Golden Lies - Barbara Freethy [20]
* * *
She should have known better than to visit her mother. She'd accomplished nothing. Paige tried to slam the front door behind her, but it was so damn heavy and expensively made that it merely swung shut with a quiet thud. So much for venting her anger. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and drew in a deep breath. She tried counting to ten, but she was still feeling angry when she got to twenty.
Something was wrong. She knew it. She could feel it. But she had no facts, nothing to go on but instinct. She crossed the graveled drive, got into her Mercedes, and buckled her seat belt. There was nothing more to accomplish here. She might as well go home. Halfway down the street, she realized she didn't want to go home, didn't want to sit in her quiet, empty, lonely apartment—whoa, where had that lonely come from? She wasn't lonely. She liked living on her own. She didn't need a man in her life, even one that was as good a candidate for marriage as Martin was.
Her mouth turned down at the thought of her mother's suggestion to make a pro and con list. Marriage was supposed to be about love, lust, breathlessness, recklessness, falling head over heels; it wasn't supposed to be about IQ, credit rating, college degrees, family connections, business mergers—was it? How would she know anyway? Her mother and father were hardly a shining example of passionate love. Still, they'd been married for thirty-one years. Maybe they'd had all that earlier on, and she just hadn't been old enough to see it.
She hit the brake as the traffic light in front of her changed to red. She should turn right. It was the fastest route home. But she didn't want to go home. She wanted to talk to someone who would understand.
Unfortunately, as her mother had pointed out, all of her friends were married or about to be. Besides that, it was almost nine o'clock on a Wednesday night. She couldn't just drop in on anyone, especially not her married friends. Something happened once a woman walked down a rose-strewn aisle toward the man she loved; she changed, became one of a pair, half of a couple, someone you didn't stop by to see without a reason.
And, to be completely honest, most of her friends hadn't been all that close to her before marriage; they'd been girls she'd gone to private school with, college friends, or fellow debutantes. They were women she had lunch with, not women she confided in, at least not confidences that were more serious than the chocolate she'd sneaked after a Pilates workout. She wasn't in the habit of sharing personal information with anyone. The Hathaways had always been targets of gossipmongers. No matter how close the friendships were supposed to be, confidences always seemed to leak out.
Making a quick decision, she turned left at the green light and drove across town to the neighborhood known as the Avenues. She found a parking spot just down the street from a popular neighborhood bar. It wasn't the kind of bar a Hathaway was supposed to be caught dead in but she wasn't dead yet, she thought with a smile as she got out of the car and walked down the street.
Fast Willy's was a cozy sports bar with photographs of athletes in every available space, some signed to the owner, Willy Bartholomew, a third-generation Willy from what she understood and a former minor league baseball player. There were four television sets, one placed at each corner of the room, with small tables crowded together on what was sometimes used as an impromptu dance floor. On the weekends, the bar overflowed with customers, but tonight there was a quiet after-work crowd, content to talk and listen to the jukebox.
She avoided the tables and headed to an empty stool at the long bar.
"What's an uptown babe like