The Red Hat Society's Queens of Woodlawn Avenue Read online

  Dear Readers,

  The Red Hat Society embraces women from all walks of life. Most have been homemakers, wives, and mothers. Many have also pursued busy careers outside the home. Some are married; some are divorced or widowed. But even though each of us has been dealt a different hand, we have all played in the same game of life.

  As the Red Hat Society has grown, its members have come to realize that, as different as we are, we do share one special personal quality. Each of us has come through the years with our optimism and sense of humor intact. Rather than gritting our teeth and fearing whatever comes next, we march out to meet life with smiles on our faces and hope in our hearts.

  Yet even the strongest woman occasionally falters. That’s when the value of having “sisters” becomes most important. This new official Red Hat Society romance takes us into the mind and heart of a divorcee whose own resources have run dry. As her story progresses, she is the beneficiary of a great deal of love and support from her new neighbors—the red-hatted Queens of Woodlawn Avenue. As they plop a hat on her head and teach her to play the game of bridge, they also deepen her understanding of how to play the hand now dealt to her. From these generous women, she learns how to accept the things that she must, and how to change the things that she can. And she finds that she is far from being “done.”

  Is there magic in a red hat? You betcha!

  In friendship,

  Sve Ellen Cooper

  PRAISE FOR THE

  The Red Hat Society®’s

  Acting Their Age

  “Four and a half stars! Top pick! Alternately amusing and emotional, Sutherland’s novel is quintessential women’s fiction, full of good humor and deep relationships. With seamless plotting and entrancing characters, this book is certain to appeal to readers of all ages.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKclub Magazine

  “Lots of humor fills the pages of this heartwarming novel. With characters so familiar you feel as though you know them and a small town so real you feel as though you’ve been there, Sutherland’s book is a bang-up tale about women over fifty, and the men who love them.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “The best thing about any Red Hat Society book is the relationships and emotions these women share with each other. Everyone will enjoy this very entertaining book…Be sure to add this one to your reading list.”

  —BestsellersWorld.com

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2006 by The Red Hat Society,® Inc.

  Excerpt from Domestic Goddess copyright © 2006 by The Red Hat Society,® Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-57001-5

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One: Fifty-Two Card Pick-Up

  Chapter Two: The Declarer and the Dummy

  Chapter Three: Taking Tricks

  Chapter Four: Discards

  Chapter Five: The Power of the Trump Suit

  Chapter Six: Opening Bids

  Chapter Seven: Length, Not Strength

  Chapter Eight: Overcalling

  Chapter Nine: Don’t Send a Boy To Do a Man’s Job

  Chapter Ten: An Unmarked Knave

  Chapter Eleven: Vulnerable

  Chapter Twelve: Doubling and Hedouolmg

  Chapter Thirteen: Kibitzers

  Chapter Fourteen: A Novice Opponement

  Chapter Fifteen: Finessing a Queen

  Chapter Sixteen: Becoming a Captain

  Chapter Seventeen: Asking for Aces

  Chapter Eighteen: Making a Slam

  Chapter Nineteen: Don’t Send a Boy To Do a Man’s Job, Part 2

  Chapter Twenty: The Partnership Desk

  Chapter Twenty-One: Drawing a New Line

  Epilogue: A Fabulous Fursome

  A Preview of Domestic Goddness

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fifty-Two Card Pick-Up

  I could smell the pound cake through my closed front door. Vanilla, sugar, butter—luscious scents mingling in a heavenly aroma that promised rapture. Of all things, why did it have to be pound cake—my sugar-addicted Achilles’ heel?

  “Mrs. Johnston? Ellie? Are you in there?”

  The nasal voice reminded me of Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor on Bewitched. Unfortunately, I didn’t possess Samantha’s supernatural powers to rid myself of this unwanted visitor. Which meant that the only way I was going to get the cake and/or make my neighbor go away was to open the door.

  Honestly, I’d have had no dilemma at all if it weren’t for the pound cake. For the past two weeks, I’d been closeted in the house, safely hidden from the outside world. All I wanted was to lick my wounds, marinate in endless bubble baths of grief and regret, and eat whatever was handy. I had consumed the entire contents of my kitchen. Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Krispy Kreme donuts. Butter pecan Häagen Daz. Betty Crocker brownie mix. No saturated fat or carbohydrate had escaped me, because for the first time in my adult life, I was eating whatever I wanted. Two weeks, though, of consuming my way through the kitchen had yielded a predictable result. Like Old Mother Hubbard, my cupboard was now as bare as my bottom was wide.

  I wanted to be left alone to grow old and die in solitude, cut off from the outside world in this tumbledown 1920s Tudor, the symbol of my wretched post-divorce existence. I could keep drifting from room to room, looking glassy-eyed out the windows at my overgrown backyard with a cup of cold coffee in my hand. The drone of late-night infomercials would keep me company during the long, sleepless nights I spent flipping through photo albums of the life I had lost. I could depend on the stray tabby cat that pawed through my garbage can for my social interaction. But if I didn’t replenish my food supply soon, I was going to grow old and die much more quickly than I’d planned.

  “I made pound cake. To welcome you to the neighborhood.” Her temptress’s voice, along with the scent of vanilla, slid through the cracks around the edge of the door. My new neighbor was scarily persistent. I had simply ignored her earlier visits, but now I didn’t have the luxury. Who would ever have believed it would come to this?

  Once, I’d been Mrs. Eleanor Johnston, wife of a successful surgeon and pillar of the Junior League. Now I was nothing but another high-end Nashville divorcée who’d been banished from her 37205 life by her husband’s wandering eye. I had become nothing but a cliché, and not a very interesting one at that.

  “I think you’ll feel better if you eat some of this,” the voice said through the door. God, but this woman was not going to give up, was she?

  And she did have pound cake.

  My hand shook as I reached for the doorknob. The warped wood stuck tight, and I had to give it a strong yank before it gave way, revealing the perky middle-aged woman standing on my front porch.

  “There you are.” The woman’s bright blond hair competed with her paper-white teeth for brilliance. With a start, I recognized her from her advertisements on bus stops all over town. She owned one of the big real estate firms and I had probably even met her at one fund-raiser or another, but I couldn’t remember her name.

  “I was beginning to worry about you.” Uninvited, she stepped across the threshold and into my inner sanctum with the s
ame determination that must have gotten her to the top of the Nashville real estate market. I had the grace to blush at the state of the living room. Twinkie wrappers and empty Coke cans littered the scarred coffee table. The sagging couch that once had done duty in our bonus room—I’d considered it fit only for small children and teenagers—was now the centerpiece of my living room suite. Sadly, it classed up the joint, a strong indication of the general condition of the house.

  “I knew you’d open the door eventually,” the woman trilled as she brushed past me and headed toward the kitchen as unerringly as if she’d traipsed through the house a million times before. “My pound cake never fails.”

  I stood rooted to the spot, mouth gaping for several long moments, before I realized I was supposed to follow her size-2 frame. By the time I caught up with her in the kitchen, she had placed the cake on my cutting board, unwrapped the cloth like a priest preparing the host for the congregation, and was using a lethal-looking knife to slice off a wedge of the promised ambrosia.

  “Got milk?” she chirped.

  My mouth watered so heavily I had to swallow twice before I could form a reply.

  “Urn, no. I’m out.”

  “That’s okay. We can have coffee instead.”

  I paused and cleared my throat. “Well, I don’t actually have any coffee either.”

  Her eyebrow arched. “You’ve gone through it all, then?”

  My stomach twisted. I feigned ignorance. And hauteur. “What do you mean, I’ve gone through it all?”

  Her laugh was like silverware clanking in a drawer. “Honey, I know how it goes when you’re newly on your own. Eating your way through the refrigerator is practically a rite of passage.”

  “I haven’t—” A flush crept up my neck.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, honey.” She placed a hunk of cake on a paper napkin from the stack on the counter and thrust it toward me. “And you look like you need this.”

  My hand froze, fingertips an eyelash away from the cake. For a moment, I saw myself through my nosy neigh bor’s eyes. Greasy hair that hadn’t seen shampoo in a week. Dressed in my son’s cast-off sweat pants and a paint-stained Vanderbilt sweatshirt. Had I even brushed my teeth that morning?

  With a laugh that was two parts humor and ten parts shame, I ran a hand over my hair to smooth down the inevitable bed head. “I don’t really…That is, I’m sure…”

  The other woman smiled, this time with no condescension at all. “It’s okay, honey. We’ve all been there.”

  That got my back up. Because, pardon me, not everyone had been where I was now. Not everyone was eating off Chinet while a DD-cup tramp ate off her Haviland china and drank from her Waterford crystal.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Indignation kept me from reaching for the cake.

  “It’s no secret, sugar. News travels fast on the Wood-lawn Avenue grapevine. We’re practically psychic.”

  Years of good Southern upbringing kept me from making a sharp retort. I didn’t need the final humiliation of a public airing of my dirty laundry in my new neighborhood. Wasn’t it enough that I could never hold my head up again in Belle Meade? I’d lost everything. My husband. My beautiful home. My place in society. And now I was nothing more than fodder for gossip over the backyard fences of Woodlawn Avenue?

  My neighbor remained undaunted by my silence. “I’m Jane, by the way. Jane Mansfield.” She laughed, showing off her blinding teeth again. “I know, I know. But you can’t pick the last name of the man you fall in love with. Or out of love with, for that matter.”

  Jane Mansfield. Now I remembered. Her publicity photo on the bus stop ads showed her dressed in fifties attire with a matching bouffant hairdo. She was ten years or so older than me, but at the moment, she looked a decade younger. She probably felt that way, too. Because right then, I must have looked at least a hundred and five.

  “It’s my birthday,” I said, the words falling from my lips of their own volition.

  The woman nodded. “Good thing I showed up. Every woman deserves a cake on her birthday.”

  I nodded, my throat too tight for speech. When was the last time I’d had a birthday cake I hadn’t made with my own two hands? Jim had been good with presents but bad with remembering to order something from Becker’s Bakery, and none of my children had inherited my home-making gene. As I’d learned over the years, there was something inherently sad about providing one’s own cake.

  “I’m Ellie,” I finally rallied enough to blurt out. “Ellie Johnston. I mean, Hall. Ellie Hall.” Another change that was going to take some adjustment.

  One of Jane’s perfectly waxed eyebrows arched. “It’s final, then, your divorce?”

  A lump formed in my throat. “I signed the papers yesterday.”

  “Hell of a birthday present.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the irony of it all. “Yes. Yes, it was a hell of a present.”

  Jane stood up straight, all ninety-eight or so pounds of her. “So today’s the day you start over. New house, new life, new you.”

  That point of view had never occurred to me. I’d been so focused on what was coming to an end, I hadn’t given much thought to what might be beginning. The very idea made me queasy, so I took a bite of pound cake.

  A profusion of flavor exploded on my tongue. “Oh my God,” I moaned through the ecstasy melting in my mouth. “I can’t believe this cake.”

  Jane smiled. “Well, there’s more where that came from.” She reached down and sliced off another piece. “So, Ellie Hall, do you have plans for your birthday?”

  I sighed and leaned against the counter. “No. Not really. Since it’s Saturday, Oprah and Dr. Phil won’t be expecting me.”

  “Good.” Jane took another paper napkin from the pile and brushed the crumbs from the counter into her hand. As casually as if it were her house instead of mine, she opened the cabinet door under the sink and tossed them into the waiting trash can. “We’ve been waiting for a fourth.”

  “A fourth? A fourth of what?”

  “A fourth for our bridge club.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, but I don’t play bridge.”

  Jane smiled. “That’s okay, honey. I didn’t play either when I moved into my house. But I learned.”

  The woman might bake heavenly pound cake, but she was clearly a bit loopy. “I’m sorry, but what does your house have to do with a bridge club?”

  “Follow me.”

  Jane stepped around me and led me back through my dining room to the archway that separated it from the living room. The heart-shaped arch had mocked me from the moment my realtor had first shown me the house. But it had been one of the few in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood south of Vanderbilt University that I could afford. It was as close to Belle Meade as my budget would allow. In time, I could channel my inner Martha Stewart to dry wall the offending arch into another shape. A dagger, perhaps, for sticking through Jim’s faithless heart.

  Jane ran her hand over the curve in the plaster, caressing it. “Didn’t you wonder about this when you bought the house?”

  I shrugged, not wanting to reveal the depths of my pain or my sensitivity about the arch. “It’s important for some reason?”

  “All four houses have them. One for each suit.”

  “All four houses?”

  “Built by the original members of the club.”

  “Someone built houses based on a club?”

  “Not just any club. Their bridge club. The Queens of Woodlawn Avenue.”

  That drew a rare chuckle from me. “Queens of Wood-lawn Avenue? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Jane shook her head. “Nope. I’m the Queen of Diamonds. Grace on the other side of you is the Queen of Spades. And Linda, in the Cape Cod on the other side of me, she’s the Queen of Clubs. We each have the dining room arch for our suit.”

  Okay, her pound cake was sinfully good, but this woman was starting to frighten me a little. “Look, I appreciate the invitation, but re
ally, I don’t think I’d make very good company right now.” Not to mention my com plete ineptitude with card games of any variety. While some of my sorority sisters in college had been bitten by the bridge bug, I’d declined to be infected.

  Jane waved away my words with a flick of her expensive manicure. “You’ll learn. We all did.” She stepped back into the living room and I followed like an obedient puppy. “In fact, I think we should meet tonight. You need backup on your birthday.”

  “Look—” Okay, I was starting to get perturbed. Couldn’t this woman see that I just wanted to be left alone?

  “Seven o’clock at my house,” she said over her shoulder as she tugged open the obstinate front door. “And wear a red hat.”

  “Wear a what?”

  “A red hat.”

  I sagged against the arm of the sofa. “I’m not sure I own a hat, much less a red one.”

  Jane smiled, again blinding me. ’Then you can borrow one of mine. We never play bridge without our hats. Chapter rules.”

  Chapter rules? Great. Not only had my husband thrown me over for a Hooters waitress, but I had spent all the money from my divorce settlement on a house in a neighborhood of crazies.

  “Bring a dish, too. That’s another rule.”

  “A dish of what?”

  “Hors d’oeuvres. Casserole. Dessert. Whatever you feel like.”

  “But I don’t have anything in the house.”

  Jane smiled again. “Then I guess you’d better run to the grocery store.” Her eyes traveled over my sweatshirt and sweatpants. “You might want to change first. In this town, you’re going to see someone who will report back to him.”

  “Report back?”

  ’To your ex. He’ll hear about your every move. So you can decide what kind of report he’s going to get. Would you rather be the spurned woman in scruffy sweats or the fabulous divorcee who embraced life and moved on?”

  Truthfully, I’d rather be able to dial the clock back nine months so that none of this had ever happened. But she did have a point. Jim was bound to hear about it if I schlepped to the grocery store in our son’s castoffs. When it came to demographics, Nashville might be a major metropolitan area, but in all the ways that mattered, it was still a small town. I’d learned never to say anything bad about anyone, because you could count on the fact that the person you were speaking to was somehow related to the person you were disparaging.