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Catch 26: A Novel
Carol Prisant
What if you could live your life all over again?There’s just one catch…Frannie Turner is a plain, middle-aged housewife married to Stanley, a self-absorbed retired dentist who hasn’t slept in her bed in years. No children to love and be loved by. No exciting career to look back on. Just loneliness and lost dreams. So when the mysterious new hairdresser in town offers her the chance to get everything she’s ever wanted, Frannie figures she has nothing to lose -except her soul. And surely, as a stunning twenty-six-year-old singleton in New York, finding true love within the stipulated year should be a piece of cake, not to mention a hell of a lot of fun!But New York City is no place for the naïve, and Frannie will soon learn just how dangerous a deal with the devil can be…‘Catch-26 marries confection with thriller to create a tale that's at once compelling and comic, delightful and deep, classic yet modern, just like its older-but-younger heroine and theme. I read it straight through yet its memory lingers, the signs of a wonderful novel.’Pamela Redmond Satran, author of Younger‘In her tantalizing novel, Catch 26, Carol Prisant serves up a thoroughly modern woman's Faust. This irresistible story comes wrapped around a devilish question: If you could have it all—sex, love, beauty, money and eternal life—would you sign on the dotted line?’Dylan Landis, author of Rainey Royal
Catch 26
CAROL PRISANT
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
HarperImpulse an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016
Copyright © Carol Prisant 2016
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover design by Holly Macdonald
Carol Prisant asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008185367
Version 2016-08-11
FOR DAPHNE
and
FOR CAROLAN
Table of Contents
Cover (#uf9719693-691d-596f-bfbb-e705ab8c3e5f)
Title Page (#ue9f4f36e-0882-5f2e-bf79-110f2d97ecef)
Copyright (#u6c6e76b8-edb1-515c-b820-4b57ca02b861)
Dedication (#u530db968-693c-5a17-8c34-587379f0afb7)
Before (#u7363c238-e829-5dc7-a6ae-51944c0d542b)
Chapter 1 (#u3ad3ee95-d552-5265-aa08-8bccef4ef2e8)
Chapter 2 (#u33c41a52-f1d7-595e-9121-339d97503b62)
Chapter 3 (#ue856be52-fcc0-5d7a-b139-def6a1c0b03b)
Chapter 4 (#u5cb86db0-1646-5fd0-9592-97d4e9e431d4)
One Year (#u58359183-39d6-5861-9b27-3944ec25fafe)
Chapter 5 (#uf7da95b8-ed8b-5825-aa09-6b4251cacca9)
Chapter 6 (#u48d76b27-3b4f-58c1-a68f-a2407e5e03aa)
Chapter 7 (#u39aeedca-efa0-5607-ad99-50a5780ae2ee)
Chapter 8 (#u8713a1d2-0fc2-5b07-926b-0b2f56be4343)
Chapter 9 (#u855107d7-46b1-5848-8977-e45e6dabad47)
Chapter 10 (#u5a1d0a68-f912-5db6-95f4-d48b33072e31)
Chapter 11 (#u2c668a25-330f-5141-a721-f4059e76d7c0)
Chapter 12 (#u5dac81f4-60c0-5396-9a7e-096712b2a91e)
Chapter 13 (#ub7f4337e-ed2f-5607-b31d-34ac633087f4)
Chapter 14 (#u5bfdcb35-cc2e-57dc-b417-41c5f3f49dae)
Chapter 15 (#u6fcd836d-5f7f-5dfc-8091-f3dafd83631e)
Chapter 16 (#ua8fef833-68ec-5ffb-9d38-7215f4a6f50b)
Chapter 17 (#uabd4248c-c4c9-5949-baa7-3861490fb2a6)
Chapter 18 (#uabe7805b-405c-5927-ad59-542433d4baa2)
Chapter 19 (#u045a68b0-f0c3-5b63-abb9-0f63f5f38f49)
Chapter 20 (#u2324e724-49d4-546e-94ba-a4b3db796f01)
Chapter 21 (#u2c8830f0-8d46-5c09-9237-d379f647a7c6)
Chapter 22 (#u0d0146e0-e4b5-5be5-ac6c-c26a79e0cc1b)
Chapter 23 (#u403be40a-b1bd-5f9d-b9a0-07cbec2577dd)
Chapter 24 (#u0db94824-ec72-57ef-863b-35d354f92960)
Chapter 25 (#uc09feb23-0f75-5842-9252-84b7102bfa7f)
Epilogue (#u9e0110d7-35d1-5a0d-92f9-8bc4babcac66)
Chapter 26 (#u1895aa76-bc41-56bf-b764-6cce33c432aa)
Chapter 27 (#u134c6535-edf3-5c8b-9ecd-5793d899c4f4)
Chapter 28 (#uff1b1302-37c8-52a0-82f8-2547f33d81e1)
Acknowledgements (#uef4436cb-c8a3-51e3-af81-348e20dd3eb2)
About the Author (#ue43ff42a-e4c3-58f1-9ba6-66cc4e2553ce)
About HarperImpulse (#u912218d0-23fe-50e7-bad1-603e82c0e9b3)
About the Publisher (#uf4ed61db-b083-538c-9065-64e493430507)
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.”
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2 Scene 2
“Burn with me!
The only music is time,
The only dance is love.”
King of the River, Stanley Kunitz
BEFORE (#u97cf7bf1-3425-5581-ba9a-cf4f153168a7)
CHAPTER 1 (#u97cf7bf1-3425-5581-ba9a-cf4f153168a7)
Standing at her closet, still naked from her shower and wondering what to wear to lunch, Frannie heard Stanley’s key scratch at the front door lock. A draught of biting winter air sliced through their bedroom. Frannie hurried to close the door.
“It’s pretty cold,” she thought she heard him say. “May snow.”
But he managed to catch the bedroom door before it fully closed and he caught her standing there. Oh, God. She tried to cover herself with her hands and arms. He shouldn’t see her like this.
Her husband barely glanced at her as he pushed past to retrieve his glasses from the top of the chest of drawers.
“Why bother?” he said mildly, dropping the glasses into his breast pocket and closing the door behind him.
Moving away from the chill left in the air, Frannie moved slowly towards the bathroom’s full-length mirror. Arms at her sides, she stood. And looked. To see what Stanley had seen.
Her mottled, freckled chest, he’d seen. But they hadn’t known about sun back then, so it was something of a surprise, although she’d never expected these pancaked breasts, either, nor the small mushroom farms growing beneath their awkward, sloppy, weight. And what about the puffy hill of her pale, defenseless stomach that ended in a scraggly patch of pubic hair – some of which was gray, she saw now. How had she not known that pubic hair turns gray? In fact, when Arlene had mentioned it the other morning, she’d been stunned. Although it made a certain sense, she thought. The hair on her head was mostly gray (beneath the dye). Her eyebrows – what was left of them – were gray. She touched them up, but they were gray. Yet how, at sixty-six, could there still have been something so basic she didn’t know? Age was supposed to bring wisdom.
She ran damp palms down her thickened body. No waist, wide hips, fat thighs. When she got to those lumpy thighs, she folded her hands into fists, and her reluctant gaze slid past hairless shins to her sad, bunioned feet with their overlong second toes.
It couldn’t have been many years ago when she’d been slim and supple as a whippet, her hipbones like paired knives and a stomach, not just flat, but absurdly concave. Her skin had been satin back then; her breasts … alright, they’d been unexceptional. Not perky not plush, just a nothing-to-brag-about B cup. But these days – these leftover days – she was into – and even a little out of – a DD. But at twenty, there’d been none of these flesh-colored moles, had there? No veinous freeways, no pinkly larval skin tags. (Who thought up words like “skin-tags” anyway?) With an involuntary groan, Frannie turned toward the window and the late-winter treeline beyond.
Why had she looked?
She sat heavily on the bed and reached for the remote, but it wasn’t there. She felt around the floor, and finding it under one of Stanley’s socks, pushed herself up to one elbow and clicked.
Elizabeth Taylor. There she was.
Frannie leaned gratefully back on the pillows. They smelled of his hair.
Oh yes, there was Elizabeth. Elizabeth, with her perfect, provocative, perfect and large, perfect and movie-star breasts. Elizabeth in Suddenly Last Summer yet again.
The enviable Elizabeth Taylor, dressed in the beautifully fitting couture shift that the madhouse she was confined to apparently issued to inmates.
“I am disturbed,” Liz was saying. “Don’t you think I have every reason to be?”
For sure, Frannie thought. With seven husbands, if anyone does, you do.
I do too.
Planting a fist on either side, Frannie heaved herself up off the bed and walked once again to the window. Was it going to snow? Not today, she entreated the weather gods. She didn’t need snow.
Why had she looked? She leaned her forehead against the glass again.
Turning at last to her dresser, she distractedly plucked up some underwear, and without looking down, stepped into her underpants, ran a thumb around the elastic, shook herself into her bra, then tiptoed into the chilly hall to peer around the living-room door. Stanley had gone out again. For the paper, she thought with relief as she circled the room in her underwear, straightening up and carefully baring the half-full glass of his last night’s cranberry juice to the kitchen. If she were lucky, he wouldn’t be back before she left for lunch with Arlene.
Because Frannie was so looking forward to their lunch today. They were trying out this new Italian place at the Golden Arch Mall. If Stanley got home before she went, though, he’d want to know who she was going out with, what she’d left him to eat, and especially – most vexingly – what time she thought she’d be back.
So peculiar, she thought, this belated desire for her company. She’d actually been a little flattered by it when he’d first retired, and she almost wondered if, somehow, he cared for her again. But six years had passed, and she finally understood: retired men depended on their wives like children. Even when they had computery gadgets to play with and golf magazines to read and sports channels to click through, even when they merely dozed through the long afternoons at home, they still always wanted to know where Mommy had gone. More importantly, when Mommy was coming home.
She might not be right about the children thing, though. She’d never had any.
She had strapped a pillow to herself once, just to get the sense of how it might feel to be pregnant. And she’d bought a baby doll once and hid it away.
She hated to remember that now.
But Stanley would be home any minute. Better hurry up, she thought, opening the closet door.
