Once Upon a Lie by Maggie Barbieri Read Free Book Online Page B

a dollop on top of the cake and see if it holds.” It was the first reasonable thing she had said about baking the entire day.
    The store was quiet that morning, despite it being a typical workday. Maeve handed Jo a muffin tin, the idea being that she would actually bake.
    “It will be fun,” Jo protested.
    “The last time someone said that to me, I ended up throwing up, upside down, on a roller coaster in Seaside Park.” Maeve licked the knife that held a dollop of cream cheese frosting. “It won’t be fun. It will be a disaster. Thanks, but no thanks.”
    Jo looked at her forlornly, reminding Maeve that she was much newer to the realm of divorce than Maeve was, although Maeve had never had a longing to pair up with anyone after her marriage had ended. In the space of eighteen months, Jo had lost her breasts and her husband to cancer, the former to the actual disease, the latter to the fallout from more than a year of treatment and all its attendant horrors: chemotherapy, hair loss, and, ultimately, a body that didn’t resemble the one that he thought he had taken possession of ten years earlier at their wedding.
    To say that Maeve didn’t like Jo’s ex was a massive understatement.
    Jo was still talking, but Maeve realized she wasn’t listening. She was fantasizing about killing him. And not in that abstract way in which you thought about making someone—a nuisance, really—disappear. It was all very clear to her, and she figured it would take about fifteen minutes; if she budgeted her time correctly, she could fit it in between Heather’s tutoring session and Rebecca’s haircut.
    “Maeve?”
    “What?” she asked, noting the empty muffin tin in Jo’s hands.
    “It’s one night. And there’s free booze,” Jo said.
    “You really want to do this?” Maeve asked.
    Jo looked at her beseechingly. “It’s that or I put an ad on Craigslist. You don’t want that, do you?”
    Maeve reached into the huge stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen and handed Jo a tub of muffin mix. “And what would that say?”
    Jo thought for a moment, putting down the muffin tin. “Breastless woman with boundless sexual energy seeks to make the carnal acquaintance of man with penis. No experience necessary. On-the-job training available.” Jo had had a reconstruction after her surgery, but it hadn’t gone well, her body too battered, her skin too thin, another nail in the coffin of her marriage.
    Maeve took off her apron, still clean, and hung it on the back of the door. “Very enticing. Alluring, even.” She pulled open the kitchen door, staring out into the empty space in the front of the store. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”
    Jo clapped her hands together excitedly, a gesture that belied her almost forty years on the earth. “I’ll drive. I know how you get around free Chardonnay.”
    Maeve was halfway out the door, another soccer game on her schedule, when she reminded Jo that she hadn’t actually said yes.
    *   *   *
    Cal and Gabriela were already at the game when she got there, and she did her best to hide the hitch in her step as she approached the bleachers, the one that indicated that, yes, she was surprised to see them, and no, she wasn’t happy to see Gabriela. Her flat-ironed hair was motionless on this breezy day, held in place by countless applications of some kind of product Maeve would never buy or use on her own curly blond tresses, preferring a stretched-out elastic band or a headband to deal with the strays that inevitably made their way onto her face. Next to Gabriela was a purse big enough to hold a case of wine, its soft, buttery leather containing the contents of one very glamorous woman’s life. Maeve knew for a fact that Gabriela had gotten the bag at a photo shoot a few years earlier because she had offered it to Maeve, her unkempt and not-stylish friend married to the man she had set her sights on, a gesture that Maeve now knew was a guilt offering. At the time, Gabriela had