Mood Swing

“Thank you, Ms. Saltzman.”

Just like that, rock bottom sank even lower.

Monica rose from her chair, feeling a little shaky, but she forced herself to thank him for his time and walk away with her chin up because she had more class than this big, blind bozo could ever hope to have.

She opened the door to his office and stepped into the lobby. Another woman was waiting there now to be interviewed, a platinum blonde who looked as if she’d cut cheerleader practice short to make it on time. And suddenly a different man was standing in Cargill’s fake leather shoes.

“Well, hello, there,” he said with a smile, practically tripping over himself to usher the woman into his office. As he closed the door behind them, Monica stared with disbelief, feeling like a wallflower at a high school dance.

“Well, she’s a shoo-in,” the receptionist said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she’s got all the qualifications he’s looking for, if you know what I mean.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky he didn’t hire you.”

“Why?”

She leaned over and whispered. “Because he’s a dirty old man. I’ve got more bruises on my ass than I can count.”

When she turned back to her Cosmo, it occurred to Monica that she used to read that magazine herself when she was younger.

About twenty years younger.

During the other job interviews she’d had recently, she’d told herself that she just wasn’t pouring on enough charm to get the attention of her prospective employers in a tight job market. But now she had to face the truth: she had nothing left that even a man like Cargill would be interested in.

One of two things was going to happen here. She was going to cry, or she was going to get mad. Since getting mad had recently bought her eight weeks in an anger management course, she left the office and hurried down the hall to the ladies’ room, where she grabbed a tissue from her purse just in time to keep mascara-laden tears from rolling down her cheeks.

She turned her gaze up to the mirror, leaning in to take a closer look at herself, and maybe for the first time in years, she saw herself as she really was.

Lines she swore had never been there before fanned out from her eyes. Skin sagged slightly at her jawline. Wrinkles had crept onto her neck. She’d been coloring her hair for so long that it could be gray all over by now for all she knew. But time had marched on, in spite of all her efforts to halt it.

All her life she’d had only one thing going for her, and that was her looks. It seemed to astonish everyone that anyone so strikingly beautiful could have been raised in such a dirt-poor family. In light of that, her mother had dragged her to beauty pageants from the time she was old enough to twirl a baton. She learned how to wink at those judges long before she knew that about half of them were dirty old men who loved looking up little girls’ skirts. Because she’d always been told she was all beauty and no brains, she’d goofed off in school and skipped college, doing what a lot of beautiful but brainless girls did—she set out to marry a rich man. And she’d almost accomplished that goal. Three times. But something always happened to nip her plans in the bud.

The first man had a wife he hadn’t bothered to tell her about. The second one decided, after a three-year relationship, that it was time for him to come out of the closet. The third time around, when Monica actually had a ring on her finger, she told herself that for the Highland Park lifestyle, she could overlook her fiancé’s drinking habit. And she did, right up to the moment he got his third DUI and a judge threw the book at him. Conjugal visits during that five-year sentence just hadn’t seemed all that appealing to her.

Somehow she turned thirty-five. Then she was pushing forty. During those years, she hadn’t bothered to acquire job skills beyond basic clerical ones, telling herself that marriage was just around the corner, only to realize that the pool of wealthy, available men was drying up, at least those wealthy, available men interested in her. And she was still working in the same low-paying, dead-end jobs she had been for the past fifteen years, so her financial future looked pretty bleak.

Then, one night at an uptown bar, she met Jerry Womack, a vice president at First Republic Bank. He was fifty-four and recently divorced. As he stared at her breasts, he told her his executive assistant was leaving and Monica might be just the woman he was looking for to replace her. The next day when she went to his office to talk to him, she discovered that the job came with a bigger paycheck than she’d ever seen in her life and very few responsibilities.

At least, very few responsibilities within the confines of the office.

At first, the whole situation made Monica a little sick to her stomach. Marrying rich was one thing, but putting out to keep a job was something else.

But the money. God, the money.

Suddenly she could afford to shop at Neiman Marcus rather than sift through the junk at outlet stores. She could buy a car that didn’t end up in the shop once every three months. She could afford a condo in a decent neighborhood rather than rent an apartment next door to a guy she was pretty sure was dealing crack.

So she did it, telling herself that maybe one day she’d marry that boss she was sleeping with. A couple of times Jerry even suggested it might be a possibility. So when the bank president had retired and Jerry ascended to that position, Monica had been thrilled. Only, it wasn’t Monica whom Jerry decided to bring with him to the executive suite. It was pretty, perky, young Nora O’Dell.

You understand, Jerry had the nerve to say. It’s just business.

So she showed him some business in the form of a flowerpot right thought the windshield of his lemon-yellow Hummer. And right now, she was thinking about the fake potted palm in the corner of Cargill’s office, wondering what kind of car he drove.

No. She had to get Cargill out of her mind. This had just been a fluke. He was simply a man who needed to rescue his own aging self-image by surrounding himself with young women. And losing out on those other four interviews had simply been a run of bad luck. That was all.

She repaired her makeup and left the bathroom, telling herself that everything was going to be fine, that a new job was just around the corner. Still, it was hard to ignore the scary little ball of nerves rolling around in her stomach, the one that was telling her that finding a job was going to be a far greater challenge than she’d ever anticipated.

CHAPTER 4

The gymnasium at Parker Heights Middle School was old, musty and smelled like dirty athletic socks, and every time Susan climbed the bleachers to sit on one of the metal benches, she actually wished she were back in the hospital, which smelled like antiseptic and sick people. The bounce of basketballs echoing off the gym walls and the squeak of shoes on the wood floors grated on her nerves the way nails against a blackboard grated on other people’s. But she still showed up with a smile on her face, cheering when she was supposed to, because that was what moms did.

She sat down on a bench by herself, thinking about how she’d always felt sorry for the single and divorced moms who showed up alone to school events. They always had that look in their eyes as if they were frantically trying to remember everything they had to do. At the same time there was a droopy-shouldered weariness about them that said completion of those tasks was going to be impossible. Now she was one of them. Of course, in a world where divorces were more common than lifelong marriages, she was really just a face in the crowd.

She turned to see Lani hopping up the bleachers. “Mom, gimme a hair scrunchie.”

Susan dug through her purse, eventually having to put half its contents on the bench beside her before finally locating one wound around a box of Band-Aids. Lani grabbed it and swooped her hair toward the crown of her head.

“Where’s Dad?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you remind him?”

“Yes, honey. I reminded him.”

“Did you tell him I was starting?”

“Yes.”

“Then why isn’t he here?”

“I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

She hoped he would be, anyway, because Lani didn’t handle it well when he didn’t show up. Lani didn’t handle much of anything well these days. Susan’s happy, perky daughter of a few years ago seemed to have vanished, replaced by an adolescent girl whose moods were so volatile that Susan never knew what she was in for from one moment to the next. In the span of an hour, she could go from crying to laughing to being angry to shutting down communication completely, and there was no way to predict which one it was going to be.

“He didn’t come to my last game,” Lani said.

“He had to work late.”

“I’m starting tonight. What if he doesn’t get here until the second half?”

Lani! We’re divorced! Don’t ask me these questions! Ask him!

“He told me he was coming, so I’m sure he’ll be here.”

Lani frowned. “Is he bringing Marla with him again?”

“I really don’t know.”