos
A BLACK OPAL BOOKS PUBLICATION
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Bethany Ramos
Cover Design by Janine Alvarado
Copyright 2011 All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-937329-09-9
Smashwords Edition License Notes:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
EXCERPT
I couldn’t believe I was actually doing this.
I was parked outside of my dead husband’s mistress’s office at twelve-fifty-five p.m., trying to look casual. I could only hope Cherry James would walk back into her office any moment now. I finally saw a group of four women, laughing and walking into the front of the office. I had no clue what Cherry looked like. All I had seen on her LinkedIn profile was a tiny, gritty avatar of a woman with blonde hair. The only woman in the group who relatively fit that description was much plumper than I expected, and she was pregnant.
Damn, damn, damn. If that did happen to be Cherry carrying my dead husband’s baby, then this drama was way too much for me. I was going to have to sell our townhome and retire to Mexico much sooner than I anticipated. Still, the overall evidence was inconclusive. I sat outside for another good half-hour, catching up on my reading in Vogue until I was so bored I couldn’t stand it. I would obviously never last as a professional detective.
Drumming my fingers nervously on the steering wheel, I tried to decide what to do. Option A, I could drive away and pretend this whole thing never happened—except April would question me incessantly about whether or not I saw the mistress.
Option B, I could wait until five p.m. when Ms. James would probably be leaving her office. But the main problem with that was I wasn’t sure what she looked like.
Option C, I could march into Cherry’s office and ask for an appointment with her so there would be no doubt about who she was or what she looked like. Option C seemed like the best choice by far. I got to take action and didn’t have to throw up the white flag or even sit in an office parking lot for the rest of my afternoon off.
Option C, it was!
DEDICATION
To my best friend and husband Mark. You have inspired me to be my best self, and without you, this book wouldn't be possible!
PROLOGUE
“Ma’am, this is a suicide hotline. We can’t give you advice on how to kill yourself.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m just going to Google it.”
I wasn’t really sure why I said that. I’d never known myself to be the irrational, making-wild-threats, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type of gal. Still, desperate times called for desperate measures, or however that saying goes.
“I was simply asking how many pills a person needs to take to kill themselves,” I continued. “I didn’t necessarily say that I was going to be the one doing it.”
Also not true. But again, I was desperate. I wasn’t sure why I thought I could trick the Suicide Hotline operator into telling me the best way to off myself. She was obviously a professional. But I figured anything was worth a shot—especially since this whole ordeal was anonymous. The anonymity of the call charged me with a newfound boldness, probably classifying me as, “This crazy lady who called up the hotline today and asked me how to kill herself,” that the operator would tell her boyfriend about later over dinner. So be it.
“Ma’am, can I please have your first and last name?”
“No.” I absolutely loved this new, rebellious, anonymous version of myself.
“Ma’am, unless you give me your first and last name, I’m afraid we can’t continue on with this phone call.”
Shit. I tried to think of a totally anonymous name off of the top of my head. “Heidi Klum.” Ah! What a horrible fake name! That’s what I got for watching hours on end of Project Runway.
“Ma’am, with all due respect, I don’t believe that is your actual name. So can you please tell me your first and last name?”
The Suicide Hotline operator sounded exasperated. I actually started to feel a bit of compassion for her. After all, she was wasting ten minutes of her precious evening trying to help an unreasonable caller like myself when she could actually have been helping someone much closer to death by their own hand.
The truth was that I wasn’t going to kill myself. I simply wanted to dabble with the idea as an option after the shocking/horrible/stomach-turning news I had recently received.
I promptly hung up on the patient, Suicide Hotline operator so she could progress to the more important callers of the evening—and maybe actually save someone’s life. That thought made me feel quite pleased with myself. For a moment, I almost believed I had done a good deed. Twisted thinking, yes, but I would take a pat on the back where I could get it.
I returned to my previous activity of watching—you guessed it—Project Runway, eating a bowl of tepid ramen, and placing mental bets on when the fish in my husband’s aquarium were going to die since I hadn’t fed them in a full week. I was thinking the angelfish would probably last another week without food, but all of the colorful guppies were looking positively green around the gills. I assumed that meant their numbers would be up soon.
I never used to be the type of person that would starve her pets and watch them suffer before her eyes. But again, shocking news will do strange things to a person.
This shocking news came in the form of discovering a secret about my husband, which was made all the worse because he was dead. Finding out this secret made me unspeakably angry—full of boiling rage I couldn’t do anything about because the person who did this to me was dead. And I’d been wasting my time grieving over him for the last nine months.
When your spouse dies unexpectedly, it is literally the worst thing you could ever imagine happening to you—especially since I’d only been married for three years. Three years is that magical-in-between time where you are just settling into the rhythms of your marriage, thinking about having a kid or two, and feeling pretty darn happy that you’d made it. You’d been able to create a solid relationship that looked like it would last well into the future.
So when death became a factor, it seemed like a horrible, cruel twist. Which could pretty much be summed up by every Lifetime movie ever created. I was such a sucker for that channel—pure addiction.
My husband passed away in a typically clichéd fashion. He was driving home on a rainy night, his car fishtailed, and he went into oncoming traffic and died instantly.
I could say this now with such clinical candor because I was over much of my sadness regarding the situation—simply because of the aforementioned secret that punched me in the stomach and made me start to hate the man. Of course, admitting that made me feel like a horrible person who starved her fish and watched them die—which I obviously was. It was also difficult to admit you hated your late husband when all of your friends, family, coworkers, and even dry cleaner had been showering you with sympathy because of your tragic loss.
So that left me in a bit of a pickle. Did I reveal the horrible secret I found out about the jerkoff and let everybody else hate him, too, or did I let his memory live on angelically and continue to receive false sympathy that was becoming more and more difficult to swallow?
I found out about this gut-wrenching secret roughly nine months after his death. I had just recently returned to work as the beauty editor for the hit Denver magazine High Life that had newly launched their online publication. This was the sweet, cushy job I’d always dreamed of, but I’d only been able to enjoy it for a mere six months before the husband-killing car accident occurred.
So basically, I got my awesome job as a beauty editor for a hip Denver magazine. I started enjoying my new position. My husband was killed. I was forced to take six more months off of work because I could barely leave the house, since I looked ghoulish from grief—to put it nicely. And when I felt I was finally ready to return to work—like a semi-normal human being who recently lost a spouse—BAM! I found out the secret that took my “grief” to a whole new level.
I had been back at work for about two months when I learned this secret. High Life was a newer, albeit highly successful, publication that started in Denver but soon had a national reach. High Life, true to its name, represented the typical outdoorsy, granola, nature-loving woman often found in the Mile High City. So all of our features, articles, and columns related to this natural, healthy, and independent career woman you might find walking about the streets of downtown Denver at any given time.
For some reason, this image appealed greatly to the entire country. Women everywhere were snatching this magazine off the racks to read more about the latest organic, fair trade, faux fur lined boots that were en vogue for the season, or to find a homemade beauty mask recipe made from organic yogurt, papaya, and honey that would revitalize tired and dry skin so that you instantly looked five years younger.
The job itself was fantastic—everything that I had been hoping to achieve after working in freelance PR for a lowly beauty supply store in south Denver for more than five years. I always felt like that crappy job was my steppingstone to something greater and much more fabulous, so I kept chugging along. Even when I had to create flyers advertising weekly specials for exclusive made-for-TV products like the Bump It or Smooth Away.
I was just starting to ease back into my role at the magazine. I had my own small but adequate office, which, for me, merited quite a celebration since I was used to being crammed into a long desk with four or five other PR reps who constantly chatted on the phone with anyone and everyone they knew with such fervor that I could hardly think straight.
My assistant buzzed my phone at ten a.m. I was expecting this since I had placed calls to a few popular beauty bloggers in the hopes they would review the beauty section of High Life to give it a little more Internet buzz as we proceeded to launch the online version of our magazine. Thinking that one of these said beauty bloggers was giving me a ring back, I jumped on the call right away.
“Hello. Danielle Starkey.”
Yes, I still had my husband’s name. I just wasn’t ready to face going back to my former Danielle Black just yet.
“Mrs. Starkey? This is Meredith calling from Classic Vacation Caribbean Travel regarding your recent reservations booked by a Mr. Adam Starkey. I’m afraid we have a little bit of a problem. We have reservations for two at the Grande Royal Antiguan Beach Resort for August first through August ninth, which was five days ago. We were concerned since the hotel alerted us that you never showed up for your vacation.”
I struggled to suppress the tears that immediately welled up in my eyes. “I think there must be a mistake. My husband never told me about a vacation he booked for us. Unfortunately, he...passed away, which is why we never went on that trip.”
Even though the mention of my husband’s name felt like a sharp poke into an open wound, I also felt a little bit of pleasure knowing he had booked a surprise vacation for both of us so far in advance. He was always the thoughtful type. This was just one more of his surprises I got to be reminded of after his death.
Meredith was clearly embarrassed and at a loss for words. “I am so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Starkey. We had a reservation here for Adam and Cherry Starkey, so I’ll try to see what I can do to get your deposit back for you since you missed the vacation altogether.”
“Sorry, that must be a mistake. My name is Danielle, so the reservation would have been under Adam and Danielle Starkey.”
Meredith hesitated. “No, it says right here that it was under the name Adam and Cherry Starkey. Mr. Starkey also faxed us copies of both of your passports, and the other traveler’s legal name is Cherry James. Is that correct?”
“Cherry? Like Cherry, not Sherry? Are you sure it’s not Danielle, or even Dani?” I asked lamely, although Dani and Cherry sounded nothing alike.
“Yes. Mrs. Cherry Starkey. Is that correct?”
I was simply stunned. Why would my husband book the wrong name for our surprise vacation? How could he make a mistake with his own wife’s name? And whose passport did he fax instead of mine? I wasn’t necessarily the brightest crayon in the box, but I wasn’t slow either. The only answer I had for why it took me so long to connect the dots was simply due to my overwhelming disbelief mixed with some residual grief. How could my husband stab me in the back from beyond the grave? It just didn’t make sense.
When I finally grasped the reality that my husband had booked a secret vacation with a mistress—who had a stupid, slutty, stripper name, I might add—I wrapped up the call with Meredith from Classic Vacation Caribbean Travel as quickly as possible.
“Thanks for the information, and if you could get the deposit back, that would be great. Oh, and can I ask how you got this number?” Since I wasn’t the “Cherry” in question booked on the vacation, I was wondering how Meredith had gotten ahold of me so quickly.
“Yes, we called the home number left by Mr. Starkey. The voicemail had your work number listed, so we called you here.”
Damn my overly-informational voicemail covering all the bases for me! “I see. Thank you.”
I slammed down the phone with both hands and immediately started puking the stomach acid that had risen up in my throat into the trashcan under my desk. I had always heard—and seen on Lifetime—that when women were faced with the truth of infidelities, they would cry, go into a rage, or cut all of the sleeves off of their husband’s nicest shirts.
I really thought that Mary J. Blige would have been playing in the background as I tossed all of my husband’s clothes into trash bags and threw them out onto the lawn for him to find when he got home from work.
Still, in my cheater-revenge fantasies, I had never thought about the fact that Adam would be dead and long gone, and I would have to find out about his mistress nine months after he passed away. I hadn’t seen a Lifetime movie that covered this scenario just yet and really was at a loss over what to do.
STAGE 1: DENIAL
CHAPTER 1
After the vomiting-into-the-trashcan-underneath-my-desk episode, I decided to work through lunch and finally call the webmaster of a popular beauty blog to see if she would do a feature on our Winter Best of List for the career-minded mountain beauty. This was a call I had been putting off for quite a while. I absolutely hated to chase down seemingly important people who acted as if they didn’t have time for me. Granted, this was a fear I needed to shake if I wanted to be successful at High Life, and today seemed as good a day as any to shoot for a career victory.
I was able to leave a voicemail with the bigwig-beauty-blogger’s assistant, who kindly told me I could expect a call back late tomorrow afternoon. Hey, at least they gave me a time frame for the point of contact this time, instead of letting me lie in wait, all the while unsuspectingly answering calls from my cheating husband’s travel agent—
Nope. Not going there. I tried to push those creeping thoughts from my head. There simply wasn’t anything I could do about a dead cheater. I felt exploring the issue brought a whole new meaning to “beating a dead horse”—pun intended.
I honestly had never heard the name Cherry before in my life. There I go again! These thoughts absolutely had to go, or I wasn’t going to get any work done in this century.
I pressed the fingertips of both of hands lightly against my temples to stop what appeared to be the beginning of a monster headache and ran my fingers through my hair as I tried to think of what I could do this evening to distract myself from this overwhelming bubble of despair that threatened to pop and rain down on me at any moment.
I could only imagine Cherry was a thirty-six/twenty-four/thirty-six type of gal, as often idolized in nineties hip-hop songs. She probably had a perfect stripper type of body with extension upon extension that rivaled even my best hair days with my all-natural mane.
As this thought threatened to send me into a tailspin, I decided that the only way I could have an enjoyable Wednesday evening after what the travel agent revealed was to phone my sister. Maybe her husband was willing to watch her son Jackson for a few hours so we could go out and play together.
I gave her a quick call as I was wrapping up the last of my work for the day.
“What up, girrrl?”
“Lacey, that hood vibe totally suits you.”
She laughed way too hard and way too long for what really wasn’t intended to be a joke to begin with.
“Sorry!” She sounded like she was trying to catch her breath from her own hysterics. “I’ve had hardly any sleep because Jackson stumbled into our room and puked on my legs while I was sleeping, and then I figured out that he already puked all over his own bed, so there wasn’t anywhere to sleep. I think I’m going totally bonkers.”
“Wow, if I felt bad about not having kids before now, you just made me feel so much better.”
Immediately I felt that sudden, familiar rush of sympathy on the quiet phone line. I knew Lacey was thinking about her poor sister with the dead husband, and I contemplated whether or not to drop the cheating bomb. But, really, what did it matter? Adam was dead now, and there was no undoing that. I decided to stay quiet.
“Oh, Danielle...I wasn’t thinking. I’m really sorry.”
I ignored her condolences, since they meant nothing to me as of today, and cut to the chase. “Do you want to meet me downtown at Lodo’s at seven? They have retro drink specials for anyone who dresses in ’sixties, ’seventies, or ’eighties clothes. So we could just make fun of all of the college kids that look like Saturday Night Fever if you want to?”
“Oh...I’m so sorry, Dani. I really can’t tonight. I can hardly keep my eyes open, and I’m positive that my jeans still smell like vomit, even though they weren’t puked on. How about we try for two weeks from Saturday?”
“Sure, that’ll work.”
“A’ight, peace out, sistah!”
I ended the call in the middle of Lacey’s next round of hysterical laughter. I figured I was better off not spending an evening with someone who appeared to be more out of their head than I was, family or not.
I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with the night ahead of me, so I decided to do what any girl trying not to think about her cheating significant other would do—wander aimlessly around the mall and window shop. I guess I could have technically blown some cash, but for some reason I couldn’t face trying on clothes, jewelry, or shoes. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, something was definitely wrong.
I finally decided to go into Express, figuring I could pick myself up something in “business-casual” for work to lighten my mood. I started mindlessly thumbing through trousers in white, off-white, tan, fawn, khaki, dark khaki, olive khaki, deep brown, gray, charcoal gray, and black, but I quickly grew bored with that rack. Before I knew it, I found myself on the men’s side of Express. This was definitely a line in the sand that no angry widow should cross.
The odd thing was that Adam absolutely loved Express for Men, although he never wanted to admit it. It all started with the first Christmas we spent together when we were dating about five years ago. I was peppy, upbeat, and pretty darn cute—all qualities I would never be accused of having these days—and I was more than elated to finally have a serious boyfriend to buy a Christmas present for.
Of course, Adam and I had just graduated from college, so we were broke as a joke. We decided to each chip in fifty dollars to “take each other out” to a fancy Christmas Eve meal at the Brazilian Steakhouse next to Union Station. There, apparently, men sauntered by your table with different types of meat on a stick throughout the evening, and you simply had to point at them and say, “Good sir, I want that meat.”
Or at least that’s what I heard. I didn’t really know why I envisioned myself talking in proper Elizabethan English, but I figured my first Christmas celebration with my first serious boyfriend in a long time was as good a reason as any.
Those few weeks before our special Christmas meal passed in a whirlwind since I was still in training for the PR company I had started working for as a beauty rep. Lo and behold, I had an evening free to myself, and I found myself in pretty much the same place—wandering aimlessly around Cherry Creek Mall and waiting for Adam to get off of work so we could try to undo the horrible decorating job his roommates had done to their lonely and scraggly Christmas tree.
And then I spotted it. In the store display window of Express for Men, there was a beautiful—in a manly way—and soft-looking white “skinny” winter scarf wrapped jauntily around the neck of the creepy, faceless male mannequin. I just knew it would look perfect on Adam, especially since he had a face.
I went into the store, grabbed the skinny scarf, and made it to the register, only to discover I was out a cool seventy dollars. I blinked. Seventy dollars? Seriously? Still, it would have been more than embarrassing to have backed away from the register and laid the white scarf down on the floor in defeat. So I just put it on my credit card and hoped the charge would somehow disappear in the not-so-distant future.
And then the day of our Brazilian Christmas Eve dinner finally arrived.
We started our meal relaxed and casual, joking around with each other and trying to talk in forced British accents when we ordered our various meats from the men with the sticks. As the meal started to wind down, and my holiday cocktail dress grew tighter, I decided it was almost time for the gift I had snuck into the restaurant in my large Coach handbag. It was always good for smuggling something. I began to grow nervous, even though it was just a little—seventy dollar!—skinny scarf that I was giving to Adam. I still felt kind of bad for breaking our no-gifts-on-our-first-Christmas-together rule.
I suddenly realized Adam was saying something to me. I tried diligently to tune in and push all white-skinny-scarf thoughts out of my head.
“Danielle, I know we’ve only been dating about eight months, but these have been the best eight months of my life.”
Oh my God, what was happening?
“You are everything I’ve looked for in a girlfriend. ’You’re smart, beautiful, funny, compassionate, and I have to say you are truly my best friend.”
What was he talking about? Was he saying what I thought he was saying? Adam started to shift, and yes, he really did get down on one knee. Holy shit! He totally one-upped me by proposing when all I got him was a lame, white skinny scarf! I happily accepted his proposal—taking a moment to gawk at my giant engagement ring—and gave him a huge, passionate kiss, even with all of the bits of Hawaiian barbecued pork ribs stuck in between my teeth.
Fuuuuck! I wasn’t exactly sure why I went down this delightful road on memory lane, but I knew it wasn’t good. I needed to get my mind off of all of this Adam-turned-cheater drama, so I marched furiously through the mall, looking for something to buy.
I made my way quickly past the pretzel stand, since carb loading wasn’t going to do it this time. I briefly paused at a jewelry store, but that was way too close to my engagement ring memory for comfort. In fact, I was still wearing my engagement ring and wedding band at the moment, which was pretty weird, and something I would have to address later.
Moving on, I finally stopped dead in my tracks in front of the perfect answer to my now-deceased marital problems. The Pet Emporium. The window was full of all of the roly-poly, adorable, fat, squishy puppies I had always wanted as a girl and even as the twenty-nine-year-old I was now. I’d always had everyone, including Adam, tell me how horrible it was to buy puppies from pet stores. They came from a puppy mill. They were ridiculously marked up in price. They probably had kennel cough.
My logic was, if I didn’t buy them from the evil, capitalist pet store, wouldn’t someone else do it instead? Or would they just die? If you thought about it, I was really saving their lives. The thought of my good deed spurred me on, directly into the pet store, where I immediately picked out the tiniest and most feeble looking Chihuahua. It resembled a bobble-head doll fit for the dashboard of a car.
A quick eight hundred dollars later, and I was the proud new owner of Madam, my tiny teacup Chihuahua with an all-black coat, a white belly, and white paws. Hooray! I don’t know why, but that moment of retail therapy weakness really did erase all the bad memories I was having. Maybe there was something to be said for a shopping addiction.
I didn’t think much about the name I had chosen for my precious new bundle of joy until I called up my best friend April to tell her the news.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that you pretty much named your dog the same name as your late husband’s, except for one letter?”
Shit. What was I thinking? “No.” I said in my snottiest tone as I tried to buy myself some time. “Actually, I named her Madam because she is so dainty and beautiful, and I also bought her her own bed she will sit on like a throne. So there.”
I knew saying “So there” immediately made me sound guilty and quickly changed the subject. I knew just the thing.
“Doooo youuu knooow whoo shee looks liiiike?” I hissed in my best Japanese accent.
“Oh my God, seriously. Don’t even start this.”
April’s full name was April O’Neill. For anyone raised in the ’eighties who grew up watching Ninja Turtles, you would immediately recognize her as the hot reporter love interest who always wore yellow.
“It’s Spliiiinter, Apriiiil.”
April absolutely hated it when I did my Splinter impression. It was normally reserved for times when I was drunk, but I figured this was the perfect chance to deflect her from my creepy post-mortem issues.
“If you don’t stop, I’m going to hang up on you.”
“It’s not my fault you have a thing for turtles, and ninja fighting, and happen to live above an antique shop...”
I heard her sigh and make noises like she was going to hang up the phone. “Okay! Sorry! We can move onto another subject, but I do think Chihuahuas in general really look a lot like Splinter—just saying.”
I assumed by April’s silence that she agreed.
“Why don’t you come over and see Madam? She’s absolutely adorable, and I think she could literally fit inside my coffee mug.”
April only lived about five miles away in Lakewood, where she was an event coordinator at the Lakewood Country Club. By Denver standards, that was pretty darn close to me. It normally only took her fifteen minutes to get here, if she didn’t have to battle with insane traffic.
“Well, actually, it would be a good idea if I came over since I have a little bit of news for you.”
I tried to browbeat the news out of her, but she wasn’t having it. I guess I would just have to wait fifteen more minutes to find out what was going on in her life. To be honest, any news or drama related to anyone other than myself was a welcome distraction.
Sure enough, less than twenty minutes later, I heard April ringing the doorbell of my townhome, luckily or unluckily for me, located just west of the Cherry Creek Mall on East Cedar Drive. Adam and I thought the townhome was an excellent purchase for our first—and last—home together. We bought it for two hundred thousand dollars three years ago when we got married, and it had now increased in value to a half a mil. I guess I should count that as one good thing about being the widow of a cheater since I now owned a bit of valuable real estate should I choose to sell it on a whim and retire to the beaches of Mexico.
I opened the door for April and immediately noticed she had a small bottle of Bailey’s in her hand. This meant she couldn’t have been too upset at me for torturing her with my Splinter impression over the phone. Bailey’s was our “talking beverage” and always had been as long as I had known her. April and I actually met, working at a restaurant together as hostesses, directly out of high school. And we had been best friends ever since.
We bonded over our mutual hatred of our manager who had not only a lazy eye but a stereotypical love for young, just-out-of-high-school hostesses. He was also difficult to read since you never knew exactly who he was looking at. On top of that, Gino’s, the restaurant where we worked together in South Denver, seemed to have a never ending array of plumbing issues. They ranged from an overflowing toilet—that the hostesses were told to take care of because the busboys were too busy—to frozen pipes in the winter, causing the sinks to leak in the bathroom, to the especially mysterious issue with the general plumbing that caused booths one through four on the left side of the restaurant to always smell slightly like a dirty diaper.
If you ever thought the job of a hostess wasn’t challenging, think again. We were forever trying to think of creative ways to please the servers who had the section that smelled like a dirty diaper, fondly called the “Toilet Bowl” by the staff. We would do everything in our power to encourage families to sit in that section, especially if they had babies wearing diapers, thinking that perhaps they would think the bad smell was coming from their own children.
Nine times out of ten, we ended up having to move the family away from that section just as they started to get their appetizers because they simply couldn’t stand “that horrible smell” any longer. This would inevitably lead to a fight between the wait staff when a “Toilet Bowl” table moved to another server’s section, and the original server wanted to keep that table since no one wanted to sit in her section anyway.
You get the picture.
Luckily, that job only lasted two years until the both of us moved on to a series of other random restaurants throughout college. But that was when we started our tradition of drinking Bailey’s together when we wanted to have a serious talk about life. Whether it was if April should date the new busboy or not, if April should date the lazy eyed manager to get promoted to a server—absolutely not!—or if April should date her married colleague at the Lakewood Country Club, Bailey’s was the beverage that loosened our lips and brought us together.
After we had both gotten settled on my warm and comfy faux suede couches with a Bailey’s on the rocks in hand, and after I made her admit how adorable Madam was, I forced April to spill the beans.
“Tell me all of your secrets.” I always thought the direct approach worked best with April. She had a tendency to waffle back and forth and dance around the actual point of the conversation. Given the day I had had, I was not in the mood for that tonight.
“Fine.” She glared at me. I guess she was still a little upset about the earlier teasing. “Good news and bad news in no particular order: I lost my job, and I have a date.”
“Whoa! Start from the beginning, please!”
While her job as the event coordinator for the Lakewood Country Club was by no means making her rich or famous, it was still a good, steady job in the field she was interested in and it could advance her further in her career over time. I’d had no idea she was even having issues with her job, so this came as a major shock. While the second tidbit of news would have seemed run-of-the-mill for many, for April, it was also a big shocker.
I previously mentioned she was once considering dating a married colleague who worked with her at the Lakewood Country Club. Against all of my best advice, which eventually amounted to begging her not to, she decided to do it anyway. April had always been the type of person who did exactly what she wanted to do, but in this particular situation, I felt it was a trait that steered her wrong.
April’s coworker, Roger—which was an entirely lame name in itself—made it very clear to her he was interested, although he had four, count them, four, children birthed to him by his living and breathing wife who he was still married to. If that was not enough to turn you off of someone, then I don’t know what would.
April proclaimed she tried to resist his advances. Then she gave the tired excuse of so many who had affairs—Roger simply wasn’t happy in his marriage and had wanted a divorce for a long time. Oh, please.
I tried to steer her clear of the situation as nicely as I could, especially since I was a newlywed at the time and believed in the sanctity and value of marriage. Little did I know how wrong I was about that, too.
April promptly began an affair with Roger due to their “undeniable chemistry.” They were caught by his wife in a matter of months. Roger decided to divorce his wife—he really had no other choice because she left him—give her custody of his four children—all between the ages of six and twelve—and move in with April, ultimately proposing to her six months later.
By the time the ink was dry on his divorce papers, Roger and April were married in a small ceremony with only three hundred of their closest friends. Of course, I was her matron of honor as she had been my maid of honor the year before. Yet this time, I felt awkward and forced to go through all the motions of throwing a bridal shower, bachelorette party, and a full-blown wedding for a relationship I thoroughly disapproved of.
If I didn’t say we had grown apart during their marriage, I would be lying since I so obviously disagreed with the infidelity that birthed their union. I tried to gently, and not so gently, tell April over and over again the statistic that even more marriages ended in divorce that started from infidelity, but she would have none of it. She absolutely “knew” she and Roger had a connection, and he was simply in the wrong relationship at the wrong time.
Still, I didn’t think she was ready to be an instant step-mom to four young children, which definitely started to take its toll on her after a year of marriage. Ultimately, Roger ended up telling her he didn’t think he was ready for a second marriage so quickly—code for the fact he was probably dating a different coworker yet again—and he decided to end their marriage of a little over more than a year.
Yes, it was certainly difficult for April to deal with this sudden loss and even admit she was wrong about him. And after months and months of bitterness, crying, and drinking Bailey’s together, she finally decided she would be open to dating someone new. Granted, she hadn’t taken the plunge yet. Other than giving out her number to a few weirdoes at the bar from time to time—only to screen their calls when they called her in the sober light of day. But at least she claimed she was open to the whole dating scene.
Then Adam died, and it seemed to put a huge wrench in our young and carefree friendship. I highly suspected April felt guilty about meeting someone new and falling in love until I had gotten over my grief. And now here we were today.
“Basically, the Country Club decided the current PR manager could also handle the event coordination since our business has been dwindling,” she said. “And fewer and fewer weddings have been booked over the past two years. They decided to make my job obsolete since it was an extra. So now I’m out of work, and that bitch PR troll Rosalyn has double the workload and ten thousand dollars more per year.”
Rosalyn and April had a long-standing feud as the two highest-paid women at the Country Club. Although April would like to believe she was mature and way past that catty, high school phase, she was still always checking out Rosalyn’s clothes, hair, and clients to see who was doing better than the other in the Country Club politics. Pretty much your run-of-the-mill female rivalry in the workplace. Oh, and add to that the fact Rosalyn had discovered the big secret of Roger and April having an affair, outed them, and ultimately got Roger fired since it was against company policy. Although that hardly matters now, since Roger was April’s ex-husband.
“Oh, God,” I cried. “I’m so sorry! What are you going to do? Do you have any savings? Have you been job hunting?”
“That’s the thing. I kind of had a hunch things were going bad over the past month, so I’ve been secretly sending out a few résumés, but I don’t even have a nibble so far. I’m just thinking if worse comes to worse, I’ll have to waitress or go to a temp agency.”
Wow. If April was even considering waitressing again, then things were much worse than I had anticipated. When we both quit our final waitressing jobs after graduating from college and moving into the real career world, we literally burned our uniforms and aprons in the fireplace in a ceremonial ritual. Unless you have been a waitress, dealing with asshole after asshole, you wouldn’t understand. Unfortunately, the ceremonial fire stank so much of garlic from our rancid work uniforms that were so rarely washed, it had to be immediately put out with some Fresca I had in the fridge. But the thought was still there.
“Well, if there’s anything I can do for you,” I said. “You know I’m here for you. That really sucks. I’m so sorry. Dare I ask about the good news? Where did you meet this guy, who is he, and when is your date?”
April had a smug smile on her face. “You are never going to believe it. You’re really going to laugh at me. I decided to join eHarmony.”
“What? No way!”
April continuously bashed all of the pathetic people that used online dating services, although I was always a sucker for those delightful eHarmony commercials with the happy couples who finally found each other after all these years. Of course, as she was quick to remind me, those were all paid actors and online dating services were for creeps who had no actual social skills.
“What made you decide to do that after all this time?”
“Well, I decided to finally swallow my pride since a coworker, ex-coworker, of mine just got engaged to this guy she met on a dating site. I thought about it a little, and it really seems just as good as meeting someone in a bar. Except you don’t have beer goggles on, and you can read their profile to see their values and hobbies and all that stuff. I still think there are creeps on those sites, but it’s probably the same odds of meeting a weirdo at the bar, which I do every time I go out.”
Couldn’t argue with that logic. “So who’s the lucky guy? How long did it take to meet him? When are you going out?”
“Well—again, don’t laugh since I seem to have an attraction to guys with pedophile-inspired names, but his name is Ralph. He’s a teacher in Westminster. He’s also divorced with no children, and his profile picture actually looked fairly normal and decent. We’ve e-mailed each other a few times, and he’s pretty fun to talk to so far, so we set up a coffee date—which is what the website recommends for your first date—next Saturday at Starbucks off of Speer. I have to make sure to tell you exactly where I’m going and with whom in case I disappear and end up in a body bag in his trunk.”
“Ha ha,” I said sarcastically. “That’s so exciting! I’m sure it’s going to be really fun, and at least you’re putting yourself out there!” I added encouragingly. “All you have to do is get the ball rolling until you find someone you actually like.”
Suddenly I was struck with a great, albeit totally random, idea. “Hey! I have an idea!”
I jumped up off the couch and startled April enough to make her dribble a little bit of Bailey’s onto her chin.
She put her hand to her heart, dramatically. “What? Stop jumping up and scaring me like that! What’s your amazing idea?”
“Okay. I didn’t say it was amazing, but my assistant is being promoted to a beauty researcher and writer for the magazine, and since you’ve done tons of administrative stuff in your lifetime, what if you worked as my assistant? It pays about thirty thousand, which isn’t the best, but it’s definitely enough to live on for a while until you decide what you want to do.”
Now that I got the idea rolling in my head, I couldn’t stop. “You would work eight to five, Monday to Friday, and you get five vacation days a year and five personal days, and it’s actually way easier than you think because we have a database designed for scheduling appointments and organizing my schedule, which really isn’t that difficult. And I could probably train you in like a week. I think my assistant is getting promoted in like three weeks, so you could probably start in two weeks.” I paused for a breath. “So what do you think?”
“Whoa, slow down, missy. This seems like a pretty good idea, and I definitely need a job, but don’t you think it’s a little much? You really don’t owe me anything. I don’t want you to give me a job just because I’m your friend if I’m actually under-qualified. Maybe you could just put in a good word for me and see what happens?”
“Nope.” I was firm and confident in my decision. “You’re going to start in two weeks, after I clear this with my boss, of course. And I promise you you’re going to love it!”
CHAPTER 2
My boss actually thought the idea of April working as my assistant was utterly fantastic. She hated screening applicants for a new position, and April had PR and admin experience from her time as an event coordinator. It was the perfect fit.
I decided to give April a call during lunch to tell her the great news—she basically had a new job handed to her on a platter, and all she had to do was come in for an interview with my boss as a formality to make sure she wasn’t a total psycho or very ugly.
Yes, as unpleasant as it sounded, it seemed to be an unspoken fact that my boss, Gwen, only liked to hire fairly to very attractive employees. I had not once seen an employee walk through the doors of High Life who was overweight, balding, or not perfectly polished from head to toe. That put a little bit of pressure on me in the morning to make sure I looked as glam as possible, but at least I had the extra time to put the finishing touches on during my rigorous commute.
I knew April would be a shoe-in since she was tall, voluptuous, and exotic due to her half-Hispanic heritage. April was one of the only women I knew who never expressed guilt about eating or felt pressured to be thin—which was a good quality to have when working at a magazine full of trendy, bitchy, skeletal women. She always thoroughly enjoyed her meals where the food seemed to magically go to all the right places. Mainly her boobs.
I, on the other hand, always struggled to eat a balanced meal that was less than five hundred calories because when I “thoroughly enjoyed my meals,” it looked like I immediately gained ten pounds from head to toe. Damn you, DNA.
“Heyyyyy!” I drawled to April when she answered the phone.
“Did I get it?” she squealed. She had as much enthusiasm as if Ed McMahon had visited her doorstep. It appeared she was much more desperate for a job than she’d let on. Well played, April, well played.
“Well, I talked to Gwen, and she looked over your résumé. We talked a little bit more about your hours and your salary-”
“Seriously, stop it. I hate it when you do this. I hate it. Tell me whether I got the job or not right now!”
Geez, what a bully. I smiled. “Of course, you absolutely got it! Didn’t I tell you that you would?”
“Thank God! I didn’t want to freak you out or anything, but I was really thinking about donating my eggs, or at the very least, selling all of my furniture, because I didn’t know how I was going to make rent next month. This is so, so helpful. When can I start? I could seriously come in tomorrow if you wanted me to.”
After I told her she could come in the following Monday and instructed her on the basics of the hip-mountain-chic wardrobe that was the prerequisite for working at High Life. I suggested we go out and celebrate this Friday, since she finally got a job and didn’t have to worry about selling parts of her body for money.
“We could go to Lime downtown,” I said. “And then maybe hit the bars afterward? I know how you like the free tequila shots in a lime they give you at the beginning of the meal. If you want, you can just stay at my house, and we can take a cab from there. What do you think?”
“Best idea you’ve had all day. See you Friday, bitch!”
Um, it’s boss now, I thought. I guess we’d have to work on that Monday. I did have a small amount of concern about having my best friend work as my assistant, especially since April was nothing if not outspoken. She had steadily matured as she’d gotten older, but she was fired from three restaurants in a row in college because she refused to do one thing or the other. Whether it was wiping the crusty ketchup out from underneath the cap or taking a ten-top of frat guys a half-hour before the restaurant closed, if she didn’t want to do it, she wouldn’t.
I pushed that thought away with the rest of the thoughts I wasn’t thinking about these days. Like a cheating spouse, and whether or not I needed to explore that further. Right now, my thinking was that what was in the past should stay in the past. There was no sense crying over spilled milk. Another alarming trend was I kept talking in worn out figures of speech. Which could potentially be a symptom of a deeper emotional problem. But who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth? Obviously, I hadn’t fully mastered the art of using my figures of speech correctly yet.
Since it was only Wednesday and the next fun thing I had to look forward to was painting the town red—there I went again—with April on Friday, I spent the next two nights distracting myself as best I could. Think massive amounts of reality TV and attempts at training Madam to at least piss on the tile floor as opposed to the carpet.
Although I owned our, I mean, my townhome, I really didn’t want to have to steam vac every night of the week because of little doggie accidents. That was one thing I didn’t think about when I made the impulse buy of an adorable teacup Chihuahua. Even worse, she was so little it was hard to tell if she had peed on the beige carpet or not. I had to resort to sniffing suspicious spots on my hands and knees or even sticking a finger into the carpet to see if it was wet. And I thought I would only have to succumb to such humiliation if I ever had kids.
But don’t get me wrong—Madam was truly the light of my life. She was absolutely nothing like Adam, and she made a much better companion, if you asked me. Sure, she couldn’t control her bladder wherever she happened to be, and she bit me with her little pointy teeth while I was sleeping, but I’d be hard pressed to discover she ever cheated on me since she was so ferociously loyal and loving. Now I truly understood why a dog was man’s best friend.
***
By the time Friday finally rolled around, I was more than ready to get my drink on. I even made the mistake of pre-gaming a little bit at home while I waited for April to get there at nine o’clock. Normally, I was quite a bit of a lightweight, so I just stuck to drinking at the bars—except for that brief phase in college where I lived within walking distance from downtown, and my friend Regina and I would drink forties and walk to the bars. But I digress...
Now, I was a big-time grown-up, so I paid for my drinks at a real bar like a real person when I wanted to go out.
But, for some reason, since it had been such a stressful week, I was really feeling in the mood to party. I didn’t want to admit the cheating husband news hit me so hard, but it felt like a burr under my saddle—excellent use of a figure of speech!—all week, pestering me and poking at me when I least expected it. Why wouldn’t it just go away? Adam was dead, so you’d think all of the drama would have died with him. But I just couldn’t get all of the questions surrounding the news out of my mind.
So many times I stopped short of Googling his stripper girlfriend’s name, but I had always thought it was a little bit crass to resort to Internet stalking. April, however, was a whole other animal since she would stalk anyone and everyone online, sometimes total strangers out of sheer boredom. She previously admitted to me if she was on the phone with a bride for a long period of time, planning her event at the Country Club and dying of boredom, she’d Google her and look up her Facebook profile just to see what she looked like. If she was fat or ugly, all the better. If she happened to be beautiful and thin, then she was probably a bitch with a bad personality.
Made sense to me.
I, on the other hand, normally didn’t use and abuse the search engines to find out about random people. Even if that random hooker may or may not have slept with my husband. So to keep myself away from the temptation of the Internet while I waited for April—who you could always count on to be late—I started my night early with a few homemade lemon drop martinis. Of course, mine were the ghetto version with Absolut Citron and sugar-free lemonade, but they tasted like the real thing if I put a little bit of sugar on the rim of my juice glass!
Besides, no one was home to judge me on my drinking habits, which made it all the more tempting to have not one, but three, pre-Big-Night-Out martinis.
By the time April arrived, I was definitely feeling good, if you know what I mean. I tried to hide it because I didn’t want her to think I started without her. I told her I was working on my first martini and offered her one.
“Nah, let’s just grab some dinner at Lime and get crackin’ on those free tequila shots. Plus, I want us to be able to chat for a bit so I can get the scoop on all the office gossip!” she said mischievously.
I groaned silently. This was just one more dreaded issue I had hoped wouldn’t come up with April as my assistant. I really felt strongly about not spreading gossip or being a part of any work drama since I wanted to get promoted as quickly as possible. Let’s just say being in the restaurant business taught me a thing or two about keeping my trap shut, and I hoped the alcohol wouldn’t loosen my lips enough for me to air all of our company’s dirty laundry to April over dinner.
Since April had wisely thought to call ahead for a reservation, we were seated surprisingly quickly at Lime for a Friday night. As we gorged on the chips, salsa, and free shots of tequila, she pumped me for office gossip right off the bat.
“So who’s sleeping with who?”
I tried to play dumb, like I was too caught up in my work to care what anyone was doing at the office, but April wasn’t having it.
“Seriously, you absolutely have to know. Does Gwen hook up with any of the guys in the IT department? They’re pretty cute.”
I remained silent and tried to divert attention by cramming my mouth full of food so all I could do was shrug my shoulders and look innocent.
“Wait, does she like girls? Her hair’s pretty short, and she definitely has a masculine energy. I’ll have to watch my back if she plays for the other team.”
I swallowed my food so fast the salsa burned my throat. “No, no, no, nothing like that. Um...” I tried to think of something to get her mind off of the work gossip. “How are things going with Ralph?”
“He was a freak. He showed up wearing really short gym shorts to our coffee date, which was a total turnoff. Not only does that outfit choice make absolutely no sense for a coffee date, but short shorts are never flattering on a man, no matter how you slice it.”