Free All That Was Happy by M.M. Wilshire Page B

office--I’ve made up my
mind. I’m walking in there and I’m going to blow him to
smithereens.”
    “ You’re not kidding, are you?” Scotia
said.
    “ Scotia,” Beckie said. “I’m absolutely
not kidding. I’m going out tonight with a new guy, and I’m going to
have one, final, really good meal with him at this great little
Mexican place I know of. It’ll be me and my new date and my best
friend Leah and her husband Ira. Then I’m going to get a good
night’s sleep, take the limo over to the lawyer’s office, wait
until we’re all seated at the conference table, and put four shots
straight into Bernie’s fat little heart.”
    Scotia’s voice went high, urgent.
“Beckie?”
    “ Look,” Beckie said. “I’ve tried to get
into the WE thing, and the sessions with Dr. Black and all, but I
just can’t do it. I’ve been married for twenty-nine years to the
same fat little businessman--that’s been my life. It’s probably a
life few women would envy. I haven’t learned to do anything
creative in all that time, haven’t explored myself, or ran
marathons, or raised kids--the only thing I’ve done is collect
little ceramic figurines--I’ve done that, maybe a bit too
much--I’ve got over a thousand of them in the vault at Bekins. But
that’s it. It’s too late for a woman like me to learn anything
about how she fits into the universe. I liked being married to
Bernie--I didn’t love him with the kind of passion I was supposed
to have, but in my own way I loved being with him. I liked being
financially secure. I was ready to finish it out to the end--what I
don’t like is being left alone, and having my husband making a baby
with his hot young Irish-Hispanic secretary. What I don’t like is
being left standing in my bathrobe at the corner of Wilshire and
Barrington without my car. What I don’t like is being summoned to
appear by my husband’s lawyers so they can lowball me and take
advantage of my disorientation and flimflam me into giving up
what’s rightfully mine. Believe me, Scotia--I’m deadly serious when
I say I’m going to send my husband to the afterlife
tomorrow.”
    “ But you never loved him?” Scotia
said.
    “ I respected him, and in my own way I
loved him,” Beckie said. “But that’s beside the point. In fact,
that may be the main reason I’m going to do it. You know, perhaps I
have discovered who I am after all--I’m a woman in a killing
rage--and let me tell you, right now it feels great. King Solomon
had it right--there’s a time to kill. I’ll do the weeping after
Bernie’s gone.”
    “ I’m skipping your massage,” Scotia
said. “This is getting too weird for me--I can’t handle the way
you’re acting--you need to go straight in to Vito. Maybe he can do
something with you.”
     
    Chapter
15
     
    “ I should tell you,” Vito said. “That
dog of yours makes a pretty poor Chihuahua--we brought in a couple
of those chalupas from the Taco Bell down on Melrose and he
wouldn’t touch them--it appears his tastes are a good deal more
sophisticated--we finally got him to eat a couple of jumbo quail we
had left over from a party last night.”
    “ There’s no accounting for taste,”
Beckie said. “I wish all my problems were as small as that
dog.”
    “ When you’ve got a big problem,” Vito
said. “The first step is to admit there’s nothing you can do about
it.”
    “ You mean just forget about solving
it?” Beckie said.
    “ I mean, nobody ever solves a big
problem by solving the big problem. They do it by solving all the
small problems leading up to the big problem. When you solve the
small problems, one-by-one, by the time you get to the big problem,
it no longer exists, because big problems are just collections of
small problems in the first place.”
    Beckie, sitting on a stool and draped with a
black sheet in the windowless, mirror-less, soundproof cutting
chamber, the top of her head the focus of a single spotlight
shining down on her from the