Best laid plans, p.1
Best Laid Plans, page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Gwen Florio
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Acknowledgments
Also by Gwen Florio
The Lola Wicks series
MONTANA
DAKOTA
DISGRACED
RESERVATUINS
UNDER THE SHADOWS
Novels
SILENT HEARTS
BEST LAID PLANS
Gwen Florio
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This first world edition published 2020
in Great Britain and the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2020 by Gwen Florio.
The right of Gwen Florio to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9024-5 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-715-6 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0436-3 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described
for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are
fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
To my mother
whose wanderlust was hereditary
ONE
Nora Best blew up her life when she turned fifty – said take it and shove it to the day job, goodbye to the friends who turned out not to be, along with the home touted with neither irony nor exaggeration by the realtor as a dream house. Ditched the husband; went on the run for real, not some Eat-Pray-Love lark; saw herself arrested, fingerprinted and mugshot, the whole nine yards. But those last came later.
First, the party to end all parties.
That’s how she and Joe billed it on the invitations. ‘Our house is empty but our hearts are full. Help us celebrate.’ Nora’s wording. She was the detail queen, the one who’d done the necessary financial tap-dance that made it possible for them to leave their careers, sell the house, and sink the proceeds from the sale and a book contract into a tricked-out Airstream in which they’d cruise the country for the next two years. At the end of which time, they aimed to have a bestseller from the book deal Nora had wangled.
‘Every overworked, stressed-out cubicle jockey’s dream! With sex! A whole new travel genre!’ her agent chirruped in an email, another in a series so relentlessly exclamation-pointed that her actual speaking voice – all ball-busting gravel – never ceased to startle. She’d been hounding Nora for a follow-up to her first book, Do It Daily, a treatise on the benefits of sex – lots and lots of it, six days a week minimum (because even God rested) – with one’s spouse. Despite its provocative premise, book sales had proved disappointing. Apparently nobody, not even the evangelical crowd, was interested in having that much sex with his or her spouse. Her agent blamed polyamory. ‘It’s all the rage now. Maybe we should have said spouses, plural,’ she groused, hinting at a sequel, bait Nora refused to take.
Escape, though. What about that? ‘It’s the new fantasy,’ her agent had agreed with reawakened enthusiasm. ‘People would rather run away than fuck. But be sure you put some of that in the book, too.’
Now it was time. The Airstream crouched in the driveway, hitched to a chrome-laden, black, double-cab pickup that farted testosterone whenever Joe stomped the gas. The truck, its side panels flared to accommodate dual fuel tanks, had been Joe’s one contribution to the entire enterprise.
She’d stood aghast when he tossed her the keys. ‘I thought we agreed on a Land Cruiser?’
‘I went for the cowboy Cadillac.’ He slapped its flank as though he’d just dismounted after a long day on a dusty trail. Standing there in his boat shoes and khakis, collar turned up on his polo shirt, for God’s sake. She pinched the keys between thumb and forefinger, held them away from her. A Chevy. No one she knew drove an American vehicle.
But Joe could have his truck. The Airstream was her baby. The sounds of the backyard party faded as she slipped around the front of the house. Before her, the trailer gleamed like a promise, catching the day’s last light. Her own reflection, a wavering funhouse distortion, smiled back at her as she approached and ran her fingers just above its famously riveted surface, afraid of smudging the aluminum.
‘It’s beautiful.’ Another reflection bent and swayed behind her, wafting scents of perfume and bourbon, cut by the faint tang of sweat. Charlotte, wife of Joe’s best friend and law partner. Their reflections merged as Charlotte pulled her into a hug. ‘We’re going to miss you guys so much.’
Nora sank into softness. Charlotte had, in Nora’s mother’s dismissive phrase, ‘let herself go’, all breasts and stomach and hips, the perfect shape to cradle a grandchild, not so much for the neon-yellow summer sheath with its cruel color and unforgiving outlines. Had the woman never heard of Spanx?
Nora waited for Charlotte to let go. Finally pulled away. Refocused on the Airstream. ‘I named her Electra.’ Forestalled the question. ‘For Amelia Earhart’s airplane. See?’ She’d paid someone to paint a decal of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, its lovely rounded contours, wheels just leaving the ground, nose angled skyward, on the trailer’s front flank.
‘Are you fucking nuts?’ That had been Joe’s reaction. ‘The thing went down in flames.’
‘It disappeared. There’s a difference.’
But Charlotte nodded immediate understanding, greying curls bouncing around the long face that gave her an unfortunate resemblance to a sheep. ‘Because it’s an adventure. God, Nora. I’d kill for some adventure.’
Of course she would. The adventure didn’t exist that could pry Charlotte’s husband’s hands off the next rung of the career ladder. Artie had tried to stage something of an intervention when Joe and Nora announced their plans, oblivious to his own wife’s yearning expression, her eye-rolls at his exhortations of common sense. Recently, though, Artie seemed to have succumbed to the inevitability of the venture, even urging them to move their departure date up. ‘Once you’ve made the decision, why wait?’
Nora thought Artie’s new attitude might have cheered Charlotte, but maybe it had yet to take hold.
‘If it’s adventure you’re after, we’d better get back to the party. I hear Joe and Artie talked the caterers into mixing up some kind of killer rum punch.’ Nora stepped back, willing Charlotte to lead the way.
But she couldn’t keep herself from looking back over her shoulder at Electra, still shimmering in the dying light, poised for morning take-off.
Strings of twinkling lights framed the back yard. Nora would take them down at party’s end, pack them away in a flat box, slide it into one of the Airstream’s clever compartments. At each stop, they’d festoon the Airstream and their campsite with the lights, making for the Instagrammable ambience they’d flaunt throughout the trip, building their future book’s audience along the way. The assortment of baguettes, boules and ciabatti in another box were fake; the wines that would appear beside them real, waiting in cases padded
An arm slid around her waist. ‘You done good, babe,’ Joe said. ‘Just look at all this.’
The house sat atop a hill east of downtown, with a sweeping view of Denver’s ever-more-vertical skyline, the corporate headquarters’ striving grandeur made petty by the peaks beyond, purpling in the twilight. Alpenglow backlit the holy trinity of Pikes Peak, Mount Evans and Longs Peak, along with the lesser ridges between. The lawn sloped gently downward toward the food tables and bar. The catering team had cleared away the platters of salumi and cheeses and moved among the crowd with trays of mini-desserts and champagne flutes filled to the brim. In one corner of the yard, a large screen flashed a rotation of photos. Nora and Joe twenty years earlier, part of the first wave of right- and left-coasters to invade Colorado: Joe still sporting the techie jeans-and-hoodie uniform he’d had yet to abandon for button-down law-school duds, his hair sweeping his collar; Nora’s own hair boy-cut then, less blonde than it would become in gradual stages over so many years it now seemed natural.
Joe and Nora on the slopes, Steamboat and Mary Jane in the early years, Aspen and Beaver Creek later. Joe and Nora running the Colorado, raft tilted precariously, rapids boiling up white against the redrock canyon walls. Joe and Nora atop one fourteener or another, gym-toned calves anchored by clunky hiking boots, the whitecapped sea of the Rockies stretching infinitely away at their feet. No kids; whether they’d never been part of the plan or things just worked out that way, Joe and Nora were vague even in their own minds on the topic. At some point, a decision had been made by default, leaving them plenty of time and money for all that adventuring.
But – the inevitable but of modern, mortgage-laden life – each exploit was grabbed in weeklong chunks of vacation, the weight of work pressing ever more claustrophobic over the years, phones vibrating in their pockets, watches flashing alerts on their wrists. Emails flagged urgent. Actual phone calls: ‘I know you’re on vacation, but …’ ‘It’ll only take a second …’ ‘Sorry. This can’t wait.’
Done with all that now, belongings boxed away in a storage unit, house stripped bare and echoey, keys waiting on the counter for the new owners’ arrival the next morning.
For this last hurrah, Nora had specified finger foods, simultaneously lavish and stripped down. Yet somehow Artie had procured a spoon, probably from the caterers, and tapped it against his glass – tink, tink, tink – calling for a toast.
‘To Joe and Nora …’
It ran around the lawn in murmurs rising to a shout, subsuming Artie’s carefully crafted farewell. Joe and Nora! Whistling, stomps. Joe and Nora! A glass shattered against the patio’s bricks. How much rum had the guys mixed into whatever preceded the champagne? Charlotte stood to one side, her slow sheep eyes blinking away tears. Nora eased away from Joe, slipped beside her, stroked her plump forearm. ‘Oh, sweetie. It’ll be fine. I’ll text you every day.’
‘It won’t be the same.’ Almost a pout.
Of course not; their weekly, wine-soaked brunches while the guys golfed the only exciting thing in Charlotte’s empty-nest life. Nora wouldn’t miss those brunches nearly as much as Charlotte, the familiar recitation of Artie’s faults long gone stale. And other than the truck, a topic quickly exhausted, what was she supposed to offer in return about Joe, a man known among her friends as the Perfect-Ass Husband, double-entendre intended. Joe in his jeans was a sight to behold.
No wonder they’d had all that sex, her friends’ envious glances said, as clearly as they’d spoken the words aloud. Those same friends now kept an eye on their own husbands when Nora was around. Because a wife who actually wanted it, who wasn’t coming up with one excuse, or another, or another still – who wouldn’t want a little piece of that action? No, Nora wouldn’t miss the eggshell-walk her life had become ever since she’d written that damn book.
More toasts. Another glass sacrificed to the patio bricks, the caterers collecting things, broad hints written on their tight-lipped faces. Time to go. Yet people lingered. Nora slid her phone from the pocket of her sundress and snapped a few photos, something for the blog that would precede the book, building both audience and anticipation. Someone brought out tequila, a saltshaker, limes. A knife. Who in God’s name had come so prepared? No shot glasses, though, and the caterers had rounded up all the champagne flutes. The bottle passed mouth to mouth. Now they’d never leave. But if you can’t beat ‘em …
Nora joined them, muscle memory from the carefree young woman in those long-ago photos kicking in. Touched her tongue to the meat of her thumb. Shook salt. Tipped up the bottle. Holy hell, it was the good stuff. Teeth into lime. Damn.
Nora! Nora! Chanting now. Where had Joe gone? Who cared?
She reached for the bottle again, glugged, coughed. Laughed and shook out her hair. Nora!
The bottle made the rounds. The landscape tilted. Nora kicked off her shoes, planted her feet in the grass, everything still aslant. She headed for the house, step by careful step, vowing to double the caterers’ tip if they’d cleaned up all that broken glass. Dark inside, floor cool and smooth and safe against her feet, just a few silent steps now to the bathroom, where she’d splash cold water onto her face, the back of her neck, and maybe jam a quick finger down her throat to hasten the inevitable.
She stopped. From the bathroom, a light. Motion. Sound – a male groan. What was it with men and their bathroom noises? And this idiot, maybe thinking himself alone in the house, not even shutting the door behind him. Nora slid a step back, started to turn away, registered all the wrongness of it one wrong thing at a time. He stood, not in front of the toilet, but before the long marble counter between the double sinks, hands braced against its edge, body a blur of motion.
What was he doing? What were they doing? Oh, Jesus.
Another step back. Too late. She’d already seen the khakis down around ankles. Yellow sheath pushed above hips – not only sans Spanx, but total commando. Perfect ass bobbing between jiggling thighs.
No. Fucking. Way.
Her hand went to the phone in her pocket. She looked again.
Way.
Later – many, many years later – she’d make a joke of it. You want to go from drunk to sober in two seconds flat? Get a gander of your husband helping himself to his best friend’s wife.
And maybe she was sober as she made her way across the lawn, phone clenched in hand, toward the laptop powering the photo montage. Soberer still as she clicked at the phone and then the computer, a quick download, a few more clicks to stop the running carousel, to freeze a single photo on the screen. She reached for the extension cord running from the house, found the plug to the lights. Yanked it.
The lawn plunged into darkness, alpenglow long gone, the only light supplied by the screen with its image of Joe fucking Charlotte.
Nora’s voice shattered the silence more thoroughly than any fling of crystal against patio brick.
‘Party’s over.’
TWO
She bolted back through the house, scooping up her keys and purse, past Joe and Charlotte emerging from the bathroom.
‘Your fly’s open,’ she called. ‘And there’s a big wet spot on your dress.’
Was there? It didn’t matter. Worth it, almost, to see the way they leapt apart, launching into stuttering explanations that she didn’t have time to hear, intent as she was upon getting the hell out of there, only to confront an issue that nearly foiled her escape before it was begun.
Joe hadn’t just selected the truck. He was going to drive the truck.
Not that Nora had any qualms about driving the truck itself, although it would be the biggest vehicle she’d ever operated, larger by several factors than the Prius she’d traded in. But towing twenty-four feet and three-and-a-half tons of Airstream – that was a whole different matter. They’d agreed that Joe would get them out of Denver, through the first couple of weeks of the trip, over to California, up the coast, catching the ferry to the islands off Seattle for some magical days kayaking among seals and orcas. She’d wait to drive until they hit the big empty stretches of eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, taking the wheel when the roads were straight and empty, nobody around to honk their horns in annoyance at the woman of a certain age, hands clutched at ten and two, creeping along like a first-time driver with a parent grinding a foot against an imaginary brake.
