“Your parents’ trip,” she said quietly. “To California.”
I blinked.
“Obviously, Paul had no idea what I was talking about. Made some joke about how it’s impossible to get your dad to cross the Ashley River.”
“Mary Lou—” I started to say, but she cut me off.
“I do not like being taken for a fool,” she said, then ashed her cigarette over a potted geranium.
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t.”
I was panicked, trying to figure out what Mary Lou knew, or at least what she thought she knew. Clearly she’d decided I’d been calling someone local at Bar Sanna, but did she suspect I’d called Teo? Or that I had been calling him about theChartridge? That seemed unlikely, but I was still trying to work it all out when it occurred to me that, if Mary Lou and I were standing here having this conversation, she had not outed me to Paul. If she had, he’d have found me right away, yanked me out of the ballroom, and demanded to know why in the hell I was lying about something so stupid. “You didn’t tell him?” I whispered.
She looked right at me. “I did not.”
“What did you say?”
“That I was an idiot and must have gotten you confused with one of the other wives.”
“And he believed you?”
“That I was an idiot?” She practically snorted. “Sadly, I find that men are usually all too ready to believe that.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I started with the most obvious thing. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
“As I think I’ve mentioned, we’ve had an absolutely terrible time filling positions on the CAWS executive board. And now, with Laura stepping up to serve as vice president, I’m going to once again need a new treasurer.”
I almost laughed with relief. Mary Lou was blackmailing me—we both knew it—but what she was asking for was such an easy lift that it barely felt like she was asking for anything at all.
“I know you said you’re bad with numbers.”
“You know,” I said slowly, “I probably don’t give myself enough credit.”
She gave me an almost amused look. “Of that, Eileen Archer, I am certain.”
110.
BACK IN THE HOTEL ROOM,Paul helped me out of my dress, and we fell into bed. We’d had too much to drink and might have gone right to sleep except that Bobby and Laura were having very loud sex in their hotel room, and we could hear every moan and groan through the thin wall that separated our headboards.
“Glad someone’s having a good time,” said Paul as we lay there staring at the ceiling.
“You don’t seem very glad,” I said, which was meant as a joke but did not get so much as a chuckle.
“I’m going to bang on that wall, tell them to shut the fuck up.”
“Don’t you dare,” I said. “They’ll be mortified.”
“They should be.”
“Plus, they’re trying to get pregnant again. Laura told me this afternoon.”
“Good for them,” said Paul. “But I’m not sure why that means we have to listen to it.” Still, he didn’t get up. Instead, he turned away from me and folded a pillow around his head.
