Free How to Look Happy by Stacey Wiedower Page B

chicas.”
    I lean slightly toward Carrie, afraid the dark red wine in Quinn’s glass is going to slosh over the edge and onto my favorite skirt. I watch her as she sashays across the room toward a table full of twenty-something girls near the big picture window at the front of the bar. One of them puts her arm out as Quinn walks up and pulls her in for a drunken selfie.
    “She acts like she’s still twenty-two,” I mutter, irked at Quinn for butting in and making things worse for me.
    “Yeah. She does,” Carrie says. I see her shrug out of the corner of my eye. “Good for her.”
    “Good for her?” I repeat, incredulous.
    Carrie leans back in her chair, and I notice for the first time how exhausted she looks. She has on more makeup than usual, and I see now that it’s covering up dark shadows beneath both of her eyes. She closes them as she draws in a long sip of her pale gold wine, a California chardonnay, I’m sure—it’s her favorite. “Yeah. I mean, I feel about a hundred years old right now.”
    “Are you okay?” I ask. I haven’t realized how much pressure Carrie is under—or at least I haven’t realized how much it’s getting to her. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a week.
    “I’m fine,” she says quickly. But she sets her glass on the round table between us and starts rubbing her eyes with one hand, squeezing her brow. “It’s just that our accounts are down right now. We lost two major clients when Trey left, and we’ve got the overhead of the Dallas firm on top of us. I really needed the McMurtreys to sign on tonight. Thank God they did.”
    I drain the last sip from my glass. “Do you want to finish that and go on home?” I ask, pointing at her glass and feeling dismayed but also concerned. Carrie has a habit of worrying about everybody else more than herself, and she looks like she’s the one who needs to be taken care of right now, not me.
    “No, no,” she says. “Tell me about what happened at work today.”
    I tell the story of Candace’s sabotage as quickly as I can and then change the subject to Carrie’s newest niece—a topic that makes her happy. As she talks about how Mazie rolled over for the first time and how her sister was freaking out because her maternity leave is ending in less than two weeks, I feel relief to see the worry lines disappear from my friend’s forehead. Carrie obviously needs to relax as much as I do.
    I sprawl out in my chair in a way that’s probably less than ladylike, but I don’t care. The wine warms my stomach and softens the hard edges of the images going through my head—of Candace casually walking by my desk, picking up my samples, and trashing my afternoon’s work. As Carrie tells me about a cute onesie she found for Mazie at a vintage baby boutique down the street from our offices, the worry that’s been gnawing at my stomach all evening finally begins to dissipate.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Everybody’s Favorite Aunt
     
    “Can you sue for custody of a dog?” I ask, only half kidding. I’m on the phone with my sister-in-law, Eleanor. I called her to find out what type of gift she’s buying for Jake, Chris and Christine’s youngest, who’s turning two on Tuesday. His birthday party is tomorrow afternoon at their house on the far eastern end of the county. There’s a great divide in this city of people who live “inside the loop” and “outside the loop”—the loop being the ring road of Interstate 40 that circles the heart of Memphis. People who live outside the loop tend to hate driving into it but not as much as the people who live inside the loop hate to drive out. To hear my Midtown neighbors talk, you’d think Collierville, where my brother lives, was halfway to Alaska.
    But I digress.
    “Jeremy took Simon?” Eleanor asks in an incredulous tone. “Geez, Jen, did he stomp on your foot and slash your tires too? What a grade-A asshole.”
    “Yeah, well, that’s not the worst part.” I tell her how I found out about