Free Back In the Game by Holly Chamberlin Page B

acceptable to cheat because you have a black eye but not acceptable because your soul is bruised?”
    â€œSo,” Sally said, with a wicked gleam in her eye, “now that we know Matt’s not a wife beater, can we have his number?”
    A few of the women laughed uncomfortably. Sally, I realized, wasn’t kidding. I felt stunned.
    â€œI don’t have it,” I said. “It’s unlisted. We’re not in touch.”
    Sally turned to her neighbor with a smirk. “Who can blame him?”
    Â 
    By the time I got home that night—after a long departmental meeting, after a stalled train—I was wiped out, a dishrag, a wet noodle.
    The women’s message had been clear. Men who cheat are despicable but normal. Women who cheat are whores. Worse, they are potential threats to all other women, especially those who are married. After all, if you’ll cheat on your own husband, what’s to stop you from stealing another woman’s husband?
    I tried to eat something but had little appetite. At eight-thirty I got ready for bed. In the bathroom I saw Matt’s shaving equipment on the sink. It wasn’t really there but I saw it anyway, like an accusation.
    I looked straight in the bathroom mirror and spoke these words aloud: I broke my marriage vow. I did something wrong. But I believe, deep down, that I am a good person, a good person who has done a bad thing. I am not an aberration of nature, no matter what the Women of Divorce think.
    I am not an aberration.

Chapter 12
    Nell

    Tip #348: Redirect the money you reserved for charity to your Personal Plastic Surgery Fund. Remember: As a middle-aged single woman in America, you are in much more need of help than orphaned plague victims.
    â€”You Need All the Help You Can Get: Dating in Middle Age

    â€œS o, little lady, what will it be?”
    I smiled tightly. I really wanted to leap from my seat at the white-clothed table and run, but I sat tight and smiled tighter.
    â€œI think,” I said to the red-faced, overfed specimen across from me, “that I’ll have the broiled fish.”
    I hoped my choice of entrée would put him off. I assumed he’d try to bully me into eating red meat, and that the more I refused the more he’d realize I was not the “little lady” for him.
    I was wrong. I’d never been up against this particular breed of man before.
    â€œNow that’s what I like to hear!” he boomed. “A lady taking care of her looks, watching her weight so her man can look across the room when she makes an entrance and know that every other man in that room is crazy with jealousy.”
    What, I wondered, had Jane Roberts, someone I’d known for years, someone I thought sane, what had Jane been thinking fixing me up with this caricature?
    Over the salad—which Mr. Longhorn barely touched—I was informed that a pretty little thing like me shouldn’t be all on her own in a big city like this. “I don’t know what that ex-husband of yours was thinking when he took off on you,” Mr. Longhorn said, shaking his head sadly. “That homosexuality, it’s a disease is what it is, a disease and a crime against God and man. And against all the little ladies like you.”
    Have you ever been so shocked, so appalled by the words coming out of someone’s mouth you can’t even protest? You’re frozen, you can’t imagine where you would even begin to argue.
    â€œUuuh,” I said.
    Over dessert and coffee—I made sure to order the double portion of cheesecake in a last-ditch effort to repulse him—Mr. Longhorn promised me my very own horse. I protested that I didn’t ride. He laughed loudly and assured me that if he had anything to do with it, I’d be sitting tall in the saddle before long.
    The check arrived and Mr. Longhorn signed with a flourish. I began to rise but Mr. Longhorn reached for my hand and anchored me to my seat. He