SquidgeWorld Archive

It is a beautiful day in Maui. Most days are beautiful in Maui, though. It's one of the reasons she wanted to live here. And now she does, though by herself, which was never what she had intended.

The restaurant has a patio overlooking the beach. An umbrella shades the table from the bright sun that turns the beach denizens brown... unthinkable for her, as her skin has always been one of her best assets. No leathery skin for her, unlike two of the other women seated at the table of four. A good fake tan has been a necessity for years - deep enough to give good color, yet still soft enough to attract a man with the bankbook she needs.

The four women, none a day under fifty, are now ladies who lunch. Their widowhoods or divorces are the stuff of legend, and of hefty bankbooks. Only she has no bankroll to her name - she has squandered in her time what at least one of the women has only just inherited this past year. She pretends to more money than she has, so that her new circle of friends may find her a new catch.

The last one got away, and that far too quickly. Without leaving anything behind. She should have realized that his apparent near-senility was a disguise for cunning; his reputation for it preceded him, after all. But good food, a high credit limit, and some surprisingly fantastic sex had blinded her to the truth.

Just that once. She'd never make the same mistakes again.

"... you, my dear?"

The sound interrupts her thoughts. "Pardon me, Marlene?" She looks up from her wine spritzer.

"Beverly, dear. I was asking you for your story. There's always a story."

"Which story? I'm sorry, I was distracted for a moment."

"The 'how I last got to be single again' story, dear. Once you've been through the collective number of marriages this little 'caffee klatch' has, there's a story for everything. And we haven't known you long enough to dwell over every moment of your last divorce yet."

Beverly Bridge Crane sighs to herself. There are so many aspects one could cover - some less flattering than others. She thinks it best to omit the fraudulent home remodeling career from the details, as a start.

"My dears," she announces dramatically, "I filed for divorce the day after the wedding."

Appropriately aghast breaths are drawn about her.

"At the reception - the reception, no less, at the Boston Harbor Hotel, my husband wound up in the cloakroom..." She grasps for the proper words, trying to balance decorum and need for effect. "... In the cloakroom, with a cocktail waitress, under a stack of coats." God, she sounds like she's playing "Clue".

Even more aghast sounds emerge from Marlene, Chloe, and Deirdre.

"But that wasn't all."

Chloe gulps. Her audience is captive now, just the way Beverly likes it.

"My husband was a lawyer - one of the biggest in Boston, actually." She times the next sentence carefully. "Denny Crane - Crane, Poole, and Schmidt."

"You're joking," Deirdre murmurs with some excitement. "Shirley Schmidt handled my divorce when she was at their Washington office. Back when I was married to Gordon. She bled him - it was beautiful." That needs no explanation. And Bev had pieced together that Shirley had been involved with the Secretary of Defense at one point; Deirdre's "Gordon" had been Assistant Secretary of... Labor? Commerce? Something like that? It was hard to keep all of those government official types straight. "I've heard about Denny Crane."

Bev doesn't want details of that, so she moves on with her story. "So I filed the next day. But apparently the waitress wasn't the worst of it."

"No." Deidre is enthralled, clutching her Bloody Mary tightly and staring at Bev.

"I found out during the whole thing - you know how gossip travels - that he'd been sleeping with one of his associates for some time before he'd met me. And almost immediately after the divorce, they moved in together at Denny's. Denny didn't even wait."

"Some twenty-nothing blonde," Marlene mutters. "It always is."

"Not this time," Beverly announces. "Fortyish, I think. Brown hair. Named Alan." She pronounces it for effect - "Aaaall-ehn," which made it clear that she hadn't said "Ellen". The sound seemes to take five syllables and all of her adenoids, if she still has them. Too much surgery about the face -- one forgets such things.

"Alan?" Deirdre dropps her Bloody Mary to the table. "Now that's one thing Shirley never said about him!"

"Truth," Bev declares triumphantly. She is winning the latter-aged divorcee game of "can you top this" and she knows it. "Denny actually told people in the office, out loud, that they were sleeping together. Admitted it to everyone there. Alan moved in as soon as the property negotiations were done. The ink wasn't even dry."

Chloe shakes her head. "My third husband wore my dresses, but that was about it."

A waitress in a white shirt and black bow tie hovers. She looks far too much like the cocktail waitress who had ruined everything. As if Alan hadn't ruined things first. All the nights Denny had "worked late" prior to the wedding... all the nights they weren't together... all of it probably had been Alan. Denny had been an hour late the night they were to go look for flatware... he'd probably been with Alan then, too. "I'll have the avocado and shrimp salad, thank you."

Waves crash on the beach, scattering the people along the edge of the water, pulling debris with it in its wake. Denny Crane was the wave who had crashed into her.

The waitress takes her menu and is gone.