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road and see an end to her patience. Eadie was an optimist, but there were limits to what even she was willing to take.
             
    T HE MORNING AFTER Trevor’s phone call, Eadie awoke to find herself in bed with her personal trainer. She didn’t usually let Denton stay the night, and when she awoke, she lay very still, trying to accustom herself to the unfamiliar sensation of waking up next to someone, trying to figure out how she had managed to get herself into this predicament. She was pretty sure it had something to do with the amount of scotch she had consumed the night before. She was pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that her husband was sleeping with his goddamned legal secretary. Letting Denton Swafford stay the night was not something she had planned on, and was sure to complicate matters. Still, she thought, turning to look at the sleeping Denton, who lay on his back with one well-muscled arm thrown over his head, what was done, was done. She might as well make the best of it. She poked him in the ribs with her finger.
    He moved slightly and opened his eyes. He turned his face toward her and grinned. “Morning,” he said, his hair falling boyishly over his forehead.
    Eadie yawned and rolled over on her back. “I’ll take mine black,” she said.
    “What?” He raised himself on one elbow. He was adorable, but he knew it, which kind of killed the whole effect for Eadie.
    “My coffee,” she said. “I’ll take it black.”
    Denton was her latest attempt to get Trevor’s attention and circumvent the boredom and inertia that inevitably set in when she wasn’t working. She had heard Lee Anne Bales going on about him after a doubles match at the club, and she had thought, Why not? Spending five hundred dollars a month on a personal trainer was just the kind of thing to send Trevor Boone’s blood pressure soaring. Denton had shown up at her house with his bag of equipment and his charts and his notebook and she had taken one look at him and immediately decided on the exercise routine that was best for her. So far he hadn’t complained.
    Outside in the street a tourist bus chugged by, its exhaust plume billowing in through the partially opened windows with a smell of diesel and burnt rubber. Faint music drifted from the traffic stopped at the light. Eadie lived in the home built by her husband’s great-great-grandfather along a street of equally impressive old antebellum homes.
Southern Accents
had done an article on the “Gracious Old Homes of Ithaca” a few years ago, and now busloads of tourists drove down from Atlanta to gawk at these fine examples of Southern graciousness. From time to time Eadie liked to appear scantily dressed on her balcony to give the tourists something else to gawk at. Standing on the porch of that fine house with the tourists gazing up at her in admiration and devotion, Eadie Wilkens Boone, last of a long line of gypsies and itinerant house painters, was reminded just how far she had managed to come.
    As a young girl, Eadie had never wanted anything except to go to Paris and be a starving artist, but Eadie’s mother said no, the Wilkenses had been starving for generations; it was time one of them made something of themselves. Eadie was extraordinarily pretty, even as a child, and her mother had entered her in beauty contest after beauty contest, driving her to Birmingham and Mobile and Atlanta. Because she did not care at all about winning, Eadie won them all. She won because she had an arrogant and careless deportment that made her stand out among all those eager and desperately servile young girls like a serpent in a chicken yard. Her insolence was irresistible.
    At fifteen she won the Miss Snellville Beach contest; at sixteen she was named Miss Boll Weevil; and at eighteen she was smart enough to realize her looks were her ticket out of Ithaca and poverty via a pageant scholarship to the University of Georgia. Two years later, she’d returned to