rhythm to outdated top-forty music. “Gosh, guys, I’d really love to, but as you can see, we havecompany.”
“Oh, you go ahead.” Ben smiled with devious benevolence. “Ken and I can hold down the forthere.”
She looked at her ersatz husband with pure spite. She knew what that twinkle in his eyes was allabout. He and Ken would be making out on the couch like a couple of teenagers, while she was forced toskip around a middle-school gym like a moron. “Well, I don’t know, hon. Mimi still needs to be put tobed.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing.” Ken smiled. “Daddy Ben and Uncle Ken will take care of her.”
“Come on, Lil-leee,” Sheila playfully whined, “it’ll be fun.”
Now she was in the position of looking like a total bitch if she declined. “Just a second... let me goget changed.”
In her room, she threw on a baggy long-sleeve T-shirt and some cutoff sweatpants, all the whileimagining elaborate ways to murder Ben and Ken. A mere five minutes ago, she had been having such apleasant evening.
“I tell you what, Lily,” Tracee said, after they had piled into her Lexus. “Five years ago, if Sheilaand me was gonna have a girls’ night out, we woulda been heading to the bars instead of to aerobicsclass.”
Sheila giggled. “We’re getting old, I guess.”
“Yep,” Tracee agreed, “we ain’t nothin’ but old married ladies. How ’bout you, Lily? You feel likean old married lady yet?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t really given it much thought.”
“Oh, you wait till Benny Jack knocks you up a couple times, then you’ll feel like an old marriedlady—trust me.” Tracee laughed.
Lily hoped her tight-lipped smile didn’t reveal how uncomfortable she really was. She had spentvery little time around straight women over the course of her adult life; it was little wonder she was soclueless about how to act like one.
The aerobics class was, if possible, even worse than Lily had imagined. The middle-school gymwas populated by a herd of slim, tanned bleached-blond women who looked like so many Sheilas andTracees. Lily wondered if somewhere in Faulkner County a factory churned out these seemingly identicalwomen just as the Confederate Sock Mill churned out identical socks. The one distinctive-looking womanin the class was middle-aged and heavy, her broad hips stuffed into a pair of gray sweatpants.
Lily was just admiring the big woman’s chutzpah far attending an aerobics class full of Sheilasand Tracees when the real Sheila elbowed her, nodded toward the big woman, and whispered,
“Somebody’s got a long way to go.”
The aerobics instructor was distinctive from all the Sheilas and Tracees only in that her hair was