Nine Women, One Dress by Jane L. Rosen Read Free Book Online Page B

simply wasn’t old enough for her. I lost myself in her simple beauty. Her parted lips and tousled hair. I wondered what sorts of things she dreamed about.
    Eventually I snapped out of it and made enough noise for her to wake up, but not enough for her to know that I’d woken her. As soon as she was coherent I said, “So, you spoke a lot over dinner about your mother, but I noticed that you never mentioned your father.”
    “Good morning to you too!” She swung her legs out of bed. “My father left when I was six. I was sitting in the living room playing Barbie dolls and he just walked out.” Now I felt bad for asking, though also relieved that I was right about the daddy issues.
    “He just left? Just like that, no goodbye?”
    She paused. “Kind of. He said, ‘Goodbye, sweet girl,’ and I said, ‘Where are you going, Daddy?’ and he said, ‘I have to see a man about a horse.’ And then he left. That was the last time I saw him.”
    She went about her morning business and I felt horrible. Here I was dragging up her emotional baggage just to satisfy my own stupid ego. I apologized as she plopped on the bed to put on her socks.
    “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have gotten so personal about your dad.”
    She laughed. “My father lives a few blocks from here with my mother and has since the day I was born. You are so gullible!”
    I pushed her onto the bed and we rolled around wrestling for a blissful moment or two. I wanted more than anything to kiss her, but the thought of her rejection kept me in check. She didn’t have daddy issues. She just didn’t find either Jeremy Madison or Stanley Trenton attractive. I decided I would meet her on Wednesday for the shoot and then never see her again. If I wanted this kind of rejection, I could go back to auditioning.

CHAPTER 6
The Inception of the Ostrich Detective Agency
    By Andie Rand, Private Detective
Age: 39
    As I hung up the phone after speaking with the woman who I was confident would become our one hundredth client, I couldn’t help but smile to myself. Sure, things hadn’t turned out exactly as planned, but they had turned out well. I was proud of the life I had created after my other life imploded, proud of the role model I’d become for the twins. A lot can change in three years.
    It was three years ago to the day that I called an emergency meeting with my three best college friends at an out-of-the-way coffee shop just off the West Side Highway. When you admit to yourself that your storybook, love-at-first-sight, ten-year, honey-you-stay-home-with-the-kids-and-I’ll-make-a-ton-of-money marriage has fallen apart, you don’t want to discuss it at great length and varying volumes in your own ’hood. This felt particularly true when said ’hood was the Upper West Side of Manhattan, though my guess is that jilted ladies from Chappaqua to Chattanooga feel the same. Once out, a cat like infidelity is particularly impossible to get back in the bag. But holding it all inside was eating me alive, so I’d called my college roommates. We didn’t see each other that often, but we found ways to stay connected. I knew they would travel to the ends of the earth for me, or, in this case, a diner on Eleventh Avenue that looked like it had been dropped there from suburbia circa 1969. It even has its own parking lot, which is unheard of in Manhattan, except for Tavern on the Green and a McDonald’s somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen.
    Allison was the first to arrive but not to speak. At least not to me. She entered mid-call and unpacked the entire contents of her briefcase on the table. She was looking for a file and began handing me things one by one in a very chaotic process of elimination that I remembered well from college. The drill came right back to me, as I had spent hours and hours helping her tear through our room for a paper or her birth control pills or whatever it was that she was desperately searching for. She found the file she was looking for and I