The Starter Wife by Gigi Levangie Grazer Read Free Book Online Page A

had felt this way, theRepublicans had gained control of the House and the Senate.
    “Bullshit!” Joan said. “The only thing that’s grown about Kenny is his head. His head is so much bigger than when I first met him. His head could eat other heads!”
    Joan was a former sitcom writer on a show about two blond twins who wind up living with their therapist; it was called
Who’s the Crazy One?
When the show was canceled, after the actor who played the therapist hung himself in his trailer (he was heavy into Vicodin, the Official Drug of the Millennium), Joan left the business and married a real estate magnate she’d met at a Funk Dance class at the Sports Club. An older real estate magnate. A
much
older real estate magnate. Who was bald. Not to mention older. Okay, he was freaking Methuselah. This is what happens to forty-year-old women in L.A. when they run out of dating options: they marry their grandfathers. Joan seldom wrote anymore, what with all the Georgian rooms that needed decorating and the French wine that needed drinking and the Ben Franklins that needed spending.
    “I don’t understand, I just don’t understand—” Now Gracie realized she sounded like she was starring in a movie.
Take My Divorce,
featuring Gracie Anne Pollock in her first ever starring role!
    “Oh
God.
I’m mewling!” Gracie banged her head against the arm of the couch. “I never mewl!”
    “Is it the baby?” Joan and Gracie still called her three-and-a-half-year-old, Jaden, “the baby.”
    “He loves the baby—he says he loves the baby.” Gracie thought about it. Did he really spend any time with our child? Any time at all? Didn’t Jaden seem, well, kind of scared of her father? Maybe not scared, Gracie thought, but definitely startled when he walked into a room. Jaden, who smiled and engagedin three-minute conversations with everyone—the gardener, the poolman, the UPS guy with the granite legs.
    Gracie wondered if the UPS guy was single.
    “Is it the sex?” Joan inquired. Bravely, Gracie thought.
    “Who? Where? What? When? How?”
    Gracie had been nauseous for nine months with her pregnancy; the only time they tried having sex when Gracie was pregnant, she had had to run to the bathroom and throw up. After the baby was born, things had picked up for a while. Hadn’t they picked up for a while? When was the last time they actually … picked up?
    Ah. Oh. Hmmm.
    Gracie figured Kenny was through with having sex, but maybe he was just through with having sex with
her.
    Oh, thought Gracie, here comes the headache. Just waiting patiently behind the curtain for its cue—Kenny no longer wanted to have sex with her. Yep, there it was. Hello, Headache! Come on in, join Low Self-Esteem and, next up, Diarrhea! Doesn’t she look great?!
    “Look, everyone knows you don’t have sex after you have a kid,” Joan said. “That’s why Pappy and I are not having children.”
    “Joan, no offense, but your husband is old enough to remember the Alamo, the war not the movie, no one could remember the movie,” Gracie said. “And please, for the love of God and this one conversation, don’t call him Pappy.”
    “But that’s his name!” Joan’s husband was Mike “Pappy” McAllister of McAllister Realty, the second-largest real-estate agency in the Greater Western Los Angeles Area (according to the Paps himself, and the bus stops that bore his name and likeness from his Army photograph, circa 1944).
    “Make up something else. For me.”
    “Anyway, that’s reason number one why I’m not having a kid. Number two being that I already own yours; I bought her off with Malibu Barbie’s RV, remember?” Joan continued. Gracie had the distinct feeling she was not only talking to Joan, but to Joan plus three glasses of red. “Number three, my eggs have dust bunnies.”
    Gracie and Kenny had talked about having another baby. Kenny’s plan was to have two children, one of whom was to be a male child; Kenny applying the same rules for