Page 31 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
“You don’t look like his type, to be honest,” Hairy comments rudely as he gazes over at the table of girlfriends.
“Mate, don’t even bother. They’re well out of your league,” Jonathan says.
“They’re upset; I’m sure I can offer a shoulder to cry on.” Hairy laughs, taking Janet’s bottle and walking over to the table.
“This should be fun to watch,” Matthew’s boss says with a snigger.
Janet doesn’t have time for this. She decides to crank things up a notch with Jonathan.
“So are all you bankers as naughty as Matthew?” she whispers to Jonathan, placing a hand on his.
“You must be joking,” Small cuts in. “All Johnny talks about is his wife and kids. He’s the best behaved of us all.”
Janet tries to let her sigh out slowly. Trust her to pick the wrong one. And she’s lost her drink… Looking over, she sees the banker pouring Robyn a drink ofherbubbly and nodding sympathetically at whatever drivel she’s talking.
“Here they are,” Jonathan says, showing her a picture on his phone of three red-haired children.
“Oh, lovely,” she says. “You must be very proud.”
“I am,” he replies, beaming at the picture, apparently not noticing her robotic response.
“Shall we order more champagne?” she suggests, but Jonathan is now flicking through a photo album with more shots of his Weasley-esque kids.
“Do you have children?” he asks. Ah, the question Janet has been batting away for more than twenty years… Which response should she pump out for today: flippant, jokey, earnest, honest, or just flirt and divert?
“No, I don’t,” she says, short and sweet.
“Best thing I ever did,” he tells her. “There’s still time for you. You hear of women having babies in their fifties these days.”
Janet tries to blink away the insult.
“My wife’s talking about a fourth,” Matthew’s boss says, and the two men start debating the merits of an even number of children.
Janet has up to four months…Gordon’s words swim through her mind. Definitely not long enough to make a baby. Even if she could. As soon as she’d married Bill, she’d been plagued with well-meaning friends and family quizzing her about pregnancy, raising eyebrows if she asked for a glass of water at a wine bar. At first, she laughed it off; she was still in her twenties and focused on her job. Bill had grown-up kids from his first marriage, so he wasn’t pushing it. When she turned thirty-five, it wasn’t exactly an overwhelming urge, but she felt it was “now or never.” She was pregnant by thirty-six and didn’t dwell too much on her growing bump—until she felt her baby girl kick at twenty weeks. But just days later, the unthinkable happened: She went into early labor, her uterus ruptured, and everything went black. When she woke up, Bill was leaning across her sore body, sobbing into her neck: “Thank God you’re alive, Janey!” It took a midwife to tell her that things had gotten so bad that Bill had been forced to choose between her and the baby. “He chose wrong,” she told the woman, who shook her head sadly and then delivered the killer blow that, to stop the bleeding, the surgeon had been forced to perform an emergency hysterectomy. There would be no more children for Janet. She spent the next three days between wakefulness and sleep, trying to find a place where her baby hadsurvived. Once, as she slowly started to wake up, she heard Bill talking to a doctor.
“It’s for the best,” he said. “The baby was all her idea, and life is much simpler with just the two of us.”
Janet burned with fury at those words. She’d been filled with hatred ever since, and not just toward Bill but toward the world and everyone who lived in it. If anything, that feeling had grown, not faded, with time.
“It was lovely to meet you, Janet, but it’s time I head home,” Jonathan says, putting his hand out to shake hers.
“And I might see if my colleague needs any help over there,” Small says, eyes back on the beauties at the next table.
“I suppose I should go back to my friends,” Janet responds but the men have already turned away, leaving her alone at the table. Glancing across at the others, she sees Melvin, Vivienne, and Tristan with their heads close together, serious expressions on their faces. She considers marching past them and heading home. Or at least straight to Giles’s place. Their affair has really gained momentum lately. They see each other three or four nights a week. “Insatiable” is what he calls her, and that’s how she feels right now. Funnily enough, Bill used the same word the other day when he was going through the credit card bills: “Your love of shopping is insatiable,” he said, and he hasn’t even seen the rows and rows of clothes and boxes of shoes in their spare room, unworn, still with tags on. Sex, food, wine, clothes—she can’t get enough, and with her number constantly on her mind, Janet is no longer holding back. Her time is almost up, after all. Surely there’s no better way to go.
As she marches back to the table, Janet notices that conversation abruptly stops, and the three of them look up at her guiltily.
“Allow me,” Melvin offers and steps off his chair to help her back onto her stool.
She clutches the table to get her balance and then sees that her missing leather glove is lying in front of her.
“Where didthatcome from?” she asks, picking it up, turning it over, reassured by the soft leather and expensive label that it is indeed hers.
They each exchange awkward glances, and finally Vivienne clears her throat.
“I found it at Matthew’s work,” she says.
A silence falls across the table as Vivienne’s words sink in. It’s broken by a roar of laughter from the weeping widows and beaming bankers.
