Free A Better Man by Leah McLaren Page B

know it. So funny how we always end up here at the same time, isn’t it?”
    Maya smiley-nods and looks down longingly at her unread stack of crappy fashion magazines, but Rachel is having none of it.
    She tosses a leather handbag the size of a bowling-ball carrier down on the floor and plunks herself on the next chair over. A shampoo girl hops to it and begins hosing Rachel down in a portable sink, but Rachel doesn’t bother to acknowledge her, just continues chatting to Maya with her head thrown back under the suds.
    “So what’s up with you?” Her eyes widen in what Maya recognizes as an unvarnished yearning for scandal and misery.
If I told her Nick was leaving me for a lingerie model, she might actually die of excitement and happiness.
    “Not much. You?”
    Thankfully that’s all it takes to set Rachel off on a ten-minute monologue about two-year-old Verity’s new “boyfriend” at playgroup—a story that is ostensibly about the adorable mating rituals of toddlers but is actually intended to underline the remarkably precocious intelligence and charisma of her genetic issue.
    Despite the nature of their non-friendship, Maya’s actually known Rachel since her nightclub days, when she was a three-seabreezes-and-a-pack-of-chips-for-dinner kind of girl. Back then, Rachel was a publicist on the hunt for a rich husband, whom she eventually found in the form of Gormless Glen, the most un-entertaining entertainment lawyer in his field. Glen lets Rachel do whatever she wants whenever she wants, and for this she will never forgive him. By the time Antonio returns with his colour cart and begins the fussy work of painting and foiling Maya’s roots, Rachel is in full flow.
    “I’m telling you, he is
so
bad at gifts that this Christmas I’m actually just taking his credit card, buying my own gifts and putting them under the tree. All the lazy bastard has to do is signthe card, and I’ll probably have to nag him for days to do that. Anyway, the upside is I’ve already got this gorgeous tennis bracelet picked out at the Christie’s auction. It’s not romantic, but you have to make things easy for men, you know? Like I told Glen, he should consider himself lucky—all he has to do now is press Spend.” She cackles at her own unfunny joke.
    Maya offers a smile. “But maybe if you gave him a chance …?”
    Rachel bats her hands like she’s pushing Maya backwards off a cliff. “Bah! No way. I’ve tried that. If I didn’t do it for him, nothing would get done—trust me. It’s like everything: marriage, kids, buying a house, renovating, vacations, shopping for friggin’ groceries. If I didn’t do it, it would never get done. Honestly, sometimes I think if I hadn’t showed up in his life and stamped my little foot, he’d still be living in his roachy law school apartment, watching pay-per-view in his tighty-whities. And for this, what do I get? The privilege of buying my own Christmas presents.” Rachel shakes her head to convey how utterly convincing she finds herself. “Sometimes I honestly feel like Glen was sent here to help me cultivate patience. Like some kind of test of character from God, do you know what I mean? Surely you must feel the same way about Nick sometimes. How are things going with his company? Is he still crazy busy?”
    Maya leans back and one of Antonio’s tinfoil flaps falls forward, mercifully concealing her eyes. She knows that in passive-aggressive Rachelspeak, “crazy busy” is code for “workaholic bastard who neglects your every need.” Frustrated as she is, Maya has never been able to master the art of venting about her marriage to others. She prefers to keep her unhappiness to herself—not because she’s especially private but becauseco-rumination seems to trivialize things. She likes to think of her marriage as being in a special kind of trouble, rather than the garden-variety type.
    “Mmm … yeah, most of the time,” she mutters. “How’s Glen’s new practice