Free The Secrets She Keeps by Deb Caletti Page B

when she was looking around for an extra bottle of shampoo.”
    “A bottle of Breck circa 1977. It’ll make us go bald.”
    “It’ll make you go bald. I brought my own.”
    “She’d have a few things to say in a memoir. Didn’t some movie star come once? Ava Gardner, a fancy car, and something-something in a bar?”
    “Yeah. I feel like we’ve heard the same three stories over and over.”
    “Ava Gardner,” Shaye counted on her fingers. “Grandma and the drought…”
    “The time the lady set her room on fire when Mom and Nash were babies.”
    “So? It’ll be a short book.” Shaye bit the skin by her fingernail. “Can you believe she never got married? I can’t imagine it.”
    “Sure, you can’t imagine it.” I was joking, but maybe it was a bad time for it, especially after that fight I’d heard. I’d given Shaye a set of glass bowls for her first wedding to the brooding, controlling Mathew, a pair of vases when she briefly moved in with that sweet but chaotic artist from Montana, a knife set for her brief, disastrous union with Quentin, the fuming egomaniac, and nonstick pans when she married Eric.

    “Shut up!” she said, but it didn’t have much gusto. “Well, she had a few men in her life. There was that one guy for a while.”
    “She did? What guy?” Tex snored from the corner of the couch, where he probably didn’t belong. I could hear the sound of insect applause, the tick-tick-tick of moth wings against the glass of the window.
    “Hangy ears, backwoodsy name. Hooper? Hopper? Cooper! That was it. You don’t remember?”
    “I didn’t know! No one tells me anything.”
    “A few years before her mastectomy.”
    “I didn’t know about any Cooper.”
    “They weren’t together that long. It was before Harris.”
    “Harris? They’re together, for sure?”
    “Honestly? You can’t tell just by the way he looks at her? The man adores her. Oh, Cal, you’ve never been much of a romantic, have you.”
    “No, I guess not. You’re right.” She was. My first childhood crush had been on the Professor from Gilligan’s Island . He was the practical one, sure, but he was also the only one who might actually save the lost, with his phone made out of a coconut.
    “And I’m right about Harris. Trust me.”
    The ice had long ago diluted the alcohol in my glass, but I sipped it anyway. The radio was on softly. That stupid Dr. Yabba Yabba Love was back, with her easy psycho-relationship BS: What you think you see, you see . “God, turn that off,” I said. Shaye sat up, reached over, and pushed the power button. The unit was from the days when bigger was better and laser shows were in. Either the stereo was now off or the captain had just landed the spaceship.

    I flipped through another magazine I found under the coffee table, feeling slightly irritated. If Shaye knew so much about Nash, what was I doing here? “It’s like the historical museum of magazines down here.” I held up a Woman’s Day from 1960, with a woman and a man beaming over a glossy turkey.
    “That one had Reno in it.” Shaye pointed, and I reached for a Look from 1958, with Jerry Lewis and family on the cover. “No, that one.”
    “ Confidential ?” The face of some dead movie star beamed up at me, his teeth a row of perfect white Chiclets. “How do you know these things?”
    “I saw it when we were kids. It’s the same one.”
    “Your memory is amazing. Ask me what I had for dinner yesterday. No idea.”
    “Quiz me. I’m answer woman.”
    “Eric, for starters. Tell me what’s going on there.”
    She rolled her eyes. “I can’t. I don’t even want to talk about it.”
    “He doesn’t mind running things while you’re gone?” Shaye and Eric both did freelance marketing and were making a go of it under one umbrella.
    “Mind? He couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”
    “Okay, where are the kids? I’ll ask that.”
    “Eric’s girls are home. But, you know, Josh and Emma always spend a month with Mathew