Free Wife-In-Law by Haywood Smith

especially to their husbands.”
    Best friends?
    Nobody had ever used those words to apply to me, and my eyes welled in gratitude and astonishment. “Thanks,” I stammered. “And your secrets will be safe with me. That’s what I do best, keeping secrets.” Kat’s heart was as big as the moon, and I liked the idea of finally having a best friend at last.
    She looked at me with such compassion, I almost lost control and cried. “Don’t worry, Bets,” she said with absolute sincerity. “I’m safe. You can trust me with your secrets.”
    “Okay.” After all those years of keeping people at a distance, trusting Kat was one of the hardest things I ever did, but I never regretted it.
    As for the Kama Sutra, Greg enjoyed my experiments immensely, but eventually grew suspicious and asked me where I was getting all my ideas.
    I just smiled.
    Let him wonder. Keeping a few secrets from your husband can be very, very sexy.

Eight
     
    The second Tuesday in October, 1976. Eden Lake Court
     
    N ineteen seventy-six was one of those good news/bad news years on Eden Lake Court. The good news was, Kat and I had become best friends. In the past two years, she’d looked out for me like nobody had since Daddy left me to fend for myself. She never questioned my helping my mother, but always took my side when Mama acted up. Kat always noticed whenever I was down, and cheered me up with funny stories from her life. She could even tell when I was getting sick, before I could (she said I “had that coming-down look”), and always brought me flowers (mostly from my own garden, but I didn’t mind). It’s the thought that counts, and she didn’t have any flowers in her own yard.
    We shopped together, did projects together. And we went to every chick flick that came to town. So, in the past two years, we’d been good company for each other, in spite of our opposite ideas about most everything, especially politics.
    The bad news was, 1976 was our first major election as friends, and a sorry election it was.
    Of all the Georgians in the history of my native state, why the good Lord and the devil made a pact to run Jimmy Carter, of all people, as our first and only presidential candidate was beyond me.
    I’m not saying he wasn’t a good man. I truly believed he was—committed to his ideals and Christian faith, and his marriage vows, which counts for something. But his platform and politics were pure pie-in-the-sky. He’d won the governor’s seat by painting himself as a fiscal and political reformer, promising to clean up the excess and corruption that had pervaded Georgia politics since Reconstruction. But all Carter did, once elected, was shuffle departments and rename them, which didn’t accomplish much besides infuriating the powers that be (including our Antichrist of a political boss, Tom Murphy). The most notorious example was the renamed state trade delegation, which couldn’t even get anybody overseas to take their calls, much less see them, till they went back to being the Georgia Trade Commission—with a whopping big stationery bill, paid for by we the people. Multiply that times twenty, and you get the picture. So much for fiscal reform.
    Not that I don’t give the man credit for trying. But it’s like what Teddy Roosevelt said about trying to reform the Department of the Navy: it was like boxing with a feather bed; when it was over, he was worn out, but the feather bed was in the same shape it was when he started.
    So there Carter was, running for president, promising to fix things nobody could fix. All the transplants in the neighborhood and at church thought I’d be thrilled to support a native son for president, but I set them straight, making sure to compliment his morals.
    I tried to set Kat straight too, but she refused to listen. Seems Carter met Zach at some state function several years ago and asked if he was married, and Zach told him he and Kat had been together for two years. Carter clapped him on the