The Sweetest Revenge Read Free Page A

beautiful eulogy,” I said, choking up on the word eulogy. I
thought I was going to start crying. He looked at me with his gray
eyes of sorrow and I looked at him.
    “ Thank you,” he said
sincerely. “I appreciate your coming today. This was my mother’s
church her entire life. I felt it was appropriate to have the service
here.”
    “ Very appropriate,” I said.
“Please let us know if we can do anything for you.”
    And then it was over and Kate was
walking up to the front of the church and down the road where we had
parked. I followed her.
    “ I’m glad that’s over,”
she said when we got in the car. “I thought it would never end.”
    “ I thought it was nice,” I
said.
    “ Oh, yeah,” she said. “It
was nice. I’m glad we came.”
    I didn’t believe her.
    Kate talked about her boyfriend
all the way back to Marshall. I listened and said “uh huh” and
“really?” and all of the stuff you say when someone is
monopolizing the conversation. But I kept thinking about Keith
Richmond and his remembrance of his mother and his sad silver gray
eyes. I was grateful when Kate dropped me off at my house.
    “ Have a great break,” I said.
She waved goodbye as she drove down my driveway. It had been a long
time since I’d been on a spring break vacation at the beach.

Chapter
Three

    Midnight was sitting by her food
bowl when I walked in the kitchen door. I opened a can of her
favorite blend—beef and liver—and put it on her plate. She
started to eat like she hadn’t eaten in a week.
    I took my phone out of my purse
and turned it back on. I had forgotten to turn it back on once Kate
and I were in her car. Didn’t matter. There was only one person who
wanted to get in touch with me and he had left a voice mail and four
text messages.
    I texted Jim back: “Please
don’t try to contact me anymore. I’m on spring break. I’ll be
in touch when it’s over. Or my lawyer will.”
    Jim texted back right away: “Ok,”
he wrote.
    It was nearly eight o’clock by
that time. I looked in the refrigerator and found a full bottle of
chardonnay, a head of lettuce, and a container of blueberry yogurt. I
ate the yogurt leaning against the kitchen counter, then poured
myself a glass of wine.
    The house felt a little lonely,
but peaceful. Gone was the tension that I now realized had been
plaguing my marriage. There was no one to please anymore, and I was
relieved about that. I walked up to my bedroom and kicked off my low
heels and stripped off my black suit that had begun to feel
cloistering. I grabbed a pair of sweat pants out of my drawer and put
on an extra large T-shirt. My stomach stretched the fabric of the
shirt.
    Back downstairs, I took my glass
of wine out to the patio and sat in a chaise. Until the past few
years, we had eaten dinners on the patio when the weather was good
and hosted parties out there with our closest friends, which always
included Sam, Jim’s partner, and his wife Bitsy. The woods
encroached fairly close to the deck, giving an intimate feel. That
night, I enjoyed that even more than usual.
    After an hour outside, I went
back inside for a blanket and my iPod player. Back outside, I lit the
lantern on the table beside the chaise and listened to The Beatles
and Jason Mraz and everything in between. I sipped my wine and poured
myself two more glasses before I went back inside to bed.
    The next morning, Monday, the
first real day of spring break, I made myself a piece of toast. I had
no appetite at all, but I didn’t feel exactly sick either. I just
didn’t want to eat. Couldn’t eat. I was already eaten up with
anger. But mostly I was eaten up with hurt.
    I sat down at my computer in the
den and brought up Google. I keyed in Kimberly Williams, as I had so
many times before.
    When I met Jim at a party in our
junior year of college, he was with someone he had been dating for a
couple of weeks. Jim and I kept bumping into each other—in the
kitchen where the food was, on the porch where the