Sun-kissed (The Au Pairs 3)

"Seriously. They're making me the Social Diary columnist. Isn't that crazy?"

"Insane," Eliza enthused. "Oh my God, you're, like, going to be so important!"

"You shut up!" Mara laughed. Eliza tended to exaggerate, but it was still nice to hear. She put her feet up on the desk just as she'd seen Sam Davis do. There was no one around who would be able to see her anyway.

"Will you put me in the story? I styled the whole collection."

"I'll see what I can do," Mara replied in a professional tone.

"Oh," Eliza said, disappointed.

"Loser, I'm only kidding. Of course you'll be in it," Mara promised.

"Phew. For a minute there, I thought I might have to bring you my super-duper-big-head-shrinking machine," Eliza teased.

"See you at the Perry house?"

"If I don't see you first!" Eliza threatened.

Mara smiled as she hung up the phone. She couldn't wait to see her friends.

82

jacqui tunes out prelude-to-divorce radio

THE KIDS TRIED TO PRETEND THEY DIDN'T HEAR THEM, BUT the house reverberated with the sound of poison and bile. Kevin and Anna were fighting over the intercom. Again.

Jacqui looked at the white box by the toaster and wished she could shut off the speakers, but their Hamptons intercom was different from the New York system. In New York, when you beeped for a certain room, you got a private line. But in the Hamptons, which had older technology, when you pressed a button, your voice carried to the fifteen other intercom speakers in the house.

"Goddammit, where the hell are my golf clubs? How come I can never find anything in this house?" Kevin bellowed.

"Don't blame me--I wasn't the one who sent them out to get varnished!" Anna screeched.

"It's not like you do anything around here! All you do is spend money! And by the way, that little stunt you pulled on my ear is serious. The doctor said it's become infected!"

"So what? I don't care! I'm so sick of the way you treat me. I'm your wife, not your assistant anymore!" Anna screamed.

83

"Yeah, I know. My assistant does more work than you do!" Kevin retorted.

"Screw you! I want a divorce!"

"Fine! You've got one!" Kevin yelled back. "You probably just want to be with someone younger! It's not like you ever want to do anything that I want to do!"

"Earth to Kevin. Your friends are boring"

"Well, you won't have to hang around them anymore, will you?"

"I mean it this time!" Anna threatened. "I want a divorce!"

"Go ahead! Call your lawyer!"

"He's on speed dial! Just watch me!"

"They don't mean it," Jacqui said as she ladled out organic, steel-cut Irish oatmeal into the children's cereal bowls. The idle threat of divorce was thrown out so often, it lacked any punch. "Seriously."

Madison rolled her eyes. She pretended to be indifferent to her father and her stepmother's quarrels, but since Anna was the only mother they had--their real mother, Brigitte, had absconded to a Sri Lankan ashram and had hardly laid eyes on any of them in years--it was evident the fights spooked her. When a long shriek of Anna's voice screeched over the intercom, Madison accidentally upset her glass of orange juice on the table.