Carolina Moon

adultery, well, so can I. Now, an illicit affair is one thing, but marriage to a philanderer is another. I believe he was faithful enough for the first little while, but my God, I was bored. And then, I suppose, he was just as bored and thought he’d follow his song lyrics by cheating on me, drinking himself blind. He had made a bit of a mark in the music scene. The first time he decided to take a swing at me, I swung harder, then I walked. I got a nice chunk of money out of the divorce, and earned every penny.”
    She and Hope had sat here, Tory thought, and talked about things they’d done, wanted to do. Simpler things, childhood things. But no less vital, no less intimate than what Faith spoke of now.
    “Why Wade?”
    “I don’t know.” Faith let out a breath, sipped from her plastic glass. “That’s the puzzle, and the worry. It’s not for gain or spite. He’s pretty to look at and we do have amazing sex. But the town vet? That was never in my plans. Now he has to complicate everything by being in love with me. I’ll ruin his life.” She chugged the margarita, poured a second. “I’m bound to.”
    “That would be his problem.”
    Struck, Faith turned her head and stared. “Now, that is the last thing I expected you to say.”
    “He’s a grown man who knows his own mind and his own heart. It appears to me he’s always done what he wanted, and gotten what he wanted. Could be he knows you better than you think. Then again, I don’t understand men.”
    “Oh, that’s easy.” She topped off Tory’s glass. “Half the time they think with their dicks, and the other half they’re thinking of their toys.”
    “That’s not very kind from a woman with a brother, and a lover.”
    “Nothing unkind about it. I love men. Some would say I’ve loved entirely too many.” There was a wicked gleam of humor in her eyes, and no apology whatsoever. Tory found herself enjoying it, envying it.
    “I’ve always preferred men for company,” Faith added. “Women are so much more sly than men, and tend to view other women as rivals. Men look at other men as competitors, which is entirely different. You, however, are not sly. It’s taken too much effort, I realize, to dislike and resent you.”
    “And that’s the basis for this moratorium?”
    “You have a better one?” Faith lifted a shoulder, then picked up the notepad. “I had an urge to write some things down, and I rarely ignore my urges. Why don’t you read this?”
    “All right.”
    Faith pushed to her feet, wandered with her drink and her smoke. She imagined she’d done more serious thinking that day than she had in a very long time. Honest and serious thinking. She hadn’t solved anything, but she felt stronger for it.
    Wouldn’t it be odd if Tory’s coming back to Progress had started her on the road to finding contentment in her own life? She paused by the statue of her sister, looked at the face they had once shared. Wouldn’t it be, she mused, the ultimate irony if she found herself now, just when she realized she’d been looking all along?
    She glanced back at Tory—so cool, she thought. So calm on the surface with all those violent ripples and jolts underneath. It was admirable, really, the way Tory maintained that shield and didn’t turn brittle behind it.
    Spooky, Faith thought with a little smile, but not brittle.
    Brittle, she thought, was what her own mother had become. And brittle was what she herself had been on the edge of becoming. How strange, and somehow apt, that it was Tory who’d given her just enough of a jolt to break her stride before she’d rushed headlong into being what she’d fought against all her life.
    A warped mirror image of her own mother.
    She crushed her cigarette out, toed it under pine needles.
    “Maybe I should take up writing,” Faith said lightly, as she strolled back. “You appear to be riveted.”
    She’d been caught up, sliding into the rhythm of Faith’s words and the images they had running through her mind. She’d been both amused and sad. Then the pressure had come, the weight on her chest that caused her heart to beat too fast and hard.
    The place, she’d thought, the memories that pounded fists on the white wall of her defense. She wouldn’t answer them. Wouldn’t heed them. She would stay in the here and the now.
    But the cold skinned over her, and the dark crept toward the edges of her vision.
    The notebook slipped from her fingers, fell on the ground at her feet, where a