Page 1 of Change of Course

Chapter 1

CHERI

“Honey, are you sure you don’t want to consider a dating service?” my mother asks me with concern.

I’ve just turned down the blind date she’s trying to set up for me, with the son of one of her friends. I’ve only been divorced for a year, and I’ve only been back in my hometown for two months, so I don’t know what her rush is. Sure, I’ve been living in the house where I grew up since I moved back from Charlotte, but that’s only until I can make enough money to buy my own place. I lost my house along with my husband, thanks to the prenup he insisted I sign before we got married.

“No. Why do I need to date at all?” I ask her, and reach into the refrigerator for the skim milk.

“Because you’re not happy. A mother can tell. You’re not eating cereal for dinner, are you?” Mom adds, in the same censorious tone of voice someone else’s mother would use if their grown child were eating nothing but candy at mealtime. “That’s all carbs.”

I look at the box of unsweetened, organic Flax ‘n Bran with freeze-dried strawberries, then back at my mother. “It’s good carbs. Lots of fiber, added protein, fruit with no sugar added…what’s wrong with that?”

She’s the same woman who always used to insist on our family eating a proper dinner together, and I mean a home-cooked meal involving meat, two veggies and a starch: menus straight out of Home Ec circa 1986. Since Dad died twelve years ago of an early heart attack, she’s gone full-on Nutrition Police.

“Don’t you cook?” Mom asks. “I could have sworn you knew how to cook. Maybe that’s why Mike left you.”

She’s not being bitchy, she’s concerned, or at least I think so. It’s time I told her exactly why my marriage dissolved.

I sigh out loud. “It wasn’t my cooking skills, okay? We had a personal chef.” I swallow down my bitterness long enough to confess. “Mike left me for the yoga instructor at my gym.”

My mother blinks. “You never said that. But why would he do such a thing?”

It had blindsided me, too. “She’s very bendy, and she’s twenty-two,” I say bitterly. “Same age I was when I married him. Actually, that’s the same age his first wife was when they got married, come to think of it.”

“I thought he really liked taking you to all those fancy parties with his financial-adviser partners,” Mom says, frowning in confusion. “Because you wore your clothes well and made him look successful. He told me that once.”

“Yeah, well…he told me that Amber looked great naked. I guess I was more of an adornment in the boardroom than in the bedroom.”

I do wear clothes well. Always have. It was an asset when I was young and hot, and now that I’m in my thirties, it’s still a positive part of my appearance.

When I met Mike in a hotel bar shortly after my college graduation, when I was a marketing major still looking for my perfect job and being picky about it, he’d been thirty-five and divorced from his college sweetheart for a few years. Jennifer had full custody of their two daughters, and I’d barely seen them in all the time that Mike and I were together. Except for a few trips to Disney World or brief visits at Christmas, the girls weren’t part of our lives.

As a girl who lost her father at twenty, I felt bad for them. I was sure I could manage to be a responsible, caring stepmother. But I couldn’t make him interested in his own children, especially when I was working to keep him interested in me. I dieted, I worked out, I got my Realtor’s license, and I tried to be the perfect wife for Mike, who told me he wanted a young career woman. He said Jennifer, as a stay-at-home mom, was boring and limited and getting chunky, and I was perfect for him.

That’s a role that I’ve been playing all my life: Little Miss Perfect.

I was getting tired of it. I’d always thought I’d marry a professional man and have a career of my own, but it started to feel stifling. Unfulfilling. Not worth the pain of losing myself to be what my husband wanted.

Thing is, when Mike changed his mind about what he wanted, he didn’t even bother to tell me. I came home early one afternoon before an evening showing, to change out of the blouse I’d spilled a drop of vinaigrette on at lunch, and caught him in bed with blonde, willowy Amber. I’d stood there in my stained blouse and pencil skirt, mouth open in stunned disbelief, and he’d told me to get out.

That it was his house, not mine. That I was boring and career-focused and not enthusiastic enough in bed.

I got served with divorce papers the very next week. Amber, it turned out, was pregnant. The prenup he’d insisted I sign to “preserve his children’s interests” granted me a small income for five years, but no property beyond my car and whatever gifts he’d given me over the duration of the marriage.

So now I own a silver Lexus sedan, two-carat diamond earrings, my wedding and engagement rings, a designer wardrobe that’s a few years out of date, and very little else.

At first, I spent my alimony money on rent and counseling, but when Mike started bad-mouthing my real-estate business to everyone he knew, my sales shrank to almost nothing. I stuck it out as long as I could, but I finally gave up and headed back to Rivertown.

I grew up here. I knew the neighborhoods, and I know how to sell houses. My career is getting back off the ground.

What I don’t have here is contact with my old friends. My life has turned out nothing like the way I expected. I was always the popular one, the good-girl student, the one who had her shit together, and look at me now. I can’t bear the thought of telling everyone how my life blew up.

“Oh, Cheri,” my mother says, and gathers me in for a hug. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

I hug her back, and remember how lost we both were when Dad died.

Then I eat my cereal, and go back to doing some research on my laptop for an older client who’s getting ready to sell her big four-bedroom house and move into one of the fancy assisted-living patio homes at Harmony Place. After that, I check the social media accounts I’ve been ignoring for months. I had disabled all those notifications on my phone, and it occurs to me that I have no idea what’s going on.

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