Tell Me Lies by Jennifer Crusie Read Free Book Online Page B

stopped nagging her then, but he’d looked at her as if she were demented. Maybe that’s why he was cheating: the shame of her car, complicated by her dementia, drove him to it.
    He was cheating. All her arguments to Treva aside, there wasn’t going to be another explanation. Treva had been right to roll her eyes. He was cheating.
    Maddie turned on a country station and drove through the center of town toward her husband and the end of her marriage, listening to the Mavericks as she tried to ignore her mangled life. People smiled and waved at her, and she waved back and felt approved of. People in Frog Point liked her. She was nice. That’s who she was, Nice. That was a hell of a thing to be, Nice, but it was what she was, maybe all that she was. A terrible thought struck her that maybe the reason she was fighting the idea of divorce was that divorce wasn’t Nice. That would be stupid. Except that if she wasn’t Nice, she wasn’t sure she’d still exist.
    She distracted herself with better thoughts. Old Frog Point was beautiful in late summer, its streets canopied by huge old elms and oaks in full leaf, their branches rubbing together over the street, and Maddie felt sheltered as she drove through their dappled shade. Their roots pushed up gray slabs of concrete sidewalk into cracked and rolling waves, crusted with moss in the shady parts. When she and Treva had been little on Linden, they’d pretended the slabs were mountains and made up stories about them and roller-skated up and down them and played hopscotch. Em and Mel did the same things now, safe away from all the ugly things that happened to little kids in bigger towns. Whatever its drawbacks, and they were legion, Frog Point was home. It had wrapped itself around her for thirty-eight years and kept her warm while it watched every move she made. If it hadn’t been for Brent, she could have lived with that. Even with Brent, she was going to have to live with that. She belonged to Frog Point.
    The Mavericks finished, and Patsy Cline started in on “Walking After Midnight.” Patsy had had her man problems, which was some comfort; if a class act like Patsy could be a fool over men, too, maybe Maddie wasn’t a complete loss. An ancient brown Datsun came zooming up behind them and braked at the last minute before beginning to tailgate them. The Datsun was even older than her Civic, so old that it looked like something that C. L. Sturgis might have wrecked in his glory days. Maddie thought about C.L. back then, cocky and crackling with nervous energy, and just for a minute, she wished she were back there, back before she’d made all her mistakes, able to choose C.L. instead. But that would mean no Em, and Em was worth everything, even this, so she let go of C.L. and the memories and kept going toward her husband.
    The squeal of brakes brought the Datsun back to mind. It had come up behind her too fast again and stopped at the last minute, almost skidding into her.
    “What are you doing?” Maddie said to the Datsun in her rearview mirror, and the driver peeled off down a side street, evidently disgusted at how poky she was being. Well, nobody rushed to their own disasters, especially when they had their kids in the passenger seat. Maddie drew a deep breath. This was going to hurt Em so much; that was the worst part, the absolute worst. That was what she’d never forgive Brent for, that he’d hurt Em when she loved him so much.
    But she couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done to her, either, and driving slowly through the cool green shade, she let her anger seep into her bones. He’d made a fool of her again. If she left him, she’d be crawling away into the sympathetic, scornful arms of the town with no way to fight back. Treva was right; somehow, she should be able to get even. C.L. came to mind again, this time a recent memory, standing in her doorway, broad and smiling and solid and possible and pretty damn attractive as an adult.
    No. Absolutely