Words With Fiends Read Free

discussion well after their official 6 p.m. end time.
    Today, however, they’d ended on time. Most of the eleven members in attendance had already left behind the Thomas Hardy debate for more interesting current topics, such as the outcome of a popular reality television show. Chatting brightly, they either headed for the door or else remained behind to browse the shop.
    Dropping his impromptu counselor role for that of store manager, James followed after the browsers while Hamlet prudently slipped off the table and headed for quieter regions. Darla held down the register. She noted that, unlike the others, the last two club members descending the stairs were apparently still stuck in the nineteenth century.
    â€œArgue all you want; you can’t change my mind. Tess was a blithering fool.”
    The speaker was the same man who, a few minutes before, had wished that literary heroine a repeat of her unpleasant death.
Mark Poole,
Darla thought with a sigh as, with tattered paperback copy of the book in question tucked under one arm, the man clomped down the stairs. Every group had its own version of a Mark, she knew. Unfortunately, this one was more Mark-like than most. And today, he seemed particularly wound up.
    â€œOnce the little twit offed Alec,” he proclaimed, “she should have hightailed it to America instead of running back to her wimp of a husband, Angel. If she had, she might have lived. But, nooo, she had to be all noble, and all she got for it was—”
    He broke off as he reached the bottom of the stairs; then, turning to the woman behind him, he mimed the universal jerking-upward-on-a-rope gesture to indicate hanging. And then, in case no one had gotten the message, he punctuated that bit of pantomime by letting his tongue loll from his mouth.
    The woman who was the recipient of these amateur theatrics was Martha Washington, the book club’s president and equally ardent participant in the group. A slender, mixed-race woman in her late thirties—
No
relation to the late president’s wife,
she always assured people upon first meeting—she wore her multihued hair in dreads that dangled past her shoulders.
    Today, the cacophony of red, blond, and black locks seemed to fairly bristle with indignation. Her tone, however, was as cool as Hamlet’s gaze as she countered in precise British tones, “Mark, I’m telling you this in the nicest way possible . . . you are a bloody idiot.”
    Darla suppressed a smile at the overheard exchange, reflecting how even the snarkiest comment sounded sophisticated when spoken in a clipped English accent. The woman’s enunciation, however, was no affectation. Martha had previously explained to Darla that her father was a career military man from Georgia who had been stationed for a time in Great Britain, where he had met and married Martha’s English mother. So while Martha’s everyday accent was straight out of a Masterpiece Theatre special, she could occasionally turn on a Good-Ol’-Girl Deep South accent—a honeyed drawl far thicker than Darla’s native East Texas twang—when the situation warranted.
    But this particular lecture on English literature apparently required the BBC-esque approach. While Mark sputtered, Martha continued, “As a man, you have little understanding of the societal pressures levied upon women throughout the ages. A woman of Tess’s class lived in a virtual prison . . . bound by the law, the Church, and society as a whole. Nobly accepting one’s fate rather than flailing against it can sometimes seem the better choice, no matter the ultimate outcome.”
    â€œYeah, well, but—”
    Martha held up a hand, cutting short whatever argument he had, and then pleasantly asked, “May I finish? Of course, Tess had been wronged most terribly from the very beginning of the story: first by her lover, Alec, and then by her husband, Angel. Remember