Mean Woman Blues

enabling us both to be rich for the rest of our lives.” In spite of herself, she felt something like hatred cross her face. “Yeah, baby.” he said. “We’ve been over this territory. What’s yours is mine.”
    She looked at Todd’s body lying on her bed, blood seeping into the mattress, the carpet, the pretty, red-figured cover. Jail looked kind of attractive at the moment; she could easily end up like he had.
    She said, “Of course, sweetheart. Let’s get out of the country.”
    Perhaps he’d try to use her as a hostage. That might be good; if she got out alive, she’d be a victim. The whole thing was to buy time.

CHAPTER TWENTY
    After her husband had left for work (quite a long while after) Karen got up and dressed for the first time in two days— in black pants and white T-shirt— and moved out to the garden to think.
    She sat in an Adirondack chair, staring at the annuals she’d so laboriously and lovingly planted that spring. The jasmine was just starting to bloom. The smell of it was slightly nauseating.
    She’d thought maybe she was pregnant the night she had the talk with Carol Ann; sitting there talking about how she wanted a baby, she’d been thinking,
and maybe I’m carrying one
. And so, the day of the show, she went and got a home pregnancy kit. She tested positive, only about ten hours before she lost the baby. She thought she was over her crying, but when she thought of that now, silent tears ran down her face. It hurt to remember how excited she was, how she had first fallen into a reverie and decorated the baby’s room in her head, then thought how much fun it would be to go to the show and surprise her husband with the news. That was the whole point of the visit. That was what she had come for, and he’d hit her and killed their baby. Ever since then, those two facts had been her whole world. Now she was working on moving out the other side.
    The question was this: Could she forgive him? The promised “details at eleven” had never been provided.
    But anyone deserved a second chance, right?
    Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
The old saying echoed in her brain. The complicated thing about it was that David hadn’t fooled her twice. Charlie Bennett had fooled her the first time.
    Then there’s my father
, she thought. He’d fooled her more than once. What she wondered was, was there any man she could trust? Other women trusted men. Why not Karen? David really had been under a lot of pressure, and he really had acted in anger. And she loved him, and she wanted to be with him.
    Or at any rate, there was so much about being with him that she wanted. She was Mrs. Right. Wife of an up-and-coming local celeb. There was pride in that. Even if future First Lady was only a pipe dream.
    And she had this nice house, and security, and love, and the possibility of a baby…. She teared up.
But not the baby I was carrying two days ago.
    Everywhere she turned, it was like that. Good, then bad; bad, then good.
    I need to work it through
, she thought.
    She looked at her watch. Two hours had passed. Without even making the decision to do so, she went back into the house, found a yoga tape, slipped it into the VCR, and changed into workout clothes.
    The tape began with breathing. And after the breathing, what the teacher called “The Potted Palm” series, sitting stretches: bending, grabbing for her toes…
    And after that standing stretches. She had her butt high in the air, deep in Downward Facing Dog, Mr. Right and her problem forgotten, nothing in the world on her mind but pushing up with her thigh muscles, shifting the weight to the outsides of her feet, trying, as always, to get her heels a little closer to the ground, when the phone rang. She ignored it.
    In a moment, someone knocked on the door. She ignored that too. And then the knock became louder, more insistent, like the police knock you hear on television.
    She righted herself, frowning, trying to figure out who on earth it could be. The phone rang again. Automatically, she answered it. “Just a minute, there’s someone at the door…”
    The voice on the phone said, “FBI. Come out with your hands up.”
    She heard a noise like an explosion and then running footsteps. And there in her bedroom were a phalanx of men in riot gear, pointing guns at her.
    “Don’t forget to breathe,” the yoga master said. The tape was still running.
    She dropped the phone, screaming.
This wasn’t her life.
    “Don’t