The Social Climber of Davenport Heights Read Free Page B

money. His family had the rank and the prominence. Without him as my husband, I’d lose everything that I’d worked most of my life to gain. I’d be persona non grata at the club, a nobody in the community, a cautionary tale for younger women at the Junior League, and a regular scrapper and toiler at my job. No way was I going to go back to that. I wondered idly if a good lawyer could get me custody of our social position.
    I took the outer loop, away from the lights and traffic of the city. Suburban housing developments glittered like constellations of earthbound stars in the darkness at the sides of the roads.
    If I did divorce David, what would Brynn say? Or I guess, more importantly, what would Dr. Reiser say? How much permanent damage could a broken home do? Practically every girl she knew had been through at least one family breakup. They all seemed to manage. But Brynn was somehow so fragile, so easily wounded. Had I made her that way? She’d had the best of everything. I’d seen that she had everything that I had ever wanted.
    I’d seen that I had everything I’d ever wanted. But I wasn’t any happier than she was.
    I didn’t blame all the ills of my marriage on David. The infidelity, yes. But that was just a small example of a lot of things that were wrong. We hadn’t shared our lives, really shared our lives, for a very long time. Maybe we never had. It might have been different if Brynn had been a boy. David had wanted a boy. If we’d had a son maybe he would have taken more responsibility for raising him. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been sooverwhelmed with it. Things could have worked out differently if our baby had been male.
    David loved Brynn, there was no doubt of that. But he’d started pleading for another child when she was just a toddler. By then I knew that I was in over my head. I flatly refused. David didn’t acquiesce gracefully. He hounded me about it for years. I’m not sure he ever really got over the idea. We just quit talking about it. I’m sad for Brynn that she didn’t have siblings, but I was never sorry that I didn’t have more children. I would have made two children twice as screwed up as one. And as for my career, no way. I’d have been too busy shuttling kids back and forth to therapy appointments.
    I glanced down at my broken fingernail. I didn’t have a manicure scheduled until Tuesday. My purse was sitting on the seat beside me and I began rifling through it, looking for an emery board.
    I looked up again. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I knew that something was wrong. I didn’t know what. There was an alertness in me that was primordial, the kind of caution that saved my ancestors from saber-toothed tigers stalking from downwind. It zizzed adrenaline into my brain. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what. I didn’t quite see it. Then I realized what I was looking at.
    An eighteen-wheeler coming from the opposite direction, maybe a quarter-mile of empty freeway away from me, was haphazardly listing across three lanes of the interstate. It was a huge tanker truck. Not going particularly fast, but moving steadily and irrevocably toward the passing lane.
    I watched it, detached. The driver must be asleep, I thought. It was a good thing there was no traffic, I thought. Somebody could get killed.
    When the truck jumped the median, my reflexes went offlike an alarm clock. It was coming across the road at me, the tanker load it hauled slithering to the left in front of me like a tail on a giant T. rex.
    I swerved into the far right lane. It kept coming. I leaned down hard on my horn.
    “Wake up! Damnit!” I screamed.
    If I sped up and went off on the shoulder I might be able to get around it. But if the tanker did hit me, my going faster wouldn’t help. I didn’t have time to think it through. I stomped the gas pedal all the way to the floorboard and fled toward the very edge of the pavement.
    It was going to be close.
    It was going to be too close.
    I