One week before the dinner party where she found out the truth about her cheating husband, Eadie Boone sat outside the offices of Boone and Broadwell waiting for Trevor and his new girlfriend to appear.  She was parked in a no parking zone across the street from the old columned mansion that housed her husband’s law firm.  It was five o’clock in the afternoon and Ithaca’s thin stream of rush hour traffic moved sluggishly along the street. 
     Sunlight fell from a wide blue Georgia sky and slanted through the arching branches of the live oaks.  The air was cool and sweet with the scent of wet grass. Fall was Eadie’s favorite time of year.  It reminded her of football games, and new school bags, and the hope and promise of good things to come.  Other people think of spring as the season of renewal, but there was something about autumn’s dark wet corruption that appealed to Eadie’s nature.  In the damp sunshine of an autumn afternoon Eadie felt there was nothing she could not do. Even become one of the greatest artists of the twenty-first century.  Even make her husband love her again
     Not that Trevor had ever stopped loving her.  Eadie knew, deeply and intuitively, that he had not.  .
     

          She believed a good marriage was a fight to the death, a long slow clamp on the jugular by two equally determined adversaries, and given this definition, she and Trevor had one of the best marriages around.  Trevor liked a good fight as much as she did.  But somewhere along the way, he had forgotten all this. Waiting in her car, protruding like a jetty into the slow-moving stream of rush-hour traffic, Eadie felt it was her duty to remind him.
          Still, the sight of the girl with her husband irritated her.  They appeared minutes later, walking arm in arm, heads close while they shared some secret moment.  Looking at the two of them, Eadie realized how much reminding Trevor needed. The girl could not be a day over twenty-two. She had the pliant, eager look of someone with low self-esteem. Eadie bet she didn’t even argue with Trevor.  She probably listened intently and did as she was told and wasn’t even selfish in bed. Poor Trevor must be bored senseless.           
          She watched them disappear around the back of the building, and a few minutes later Trevor’s old Mercedes rattled past, shooting out a plume of dark smoke that disappeared lazily among the arching branches of the trees. Eadie started her car and followed them.  Five minutes later Trevor parked in front of The Pink House Restaurant, and Eadie pulled to the side of the street and watched them cross between traffic, holding hands and laughing like a couple of teenagers.  A woman with less self-confidence than Eadie Boone would have been crushed, seeing how much they seemed to enjoy each other’s company. But Eadie was feeling nothing more than a growing sense of impatience with Trevor’s stubborn stupidity. 
            She waited for thirty minutes, until she was sure they were seated and beginning to enjoy their meal, and then she picked up her cell phone and called The Pink House and asked to have Eadie Boone paged.  It was one of her favorite tricks. She’d follow Trevor and then have herself paged, knowing he would spend the rest of the evening looking over his shoulder to see if she was there.  She also liked to call his apartment when she imagined him in the middle of sex, and leave loud messages on his machine – Bad news, Trevor.  The sheriff called.  That client that vowed to kill you has jumped bail, or The lab called with the results of the herpes test.  You might want to call me.
            Her phone beeped.  Eadie checked the caller ID but stayed on the line with The Pink House hostess.  The call was from Lavonne Zibolsky, who was ringing, no doubt, to beg Eadie to help her plan the Boone & Broadwell firm party that had been dumped on Lavonne just a week before.  The annual dinner party that was only a week away and that Eadie wasn’t even invited to, now that Trevor had left her for his secretary.   She could hear the hostesses’ footsteps and a minute later her tired voice.       “Sorry, there ain’t no Eadie Boone here.”
     “Thanks,” Eadie said and hung up.  She had her work cut out for her but she wasn’t discouraged.  She hadn’t dragged herself up out of a life of poverty and adverse destiny by thinking like a defeatist.  She hadn’t overcome a tragic childhood and become an artist by thinking it couldn’t be done.  To admit she might have made a mistake about Trevor Boone would have been like admitting the whole code she had lived her life by up to now was wrong, and this was something Eadie Boone just wasn’t willing to do.
     She waited ten minutes and then called the restaurant again.  She imagined the two of them crouched guiltily over their entrees, afraid to look around.  Not laughing now, she thought, closing up her phone.  She considered going inside and causing a scene but decided against it.  She was tired.  She decided to go home and take a hot bath instead.
     Following a wayward husband was hard work.  Trying to convince that same husband that what he needed was not a change of wives, but a change of careers was even more exhausting.  Trevor would never be happy until he quit practicing law and moved home to write the Great American Novel he had always promised himself he would write. 
     Eadie knew this even if Trevor didn’t. 

©   Cathy Holton