Calling Invisible Women by Jeanne Ray Read Free Book Online Page B

than he was. “You’ve got a house and a dog and you’re married to a doctor. You’re fine.”
    “It’s not all about the money, kiddo. You’re right, I’m not out on the street, but neither are you.” I squeezed his wrist. “I bet we’ll both find something.”
    “You’ve got a meeting,” he said, brushing me off. “Underemployed people shouldn’t be late for meetings.”
    “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. Throw the tennis ball for Red a few times before you go?”
    “Sure,” he said. “I’m good at that. If there was a job posting for a tennis-ball thrower for terriers I’d have it all sewn up.” He filled in another word. “Oh, by the way, Grandma called. Maybe you were in the shower. She wanted to know why you haven’t been in yoga class. She said that Dad told her you were depressed.”
    “Dad has apparently been handing out leaflets to that effect.”
    “So I told her that was crazy and I’d never seen you so happy in my life. I said you were probably missing yoga because you’ve been raising money to cure cancer and hanging out with your friends and writing great articles and teaching Red to balance on a beach ball.”
    “Did you tell her that?”
    Nick was quiet for a moment. “Yeah. I did.”
    Arthur’s mother taught yoga at the YMCA on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and weekly meditation workshops at the Unitarian Church on Saturday afternoons and the occasional vegetarian cooking class, though now she was a vegan. She was seventy-six. She would be sympathetic to my invisibility. She would also be positive that she knew exactly how to reverse it, and that would no doubt involve me drinking great quantities of wheatgrass juice. I just wasn’t feeling up to wheatgrass yet. I told my son I loved him and went out to face the unknown.
    Over the years I had attended many of my children’s sports banquets at the Sheraton (that’s counting cheerleading as a sport), along with a few bridal shows and a couple of Ohio board of tourism conventions that I covered for the paper. So it wasn’t as if I had any problems walking into the Sheraton, but still, it was taking me a few minutes to get my courage up. I sat in the car until 9:50 and then took out the fresh Kleenex I had put in the side pocket of my purse and went inside.
    For a few minutes I snooped around discreetly, looking for an easel with a signboard on it saying “Welcome, Invisible Women!” or something like that. When I didn’t find anything, I went to the front desk, where a dark-haired girl in a navy suit was typing away at a computer. “Excuse me,” I said.
    “Just one minute,” she said, drawing the word one out until it had five syllables. She didn’t look up and so I was left to stand there and admire the gloss of her hair, wondering how it was that girls who worked in hotels always had such glossy hair, when I suddenly felt a strong hand on my upper arm, a security guard’s grip that was steering me away.
    “Hey!” I said sharply.
    The glossy-haired girl, no doubt thinking I was reprimanding her for having asked me to wait, glanced up just in time to see me being dragged across the lobby by nothing at all.
    “One minute,” a quiet voice said.
    I was marched around the corner to a row of comfortable chairs and was then deposited into one of those chairs. The grip on my arm was released, and the chair beside me turned in my direction.
    “Sorry about that,” the voice said. “I’m always telling the group we should put more information in the ad.”
    “I was just going to ask where the meeting was.” I spoke to the air.
    “The people at the Sheraton don’t know we use their hotel. The old-timers get here early to grab up the newcomers but I was in the bathroom. My bad.”
    “Excuse me?” There was absolutely nothing there, but then I saw it, crumpled in the corner of the chair, a Kleenex. Was this really possible? I reached into my pocket and pulled out a Kleenex of my own.
    “I know you’re