Kill the Competition Read online

  Belinda turned on the air conditioner. “How many children do you have?”

  “Well, there’s Glenda—her daddy, Glen, is my second husband. Then there’s Glen, Jr., my husband’s son by his first marriage. He’s a freshman in high school, second time around. And I have a son, Billy, by my first husband, who lives with his daddy, Big Bill. Billy’s a senior in high school. His truck was broken into at school, so he borrowed my SUV this week until the window is replaced, else I wouldn’t have asked you to drive the car pool right off the bat like this.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Kids. Most days I wouldn’t throw them back, but if I had it to do over again, I might opt for the road you’ve taken.”

  One corner of Belinda’s mouth lifted. Her “road” was more like a footpath, and she had no idea where it might lead. Fairly terrifying, considering a few months ago she’d had her life mapped out well into menopause.

  Libby looked up and squeezed each curler, apparently checking for “doneness.” “I know you don’t like to talk about your ex—what was his name? Vic?”

  “Vince.”

  “Well, I know you don’t like to talk about Vince, but you’re lucky the marriage ended before you had little ones.”

  Belinda bit the inside of her cheek. When she’d joined the car pool last Thursday, Libby had remarked on the thin stripe of white skin on Belinda’s left ring finger. (Who knew that two years of fluorescent office lighting could produce a tan line around her engagement ring?) “A brief, unsuccessful marriage,” she’d told the women. A half-truth. But pawning herself off as a divorced woman would elicit fewer questions than admitting she was—dum dum dum dum—acutely single.

  Libby clucked. “I changed my mind—the children are fine. It’s the men I would throw back.”

  Belinda slowed for a stop sign, then realized she’d missed the woman’s cue. “Did you and your husband have an argument?” Not that she really wanted to get involved….

  “Not an argument—the argument. The same uninterrupted argument Glen and I have had since the day after we got married: money. Do you believe he threatened to cut up my Bloomingdale’s card?”

  Belinda hid her smile as she watched for an opening in the oncoming traffic. Allegedly the president of the department store chain had sent Libby a thank-you card last year. “Isn’t Glen an accountant? We’re all frugal.” These days, by necessity.

  “You might be frugal, but Glen is cheap. For Valentine’s Day, he actually suggested that we go to a card shop, exchange cards in the aisle, then put them back because he didn’t see the use in spending the money!”

  “Okay, that’s cheap.”

  Libby huffed. “I swear, if he cuts up my Bloomingdale’s card, I’ll cut off his pecker.”

  Belinda choked on her breakfast drink. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, I do. I have a mean streak. Want a homemade bear claw?” She opened a sack, and the scent of cinnamon sugar rode the air.

  “No, thanks. I’m having—” She squinted at the can. “Berry Bonanza with extra calcium.”

  Libby made a face, then bit into a lump of fried dough. “Sugar and caffeine, girl, that’s the way we get our engines started in the South. You’re going to have to get with the program.”

  “I’m trying to lose a few pounds.” More like twelve, which had climbed onto her hips from a steady diet of comfort food after the wedding and now refused to dismount.

  “You look nice and curvy,” Libby insisted, cheeks full. “What size cup do you wear, D?”

  “Um, a C.” And not even her mother knew that about her.

  “Did you have a fun weekend?” Libby asked.

  Belinda checked the street signs and turned right into the entrance of the upscale apartment complex where the two other carpoolers lived. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Don’t tell me you worked.”

  “A little.”

  Libby began unwinding curlers, leaving corkscrews of yellow hair hanging around her ears. “Doesn’t the Mistress of the Dark get enough blood during the week?”

  Belinda had concluded that Libby wasn’t Margo’s biggest fan—something about Margo once taking credit for a document that had come out of Libby’s technical writing group. But there were two sides to every story, and Belinda had vowed not to gossip about her boss with the women, all of whom were veteran employees of the Archer Furniture Company. “I was preparing for a meeting this morning with Mr. Archer.”

  “Mr. Archer is coming in? Must be some meeting.”

  “A potential acquisition—Payton Manufacturing?”

  “Oh, yeah, I saw the memo. Don’t they make sleeper sofas?”

  “Right. And Murphy beds.”

  “Don’t tell me Margo’s actually going to let you sit in on the meeting?”

  Belinda stopped in front of the clubhouse, where Carole and Rosemary stood, then waved. She glanced at the clock and willed them to run. “That was my understanding.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.” Libby snorted. “When Mr. Archer is around, Margo likes to be the only female within a hundred yards. She has the hots for him, you know.”

  Carole Marchand, twenty-something mail room employee with short, barrette-studded black hair, slid into the backseat behind Libby and slammed the door. “Who has the hots for whom? Cute car.” The metal braces gave her a slight lisp.

  “Thanks.”

  “Margo, Mr. Archer,” Libby tossed over her shoulder.

  Rosemary Burchett, immaculate in her gray Donna Karan suit and dark pageboy, placed a lumbar pillow in the seat behind Belinda, then slid in place and caught her gaze in the rearview mirror. “You haven’t heard? Margo turns positively giddy when Juneau is in the vicinity.”

  The woman said Margo’s name with veiled loathing, and the owner’s name with the familiarity of a loyal executive assistant. From what Belinda could gather, Rosemary handled correspondence and generally fronted for the absentee owner. Belinda found the unruffle-able older woman a tad intimidating, and it seemed that she wasn’t alone—even Margo stepped aside when she met Rosemary in the hallway.

  “Mr. Archer is coming in today?” Carole asked, shifting her gaze sideways. “So that explains why Rosemary is dressed to the nines.”

  Rosemary returned a bland smile. “Even if he puts in an appearance, Margo shouldn’t get her hopes up. As if Juneau would be interested in the likes of her.”

  “Well, we all secretly lust after the man,” Carole said, clicking her seat belt home. “But Margo is positively shameless. I actually heard her giggle once when she was in his office. I think the earth stalled for a second or two.”

  “Isn’t she supposed to be leaving for Hawaii soon?” Rosemary asked.

  “This evening,” Belinda verified. Her boss had talked about little else. “She’ll be gone for two weeks.”

  “Hallelujah,” Libby said. “That’s like a two-week vacation for the rest of us.”

  Belinda didn’t say anything, although she had to admit she was looking forward to the independence, however brief.

  Carole sniffed. “Something smells brilliant.”

  Libby offered them a bear claw. Carole, who was a veritable bag of bones, took two. Rosemary looked tempted but declined. She was the one who had talked Belinda into pumping iron Friday. Apparently Rosemary had slid past forty without acknowledging the milestone and now approached fifty with a similar disregard. The woman smoothed a hand over her hair and fastened her seat belt, seemingly lost in thought. Her cheeks were pinker, her eyes evasive. Either Rosemary was nervous at the prospect of seeing her long-lost boss, or she, too, had a crush on the man.

  Belinda steered back toward the parkway. The good news—it was daylight, so she could see where she was going. The bad news—it was daylight, so she could see just how many cars were trying to get where she was going. “Is Mr. Archer single?”

  “Widower,” Rosemary said. “His wife died two years ago, but she was sick a long time before that. Like Stanley.”


  “Rosemary’s last husband,” Libby murmured behind a paper napkin. “Cancer. Took a while.”

  Belinda glanced at Rosemary, but the woman was staring out the window. Belinda swallowed a swell of emotion. The previous generation knew the true meaning of loyalty. No six-hour marriages for them, no ma’am.

  “Wow, traffic looks even worse than usual,” Libby said to change the subject as they approached the bulging lanes.

  “There’s a crash on Georgia 400, so we’re the detour.” Belinda put on her signal.

  “Smile, girls,” Libby said. “We don’t want Belinda to be late for her meeting.”

  Belinda’s three passengers pressed pleading faces to the window, and a few seconds later, a man in a late model BMW slowed and yielded magnanimously. She eased into the opening. “So that’s the secret, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Carole said. “We prostitute ourselves every day to get a break in traffic.”

  Libby flipped down the visor mirror and began teasing her hair with a fine-toothed comb. “Shoot—we made that man’s day.”

  Carole laughed. “You’re probably right, men are such suckers. Guess what Gustav said over the weekend?” She smacked the back of the seat. “No, you’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you. He said that after he gets his green card, maybe we should just stay married.” She scoffed. “As if he’s in love with me or something. And as if I’m going to walk away from that twenty thousand sitting in escrow.”

  Belinda kept her eyes on the brake lights of the car in front of her. The girl had entered a green card marriage for money? Belinda knew there were people out there who did things like that, i.e., criminals. But she’d never met one.

  Carole licked each finger. “Stay married, what a joke. I’ve got my eye on a brand-new Thunderbird, and then—no offense, girls—I won’t need to carpool.”

  “Yeah, right,” Libby said. “Then who on earth would you talk to?”

  Rosemary laughed her agreement, and Carole leaned forward. “Oh, that reminds me! Did anyone watch The Single Files last night?”

  “I watched a movie on the other channel,” Rosemary said, covering a yawn.

  “My set is on the blink,” Belinda said.

  Libby sighed. “We found pot in Glen, Jr.’s backpack, so we had a marathon family conference. What did I miss?”

  “Oh, it was so good,” Carole said, bouncing up and down. “Remember last week Tandy and Nicholas broke up? Well, this week they both had dates at the same restaurant—it was hysterical! Meanwhile, Indigo tried to be the last person leaving the gym so she could flirt with the hunky personal trainer.”

  “The guy with the codpiece?” Libby asked.

  “Right. But instead, Indigo got locked inside the gym, and had to call Jill to come and get her out.”

  “Jill?” Rosemary asked, apparently interested after all. “What could she do?”

  “Remember the cute locksmith from a few episodes back?”

  “The one who got Jill out of the car trunk she accidentally locked herself into?”

  “Right. Jill’s been trying to think of a reason to call him, so this was her chance.”

  Rosemary frowned. “What could a man possibly find attractive about a woman who wants him to commit breaking and entering?”

  “It was for a good cause,” Carole insisted.

  “I forget I’m talking to the woman who earns spending money by marrying immigrants.”

  Carole stuck out her tongue, and Belinda observed, with no small amount of curiosity, the playful push-pull of the motherless young woman and the daughterless older woman. While she had always enjoyed pleasant female acquaintances, the mystique of true female solidarity had always eluded her. Perhaps estrogenic compatibility had something to do with sharing a childhood bathroom with sisters, an experience she had missed out on as an only child.

  “Incoming spray,” Libby announced.

  Slow to recognize the signal, Belinda zoomed her window down a few seconds behind everyone else, just as a cloud of Aqua Net filled the car. Libby wielded the can like a graffiti artist, shellacking each teased hank of hair.

  Rosemary’s tongue darted out, and she grimaced. “Christ, Libby, you make a case for flavored hairspray.”

  Libby ignored her and commenced round two of her coiffure—coaxing the shoulder-length strands downward while preserving the “lift.” “So how did the show end, Carole?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. My psychic, Ricky, called, so I missed the last ten minutes.”

  “Oh, not Ricky again,” Rosemary muttered.

  Libby angled the visor mirror so she could smirk at Carole. “Why didn’t you ask your psychic what was going to happen on the show?”

  “Very funny. He and I had more important things to discuss. Ricky had a vision about my future as a single woman.”

  She paused for effect, but the women were apparently used to her drama, and they waited her out. Belinda glanced from woman to woman, wondering who would give in first. At least their teasing camaraderie kept her mind off the crawling traffic, which seemed to be reproducing.

  Carole emitted an exasperated sigh. “Ricky says the love of my life is right under my nose—I think he means at the office!”

  Libby cackled. “At Archer? Is it one of the gay designers, or one of the gay salesmen?”

  “They’re not all gay.”

  “Other than Mr. Archer, name one straight, single male at the office.”

  “Martin Derlinger,” Rosemary offered.

  Carole winced. “Ewww, the copy machine guy? He sniffs his fingers.”

  Rosemary made a rueful noise. “You can’t fight destiny.”

  Belinda laughed under her breath, while making impossible promises to God in exchange for green lights.

  Libby turned around in her seat. “If Ricky is such a powerful psychic, why didn’t he tell you the guy’s name?”

  “Because,” Rosemary said, “if he told her everything at once, he wouldn’t be able to collect a hundred bucks every week.”

  “He only gets so many visions at a time,” Carole said in a huff.

  “Yeah, well next time ask him for the winning Lotto South numbers,” Libby said. She played the lotto religiously.

  “Ricky won’t use his powers for financial gain.”

  Libby and Rosemary hooted, then proclaimed the psychic a scam artist and Carole a fool with her money, but Belinda only half-listened, nervously drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. She pressed the gas pedal in preparation for merging onto Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, a larger highway with fewer stoplights. Cars surged forward en masse, zooming from forty to sixty miles an hour in one elevated heartbeat. The fact that people weren’t killed every day in this enormous, throbbing network of machines and asphalt was a miracle to her. And the meeting…

  Her boss was not going to like what she had to say about Payton Manufacturing. In the bleary hours after midnight, she’d begun to suspect Payton of inflating its profits by underreporting debt. She needed more proof, but since Margo had made it clear that Archer had to beef up its manufacturing segment before their company could be taken public, she would not be happy about a delay in acquiring Payton, good reason or no. In fact, Margo’s e-mail message last night had hinted that “raises would abound” if Belinda “impressed the CEO in the meeting” and “facilitated the decision to proceed with the acquisition.” But was her boss trying to rally an ally, or set up a scapegoat?

  “Shouldn’t we, Belinda?”

  She turned her head toward Libby. “Hm?”

  “I was saying that since we’ve all been married at least once, we should be writing down all this stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Men stuff. Sex stuff. Marriage stuff.”

  The Berry Bonanza with calcium had a metallic after-taste. “Why?”

  “To pass on to our daughters, and to women everywhere.” She tucked a curl in place. “Incoming.”

  Belinda groped for the button in the armrest and zoomed down h
er window. At least the aerosol fog dispersed quickly at seventy miles an hour. When they zoomed up the windows, Belinda pushed her scattered bangs out of her eyes. Libby would arrive looking great, and she would arrive looking like a haystack.

  “You mean, like, us write a sex book?” Carole asked.

  “Why not?” Libby flipped up the visor mirror. “A book of advice on men and marriage from women who’ve been around the block.”

  Rosemary’s laugh was sandpapery. “Relationship advice for grown-up women? That would certainly be a departure from everything else on the market. If I see another book on ‘how to please your man,’ I’m going to be violently ill.”

  “Exactly,” Libby said, shoving the hairspray into her bag and whipping out a legal pad. “Ladies, we can do this. Tentative title—” She scribbled furiously. “A Postscript to Nine Marriages. How does that sound?”

  “Immoral,” Rosemary said.

  “Wow,” Carole said. “We really have nine marriages between us?”

  Libby counted on her beringed fingers. “I’m on my second, you’re on your third, Rosemary was married three times, and Belinda—you were married just once, right?”

  Belinda’s neck grew warm. “Um…right. But I don’t think I’ll be able to contribute much to this project. I…wouldn’t feel comfortable giving relationship advice to other women.”

  “How long were you married?” Carole asked.

  “Not long.”

  “Is he why you moved to Atlanta?”

  “Leave Belinda alone,” Rosemary chided. “She’s not used to us yet.”

  “Right,” Libby said. “We don’t want to scare her out of the car pool. If she wants us to know whether the man broke her heart, she’ll tell us.”

  She felt their curious gazes latch on. Belinda wet her lips and tasted Aqua Net. She barely knew these women—she couldn’t divulge the extent of that day’s profound humiliation. Hadn’t she left Cincinnati to escape the pitying air?

  Yet these women were inviting her to unburden her misery. Was that how sisterhood worked—women bonded by having emotional “goods” on each other? The urge to wallow tugged at her again. The women would almost certainly shower her with sympathy and call Vince vile names…at first. But how long before the sympathy gave way to the suspicion that she must be unlovable for a man to behave so abominably?