Monarch Beach by Anita Hughes Page B

others? After Angie?” I asked in a whisper.
    Stephanie nodded slowly. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept firing the women.”
    I laughed. “A full-time job, apparently.”
    “What are you going to do?” Stephanie asked.
    “What am I going to do about my wonderful husband who has been screwing around for eight years and coming home every night with a smile on his face? What am I going to say to my son who is the light of my life and loves his daddy like I loved mine?” At the thought of my father, who had a backbone like a ruler and had treated my mother like a queen, I fell apart.
    “When I was ten, my father had a really good friend named Charlie Ambrose.” I blinked away the tears. “They played golf every Sunday and he came over for poker once a month. Charlie was a lot younger than my father and really handsome, with blue eyes and white-blond hair that flopped across his forehead. He let me sit next to him while they played poker, and I’d point to the card I thought he should put down.” I closed my eyes, remembering a time when all men seemed safe. “One month he didn’t show up for the poker game, and I sat at the top of the stairs waiting for him to ring the doorbell. The next Sunday, I waited for my father to return from golf, because he usually brought Charlie over for a drink after eighteen holes. But he brought a new friend home, Stewart Pratt, who was bald and had a nose like a beak.”
    “What happened to Charlie Ambrose?” Stephanie asked.
    “I got up the courage to ask my mother and she just said my father and Charlie had a falling-out.” I remembered how nervous I had been asking my mother, and how she answered my question curtly, and then turned away and went back to writing place cards.
    “A couple of years later, I was at dance school and I was paired up with Charlie’s son. I was taller than he was and he had to stand on his tiptoes to dance with me. I mentioned his father hadn’t been at our house for a long time, and he looked at me as if someone had died and I forgot to come to the funeral.”
    “Did Charlie die?” Stephanie leaned forward in the sandbox.
    “No.” I shook my head. “Charlie had a dalliance with his son’s German tutor and was living in a penthouse on Nob Hill. My father was so moral he wouldn’t be friends with a guy who screwed around. He never spoke Charlie’s name, and Charlie never came to our house again. My father’s favorite line was: ‘It’s not how much money a man has that makes him a success, it’s the strength of his character.’” I sighed. “How could I marry a weasel?”
    “Andre is a great actor. He pulled one over on all of us.” Stephanie shrugged.
    “But I’m married to him. I should be able to read him.” I dug my fingers into the sand.
    “We can sit here all day wallowing in tears or we can think of a plan of action,” Stephanie said.
    “Such as?” I gulped.
    “We could put hemlock in his wine.”
    “I think hemlock went out as a poison with Romeo and Juliet,” I replied.
    “Then you think of something.”
    I tried. I thought of all kinds of revenge. But revenge took energy and planning. I was wiped out. “I guess I’ll tell him it’s over.”
    “Just like that?”
    “Stephanie, you just gave me a list of girls’ names longer than Santa Claus’s.”
    “I don’t think you’ll get rid of him that easily,” Stephanie said slowly.
    “What do you mean?”
    “In Europe it’s more accepted for men to forget to keep their pants on. I don’t think he wants out of the marriage. They are all just flings. Work freebies.”
    “That’s disgusting,” I said, and shuddered.
    “Come on, let’s go inside.” Stephanie stepped out of the sandbox. “It is officially afternoon and you need a drink.”
    We went into the library and Stephanie poured me a shot of tequila, and then another. By my fourth shot I was feeling a little better—in a cowboy-about-to-shoot-up-the-bar sort of way. What a morning. I had