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  “No kidding,” Sarah said, scanning the diners. “They’ve got more fat people in this restaurant than they do in all of Newport Beach.”

  “That’s enough,” Amanda said, unable to stifle her laughter. “It feels good to laugh. I feel like I haven’t laughed in months.”

  “Have any plans for how you’re going to run the Ball?” Elizabeth asked, just as the waiter came to take their order—chicken-fried steak for Elizabeth, pot roast for Amanda, chopped sirloin for Will, and a chicken Caesar salad for Sarah.

  “I’ve got no idea at all about how to run the Ball,” Amanda admitted. “The biggest thing I’ve ever organized was my wedding, and that was a long time ago. And I had a wedding planner to help with that.”

  “I’m sure there are good event planners who could give you a hand with the Ball,” Elizabeth said. “I could look into that, if you want.”

  “That would be great. I wouldn’t even know who to ask here.”

  “Sarah’s right,” Will said suddenly, looking around the restaurant. “Gigi, why is everybody in Dallas so fat?”

  “I’m not fat!” Elizabeth said indignantly.

  “Mommy says that’s because you smoke like you’re on fire,” Sarah said.

  Amanda reddened. Elizabeth shrugged. “Well, out of the mouths of babes. I guess I could cut down a little bit.”

  “Children in Southern California are just different,” Amanda said apologetically.

  “They’re sassier, I’ll grant you that. Any news from Mr. Black Mercedes?”

  Amanda shook her head. “Honestly, I was looking around the church, trying to see if I saw any men staring at me. I thought I saw a lot of women looking in my direction, but no men.”

  “I’m sure he’s not going to quit now. Men love it when you play hard to get. And on top of that, you still have a gift card from Neiman’s for ninety-eight thousand dollars in your purse.”

  Amanda had returned everything to the store. Usually with a credit that large the store opened an account for the client; however, because Amanda’s divorce was pending, she wasn’t able to open any new accounts in her name until it was final. So instead, ever-helpful Neiman’s had provided her with the gift card.

  Will’s eyes widened. “You have a gift card from Neiman’s for ninety-eight thousand dollars?” he asked, awestruck.

  Amanda had a policy of never lying to her children unless it seemed like a good idea. “Yes, I do. Somebody gave me some things, and I sent them back to the store.”

  “But ninety-eight thousand dollars’ worth?” Sarah asked, equally astonished. “Somebody really likes you!”

  “It isn’t Dad!” Will said.

  “You got that right,” Amanda said, sadly unsurprised by her son’s smart mouth. It’s exactly the same thing Bill would have said, had he been there.

  “What are you gonna do with the gift card?” Sarah asked.

  “Yeah, what are you gonna do with the gift card?” Elizabeth echoed. “Buy yourself the his-and-hers suits of armor from this year’s Christmas catalog? Since you didn’t want all those nice sweaters and dresses.”

  “You can buy suits of armor at Neiman Marcus?” Will asked, intrigued. “Cool! You can’t find anything like that at Nordstrom’s.”

  “Or his-and-hers helicopters,” Elizabeth said. “Or a diamond-studded personal spa set. Maybe you can get Neiman’s to donate something to the Longhorn Ball. Or maybe you can auction off the gift card! Mr. Black Mercedes just wants you to be happy, right?”

  “The gift card is going back to the store tomorrow morning,” Amanda said firmly. “Right after I enroll you guys in school.”

  “School sucks,” Will declared.

  “If you don’t stop saying that word,” Amanda said, “I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap and then send you to military school. I’ll make sure you don’t see another girl until your eighteenth birthday.”

  “Awww, Mom!” her son whined.

  “Seriously, Amanda,” Elizabeth steered the conversation back to her subject of choice. “Have you given any thought to how you’re going to run the Ball? Where you’re going to get started? What you’re going to do your first day?”

  Amanda shook her head as the waiter brought lunch. “No idea,” she admitted. “I’ll consider my first day a success if they don’t lead me out of the office in handcuffs, like Susie. Come on, guys. Let’s just stop talking about the Ball and Mr. Black Mercedes and Neiman Marcus, and let’s just eat. Okay?”

  Chapter 13

  Sunday night, after Will and Sarah had gone to bed, Amanda stayed up until two in the morning, trying to get as many moving boxes wrestled to the ground as possible. By the time she collapsed in bed for five hours of dreamless sleep, she had unpacked two-thirds of the boxes in the living room and all of her clothes upstairs.

  Another day or two and she would have the whole job finished, she told herself. Although that day would not be Monday, because Heather had texted her late Sunday night that they should meet at the Longhorn Ball office at ten a.m. Monday so that Amanda could get started in her new role as Ball Chair.

  On Monday morning, Amanda walked a sullen Will and a quiet Sarah the six blocks from their new home to Hillside Park Middle School, which, to Will’s delight, seemed to have fourteen hundred students riding fourteen hundred skateboards. Will, board in hand, rolled directly into the mass of students and only reemerged when he realized he didn’t know what classroom to go to. Sarah looked doubtfully at the other students. In a concerned tone, she whispered, “Mommy, there are so many fat kids!”

  Amanda was about to object to her daughter’s use of the word kids, when she looked around and realized it was true. The epidemic of obesity that she kept reading about in magazines appeared to have skipped over Newport Beach, where, it seemed, you could grab any ten adolescents and pull together an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. But here, in the middle of the country, the kids were definitely bigger in the middle.

  “I’m sure you’ll find some other students who are just as committed to healthy eating as you are,” Amanda said, squeezing her daughter’s hand. She wondered why in California people worshipped healthy carbohydrates more than they worshipped God. She vowed to concentrate on redirecting Sarah’s obsession on weight and dieting.

  The paperwork didn’t take long to complete, and Amanda thought she recognized a few of the administrators from when she had attended the same school twenty years earlier. They looked just as old now as they had then, although they must have been in their twenties or thirties then. When you’re young, everybody looks old, and old is old whether you’re in your twenties or your seventies, Amanda decided. It wasn’t until you got a few years under your belt that you were able to make distinctions.

  Will and Sarah disappeared into the crush of students, and Amanda walked home to get her rented SUV so she could drive the mile and a half over to the Longhorn Ball office to meet Heather.

  An hour later, at ten o’clock, after finding herself unable to resist the temptation to tussle with a few more kitchen boxes, Amanda arrived punctually outside the Longhorn Ball office. There, in the exact spot where she had seen Susie led off by two Hillside Park gendarmes just a few days earlier, stood Heather Sappington, chatting on a cell phone, unaware of Amanda’s approach till the very last minute.

  “Oh-oh, there she is!” Heather exclaimed, her tone, to Amanda’s ear, somewhat guilty. What’s that all about, she wondered.

  “Good morning!” Heather sang out, a little too cheerfully for Amanda’s taste. She never trusted anyone who was cheerful at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. She certainly never was.

  “Good morning,” Amanda replied, her tone somewhat more businesslike. “I appreciate your coming down and taking time out to give me the keys.”

  Heather shook her head. “No, it’s you who everybody appreciates,” she gushed. “Taking on such a big job. It really is so sweet of you.”

  “Well,” Amanda said, wanting to shorten the conversation and not knowing why, “w
e’ll see how sweet everybody thinks I am if I can actually pull this off.”

  “Oh, I’ve got no doubt you’ll do a fantastic job,” Heather said, a little too patronizingly in Amanda’s opinion. Heather reached into her dated Prada handbag and pulled out the keys for Amanda.

  “Good luck!” Heather said, giving her an air kiss. And then, under her breath, “You’re gonna need it.”

  Amanda, puzzled, nodded thanks.

  “Gotta run, sweetie! Ann’ll be waiting for me. And I’ve got to make a doctor’s appointment.”

  “How’d that deal go,” Amanda asked, curious, “the one with that guy who wanted to buy a ranch last week?”

  Now it was Heather’s turn to look puzzled. “What ranch? Ann never told me anything about a guy trying to buy a ranch.”

  “But there was—” Amanda began. She cut herself off, realizing that she had been played. “Never mind, it isn’t important.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, gotta get to the office. Call me if you need anything. Bye.”

  Amanda watched her all but sprint toward the Jaguar parked at the corner opposite the church. Amanda found herself wondering how exactly Heather managed to own a Jaguar, given her presumed level of income, but Heather had all sorts of ways of making nice things appear in her life. It was really none of Amanda’s business, and she knew it. She turned around and faced the door of the Longhorn Ball office, took a deep breath, unlocked it, and stepped inside.

  The best way to describe what she saw would be “unorganized chaos.” The Longhorn Ball offices—an entry foyer where a paid assistant usually sat, two executive offices, one of which would now be Amanda’s, and a file room—looked as though they had not been cleaned in weeks. As Amanda wandered through the rooms, she was shocked to see stacks of unopened mail, file folders all over the floor, and a layer of dust on top of everything. It looked as though the place had been ransacked and the burglars, finding nothing of value, had simply left everything all over the chairs, desktops, and floors. It was obvious that there had been desktop computers, judging from the discoloration on the desks where the computers had once sat, but they were gone. What exactly had Susie been doing all that time in the office? Or had she ever even come to the office? It was hard to say.

  Amanda, speechless, walked into Susie’s office, now hers, and the mess here was the same as in the other rooms—papers strewn all over the floor, envelopes everywhere. The only signs of life or color in the office were a pair of Jimmy Choos under Susie’s desk and a cocktail dress hanging on the back of the door that Susie must have kept for sudden social emergencies.

  Amanda didn’t know where to begin. It seemed as though her life had suddenly turned into nothing but cleaning and organizing—in the home she had rented for herself and her children, and now here. Suddenly it dawned on her why nobody had wanted to take on the responsibility of being Ball Chair. Everybody else in town must have known the exact dimensions of Susie’s reign of error. The gossip mill must have let everyone in Hillside Park know just how crazy the situation in the office was, just what a mess would have to be cleaned up before any attention could be turned to next year’s Ball. No wonder everybody was so convinced that the Longhorn Ball might never recover from Susie’s year.

  “Where do I begin?” Amanda was muttering to herself when she heard a knock at the door. Opening it, she found, to her surprise, her mother.

  “No way I was going to let you do this all by yourself,” Elizabeth said by way of greeting. “I heard through the grapevine how messed up it was in here. I’m so sorry, honey. I wanted to get here before you did so we could go in together. Wow, it’s even worse than I thought.”

  “It’s bad, all right,” Amanda said, looking gratefully at her mother. The idea that her mother would actually show up and help her out with something was so hard to process that she could barely think of anything else. “Where do we begin?”

  “At the beginning,” her mother said, surveying the wreckage with a cool eye and arms folded. “I see a lot of unopened mail. Let’s find out what the hell is going on. There might be unpaid bills, checks—who knows what? Let’s just start off by making piles, and then we can figure what’s what.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Amanda said, but all she really wanted to do was put the keys on the desk, run out of the office, and never come back. That wasn’t her nature, though. She was far too responsible a person to do a thing like that, and she knew it. The only way out was to push through.

  For the next hour, Amanda and Elizabeth attempted to organize the envelopes, documents, file folders, and all the other messes from Susie’s time as Ball Chair. They went through all the papers on the floor, on top of the desks, and on the filing cabinets. When they were done, they had three stacks of envelopes, each a foot high, and several hundred file folders, half of which were empty. Then came the biggest surprise of all, when Amanda opened the drawers of Susie’s desk and found the bank books for the organization—along with stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

  “Mom, you’ve gotta see this,” Amanda said. “Take a look.”

  Elizabeth came into the office from another room and saw the stacks of cash, which Amanda was now piling up on the desk. She emitted a low whistle. “All hundreds?”

  Amanda rifled through some of the stacks. “It looks that way,” she said.

  “I can’t believe this. That must be fifty thousand dollars in cash. We’ve got to get all that to the bank.”

  “This is nuts.”

  “This is beyond nuts,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head disgustedly. “I always thought Susie was a little stupid. Now I think she’s the biggest idiot I’ve ever seen. Dumber than dirt! This is just unbelievable.”

  “What are we gonna do? This is a little beyond my experience.”

  “You know how I met your dad, right?” Elizabeth asked.

  Amanda shook her head. Of course she did, but she had no idea which of the many versions of the story she’d hear today.

  “I was his bookkeeper,” Elizabeth said. “I told you that. I studied bookkeeping in college, because I looked at the way all the marriages of my friends’ parents ended in divorce. I figured I’d need to know how to keep track of money if I was going to survive. Besides, my father was a banker, and naturally, he insisted. So I was temping as a part-time bookkeeper one summer, and that’s how I met your dad.”

  “You know what to do with all this stuff?” Amanda asked, waving a hand at the cash, the envelopes, and the files.

  “You don’t need to be a bookkeeper to know that you’ve got to open the envelopes and see what’s inside. Let’s start by counting the cash, and then we’ll move to the envelopes, and then we’ll move to the files. That’s probably as good a starting point as any.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m not the boss,” she reminded her daughter. “You are. I’m just the hired help.”

  The women grinned and started to count the hundred-dollar bills. Twenty minutes later, after counting and recounting the money, they came to the total of eighty-two thousand, five hundred dollars. Elizabeth went into the file room and emerged with a shopping bag. She stuck all the cash in it and brought it back to her new office.

  “Why would Susie have that kind of cash lying around anyway?” Amanda asked.

  “Beats me. She must have been running this thing like her own personal bank account. She’s lucky they only arrested her for trespassing. If she was siphoning cash from this thing, she could go to prison. Not even that billionaire husband of hers could help her then. Actually, he probably wouldn’t even want to. If she went to prison, life’s got to get better for him.”

  They both laughed, but then Amanda turned serious. “I still don’t understand how anybody could be so . . . thoughtless. I mean, didn’t she think at some point somebody would see what was going on?”

  “Not everybody’s responsible. If you don’t believe it, take a look at the world around you.”

  Amanda nodde
d glumly. “I guess you’re right. Let’s dig into these envelopes.”

  For the next two hours, they sorted through the stacks of unopened mail. To the surprise of neither of the women, the envelopes contained hundreds of uncashed checks and hundreds of unpaid bills, nasty letters, and threats to turn off the electricity and phone. Suddenly it dawned on Amanda that she had not even tried to turn the lights on, because the office was so flooded with morning light through its picture windows. She tried the switch. Nothing happened.

  “No power,” she told her mother.

  She picked up the phone. No dial tone.

  “No phone?” Elizabeth asked.

  “There’s a shocker,” Amanda said sarcastically. “What hath Susie wrought?”

  “I admit I’m kind of blown away,” Elizabeth said. “I expected it to be bad, but not this bad. Let’s get the checkbook out and start writing checks. We’ve got a whole bunch of angry creditors. I’ll do that while you add up the checks. Between the cash and the checks, we ought to have enough to pay off the bills. I hope.”

  Amanda went to work. Then she thought of something else.

  “Don’t let me forget,” she said. “I’ve got to get to Neiman’s and turn in this gift card.” She took it out of her bag and put it on the corner of her new desk.

  “How much was it for again?” Elizabeth asked, glancing at the card.

  “Around ninety-eight thousand,” Amanda said.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “What’s this guy gonna do once you start showing him a little attention? Buy you an island?”

  “No attention, no island. I don’t have the bandwidth for a relationship right now, Mom. I’ve got my hands full right here.”

  “Bandwidth! Is that how people in California talk?”

  Amanda glanced at her mother. “That’s how Bill talked,” she admitted. “He liked all that technical jargon.”