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“Then why are you—”
“Dad’s getting married.”
For several seconds, Susan just stood there, not moving. Don was getting married? She hadn’t had so much as a date in the past year and a half, and Don was getting married?
“When did he tell you that?”
“Last night when I had dinner with him and Marla.”
Marla. That woman made Susan absolutely crazy. Don had a lot of nerve dating a woman who was too nice to hate.
“Why didn’t you tell me last night?” And why didn’t Don tell me before he told our daughter?
Lani just shrugged.
“Well,” Susan said gently, “I guess we knew this could happen, huh?”
Another shrug.
“We really should be happy for him, you know,” Susan said in her best Mother of the Year voice, even though it was all she could do not to choke on the words. “Marla’s very…nice.”
Lani looked up, her eyes shimmering with tears. “But this means you and Dad really aren’t getting back together.”
Susan would have thought by now that her incompatibility with Don would have been clear to everyone on planet Earth, in distant galaxies and into the far reaches of the universe. How, after all this time, had it gotten past the one person closest to both of them?
Actually, it hadn’t. Lani knew. But, in the end, all she wanted was for Mom and Dad to occupy the same household again so everyone could at least pretend things were normal. What she didn’t know was that the longer two people pretended their relationship was normal when it was anything but, the worse it became for all concerned.
A few minutes later, Susan hustled Lani into the car, and on the way to the grocery store she explained again that reconciliation was never going to happen, which made Lani even more miserable. When they arrived at school, she’d dried her tears, but chances were that her classes that day were going to be a total bust. Lemon pound cake in hand, she started to scoot out of the car, only to turn back with a quizzical look.
“And who’s that guy who keeps calling in the middle of the night, anyway?”
That’s it, Susan thought. I have to do something about Dennis.
But once she got to the hospital, she’d lost track of that directive, with room in her mind for only one thought: Don’s getting married. And I’m not.
I don’t care, she told herself later that morning as she was extracting a peanut from a toddler’s nose. After all, it wasn’t as if she wasn’t prepared for it—Don and Marla had been seeing each other for over a year. And she really did like Marla, enough that Susan had considered warning her that if she was going to marry Don, she’d better like her men to be mindlessly inconsiderate and grossly insensitive. But love was blind. There was someone for everyone and maybe true love had won out. She wished both of them well.
Deep breath. Ah. There.
Susan felt so rational and adultlike that she could almost chalk up the sickening twinge in her stomach to indigestion rather than envy. It was Don’s life, after all, and she couldn’t expect him to be a monk for the rest of it. She had just hoped he’d continue to be a monk until she found a way to stop being a nun.
Around noon, Susan couldn’t face another of the vending-machine lunches she’d had for the past few days, so she ventured into the cafeteria. She waited until nearly one o’clock, but Dennis still showed up to make her bad day worse. Now she knew for sure that he had to be getting intelligence on her day-to-day movements from a source in the hospital. And she was pretty sure that source’s name was Evie.
As Dennis started talking, Susan knew she should call a halt to all of this, but she’d dealt with enough crap that day already and the last thing she wanted was to deal with any more. So once again she tried to tune him out, turning her attention instead to the piece of gravy-covered cardboard on her plate. But as she was choking down the last bite, as impossible as it seemed, his loony rhetoric took a quantum leap.
“So I was thinking that maybe on Saturday night you could come over to Mom’s house for dinner. How does that sound? She’s a pretty good cook, you know.”
Susan stopped short. “What did you say?”
“Mom told me to invite you to dinner.”
She looked at him incredulously. “I don’t even know your mother.”
“That’s the point. She always wants to meet the girls I date.”
Susan gripped her fork until her fingers turned white. “Dennis. We’re not dating.”
“Sure we are. We have lunch together all the time. Evie says a relationship is all about togetherness.”
Evie. Change one letter and she became Evil. Why had Susan never noticed that before?
“I’m busy on Saturday,” she said.
“Then Friday.”
“I’m busy then, too.”
“Then pick a day. As long as it’s not Sunday. That’s Mom’s bingo night.”
Susan couldn’t take this anymore. “I have to go.”
She rose and headed for the conveyor belt to dump her tray. Sure enough, Dennis got up to follow her, still yammering away, and all she could think about was how her ex-husband was getting married to a decent woman when the best Susan could do was the quintessential geek with bad hair, bad posture and bad breath, a man she was going to have to break up with even though they’d never dated in the first place.
Suddenly, all kinds of emotions swirled around inside her. Irritation. Apprehension. Resentment. Desperation. Regret over the past. Hopelessness for the future. A plan was forming in her mind to break into a Hershey’s chocolate factory at two in the morning and eat herself senseless, after which she would crawl into a corner, curl up in a fetal position and cry. At that moment, she was a psychologist’s Rolodex all crammed into one person, and that one person was ready to blow.
“So how about seven o’clock on Thursday?” Dennis said. “Any later and Mom’s arthritis starts to—”
“Don’t talk to me anymore.”
“But—”
“I said shut up.”
“But I need to be able to tell her—”
Susan slammed her tray down on the conveyor belt and spun around, skewering him with a furious glare. “Listen to me! I don’t want to go anywhere with you!”
When his eyes got all wide with surprise, Susan was sure she’d scored a direct hit. Then his face morphed into a goofy grin. “Yeah, Evie told me you always play hard to get. She said you like men who won’t take no for an answer.”
Evie was a dead woman.
He inched closer. “She also said you like a man who talks dirty.”
Susan had barely registered shock over that statement when Dennis, in the most graphic language imaginable, proceeded to tell her his fantasy about the nurse in the black hip boots and the naughty barista.
In a flurry of astonishment and disgust, Susan shoved him against a nearby wall, her hand at his throat. His eyes bugged open with surprise.
“Listen to me,” she growled. “I’m not your girlfriend. I don’t even like you. I’ve had it with you calling me at four in the morning. And the last thing I want to hear about are your sick fantasies!”
He tried to say something, but she tightened her hand on his throat, and he gagged and gasped instead.
“How would you like me to tell Mom what a deviant her son is? Huh? How would that be? Maybe I’ll call her at 4:00 a.m. and let her know all about it!”
“No! You can’t—”
“The hell I can’t. And if you so much as breathe another word like that to me again, I’m ripping off your balls and tossing them into that big old vat of soup in the kitchen, and I don’t give a damn what the health department says about it. Got that?”
Dennis’s eyes grew wide and horrified. “Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, Dennis. I’m crazy.”
“This is assault!”
“Assault? Assault? What you’ve been doing to me is assault! I never asked you to hang around, to call me at four in the morning, to be there every time I turn around!”
“I’m calling the cops!”
“Oh, bite me, you little twit!”
Ah, the words felt good, as if they’d been bottled up inside her for years, rattling the cage door, screaming to get out. When she finally let Dennis go, he stumbled out of the cafeteria with his forehead crinkled in Wookiee-like rage, and she couldn’t have cared less. She felt as if she’d just conquered the world. No other jerk would ever pull this crap on her again. She’d scored one for geek-oppressed women everywhere. Until Mr. Right came along, she was through dealing with Mr. Wrong. And she felt that way right up to the time the cops showed up in the E.R. and arrested her for assault.
If only she’d pulled Dennis into a supply closet before going postal on him, there wouldn’t have been any witnesses. He said/she said testimony never got a person convicted. But at noon in that cafeteria sat approximately fifty witnesses who didn’t know the whole story, but they were quite willing to spill the part they did.
But no matter what all those witnesses said, Susan hadn’t actually threatened to kill Dennis. She’d merely threatened to emasculate him and toss his balls into Baptist Memorial Hospital cafeteria’s soup of the day. Unfortunately, Judge Henry Till of the fourth district court of Dallas County hadn’t seen it her way. Leave it to a male judge to associate the loss of a guy’s manhood with death.
Of course, her handprint on Dennis’s throat hadn’t helped matters, either.
After a plea bargain—plea bargain, as if she were a real criminal—she emerged from the experience with an attorney bill that was going to keep her in the red for the next year, along with a request for her presence at an eight-week, court-ordered anger management class. All because a certain banana-nosed freak couldn’t keep his sick fantasies to himself.
Her coworkers were astonished. Lani was horrified. And Don was flabbergasted that his meek little ex-wife would go off on anyone. Apparently he had no idea what a time bomb he’d been dealing with for sixteen years.
So now, in the midst of having to deal with a demanding job, a nonexistent social life, an ex-husband tying the knot and a daughter crying over it, she was stuck in a class designed to teach her how to control her anger just when she was getting the hang of expressing it.
Yeah, life was definitely looking up.
CHAPTER 2
It was five after seven when Susan trotted up the front steps of Andrews Hall, one of the stark concrete buildings that comprised the campus of Henderson Community College. She guessed the court had struck a deal with the college to use its classrooms, which made her wonder if the other students in the building knew they were sharing facilities with hardened criminals who could go nuts and take hostages at any moment.
Once inside, she hurried down the hall to room 124, rounding the doorway to find a tiny classroom, where four of the desks had been arranged in a circle. Two women and a man were already seated. Given the briefcase beside the man and the admonishing frown he gave Susan when she entered the room, he was clearly the instructor. An endomorphic little person, he wore tattered slacks that had lost their crease years ago, a plain white dress shirt with cuffs rolled to his elbows and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. And on his head was a tuft of hair so flaming red it would stop traffic on the tarmac at Dallas Fort Worth International.
She scurried into a seat and slung her purse over the back of it. “Sorry I’m late. I had an emergency at the hospital—”
“Seven sharp from now on. We have a lot of ground to cover.”
No problem. Next time she’d just walk out at a quarter to seven and leave the acute arterial bleeding for the next shift.
“This is our class, ladies,” he said. “I’m thrilled there are so few of you. Some groups are so large we have to move to another classroom, which, of course, is indicative of the societal trend toward the manifestation of anger in unhealthy and aggressive ways.”
Of course.
“I’m Dr. Hugh Danforth. I have a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology. It’s my job to ensure that when our eight weekly sessions are up, you’ll have the tools you need to face stressful situations in a constructive manner and perhaps—” he stopped short, fanning all of them with a supercilious stare “—keep the amount of time you spend in a court of law to an absolute minimum.”
Susan felt her eyes crossing. She was in for eight weeks of this? Danforth was clearly one of those guys who stroked his chin a lot and looked pensive, as if his brain was constantly at work on some esoteric Theory of Great Importance even as he was forced to muck around with individuals who didn’t share his stunning intellect.
Danforth consulted his notebook. “Which one of you is Tonya Rutherford?”
The woman to Susan’s right raised her hand, her metallic gold nails glinting in the fluorescent light. She had short, spiky hair in an unnatural shade of red-orange that was probably very fashionable, but it looked to Susan as if she’d dyed her hair with Mercurochrome. Her knit top and denim skirt showed way too much cleavage and way too much leg for a woman her age, which had to be close to forty. Then again, if Susan had been blessed with that woman’s generous C cup, instead of her own paltry A, and if her legs weren’t crawling with spider veins, maybe she’d consider baring a little more skin, too.
“What do you do for a living, Ms. Rutherford?”
“I own a hair salon.”
“Please share with the class why you’re here.”
“Uh…a judge sent me here?” Tonya replied.
“What was the nature of your offense?”
“Oh, that. My husband had me arrested for assaulting him.”
Okay, now, Susan thought. Maybe this class will be interesting after all.
“Specifically, Ms. Rutherford. What was the situation that culminated in your arrest?”
“Hmm. Let’s see…oh, yeah. I found out my husband cheated on me. I sent a few pieces of stoneware across the room in the general vicinity of his head. He called the cops and pressed charges. I ended up with a bastard of a judge who loves creative sentencing, so here I am.”
“I’d like to remind you, Ms. Rutherford, that had you not lost your temper and taken the unfortunate action you did, a judge wouldn’t have had the opportunity to exercise creative sentencing.”
The edge of Tonya’s mouth lifted in a screw you smirk. “Well, then,” she said, with extra emphasis on her healthy Texas twang, “I certainly apologize for my inappropriate observations about the inappropriate action the judge took as a result of my inappropriate anger.”
Somewhere in the middle of all that there was an inappropriate comment, but Danforth let it go. Either that or he wouldn’t recognize sarcasm if it bit him on the nose.
“Monica Saltzman?”
The woman to Susan’s left came to attention. Actually, she already was at attention, one of those women born with excellent posture who didn’t know the meaning of the word slouch. Dressed in a silk blouse and tweed pants with coordinating handbag and shoes, she was the picture of polished professionalism. As a nurse, Susan was good at spotting women who’d had work done, and this woman hadn’t. Still, at least at first glance, she could pass for thirty-five, even though early forties was more likely.
Susan, on the other hand, knew she looked every day of her forty-five years. Sitting there now between Miss Brass and Miss Class, wearing puke green scrubs and sensible sneakers, she felt like a frumpy nobody.
“What is your occupation?” Danforth asked.
Monica tucked a strand of her sleek, dark hair behind her ear with one perfectly polished nail and raised her chin, pausing a moment before speaking, as if she were one of those women who expected everyone to stop whatever they were doing and hang on her every word.
“I’m an executive assistant,” Monica said, then paused. “Was.”
“The nature of your offense?”
“My boss shared some rather disconcerting news with me,” she said. “I was quite justifiably angry, and I let him know how I felt about it.”
