Julia's Chocolates. Cathy Lamb

      “But I was right, wasn’t I?” Caroline laughed, pushing her long brown hair away from her finely carved face. She looked like a queen, not a near-poverty stricken neighbor living off her backyard’s vegetables.

      “You planned it with Stash,” Lydia declared, hands on hips.

      “I did nothing of the sort. I merely told you that I saw a bit of red in your reading. Soft red for love. For passion. It was all around you, Lydia. Red, red, red.” Caroline smiled, and two dimples flashed in her cheeks.

      “And then Stash brought me this!” Lydia stood with righteous anger and opened a drawer of a nearby armoire and yanked out a red negligee with black furry trim.

      I tried not to laugh.

      “He is a bad-mannered old fool. Comes by, parks his tractor in front of my house, hands me the box, forces a kiss on me, and drives off. I’m going to get another pig and name him Stash Two, that I am.”

      Aunt Lydia dropped onto the floor with me and Katie and Caroline, fluffing out the negligee. “Stash thinks that because he owns all the land surrounding my place that he can do what he wants. Really! As if I’d get in something like that!”

      “Be glad you get negligees.”

      The words, soft, with a tinge of bitterness, dropped from Katie’s lips like tiny ballistic missiles. When we turned to look at her, she covered her mouth with both hands. “Oh dear. Dear, dear. I didn’t mean to sound so pitiful. Of course, my husband and I are past that stage, and look at me. I’d hardly fit in one, anyhow!” She laughed, hollow and embarrassed.

      Lydia tossed the negligee over her shoulder, and it landed in a silky pile on the floor. “I am glad we’re having Breast Power Psychic Night tonight! A negligee is really a gift to the man. To the man!” She leaned over and shook Katie’s shoulders, the flame from the candle only inches away from her swinging gray braids. I reached out and lifted them away before her hair turned into a flaming mass, but Aunt Lydia hardly noticed.

      “Do you think women, real women, want to be dressed up like hooker dolls? Lace isn’t comfortable. It itches my crotch. It causes me to break out in an emotional rash! These negligees go straight up your butt, and no woman should be showing the backs of her thighs to any man when she’s passed the age of sixteen. See? This is what men do to us! They make us feel like sexual objects who are there to please them, listen to them, cater to them!”

      “Right,” said Katie. Her brown eyes darted to the negligee, and I saw her swallow hard. “We don’t need that. It’s ridiculous, really. We’re not toys. It’s ridiculous that women would want to wear them in the first place.”

      “Of course it is!” We all looked at our fearless leader with more than a little fear as she raised both fists in the air. “They drive up in tractors, toss us lingerie that we’re supposed to model for them, making us feel downright cheap, with our breasts yanked to our throats, then we’re to tickle their teensies, and they drive off! Leaving our breasts spiritually unawakened. Dead!”

      “Amen to that. Dead breasts, I mean.” The door slammed as another woman walked in, dropping three bottles of wine on the kitchen counter, then expertly opening each one of them. I could only assume it was Lara Keene, the minister’s wife.

      Lara grabbed five huge goblets from the cupboards. The goblets were in the shapes of ogres. She filled each ogre goblet to the top. “Praise be to God that I did not kill Mrs. Ellensby.”

      Praise be to God that she didn’t kill Mrs. Ellensby?

      Lara distributed the wine to all of us, with a nod and a perfunctory smile in my direction. “She called me over, supposedly to study the Bible, then left the room ‘for a wee minute’ to spend five thousand four hundred and eighty-nine dollars online at Pottery Avenue. Then, in the midst of my reading Psalms to her, at her request, she informed me that she sees no reason to have a fund-raiser for a new roof for the church even though there’s an enormous hole over the preschoolers’ classroom.”

      Lara imitated the woman’s voice by pitching hers at the highest level, then pinching her throat and waggling it back and forth. “‘We don’t need another roof. We need to pray to God and ask Him what He feels we need. God will provide what needs to be provided. That’s His will, and I know that God will say that the church is fine. I know how God works! People have no money in this town!’” Lara’s voice rose several octaves, shrill like a fish wife’s. “‘We’re scraping by, Lara. Really. You young ministers. You need everything. You want everything. Im-medi-ately.’”

      Lara settled herself to my left and took a very long drink of wine. The ogre goblet was half empty when she finally put it down. “I told her that it was difficult for the children to concentrate on their Bible verses when there was water trickling down a wall, and she said, ‘I am going to pray for you, Mrs. Keene. Pray that you will grow with the Lord and not against Him. Suffering is what makes us better people. Suffering is what makes us sacrifice for others. Jesus suffered for us, and we must suffer for Him, and those young children need to learn at an early age that not everything in life is perfect. Now, let’s hurry up and pray. I need to get my manicure.’”

      “Damn.” Lara slumped into the circle beside us. “Damn and damnation.”

      The silence was complete as all of us women, preparing for Breast Power Psychic Night, contemplated damn and damnation.

      After several quiet minutes, Lydia spoke up, “Lara, this is my niece, Julia.”

      Lara and I shook hands. “A pleasure,” I said. “What did she buy?”

      “Sorry?” Lara looked confused.

      “The woman who talks to God. Who knows what He wants. Perhaps God told her what to buy at Pottery Avenue?”

      Lara smiled, then sagged. “Well. He told her to buy three different sets of dishes, a chair, tablecloths, a new set of pans…I listened to her arguing with the saleswoman about the bill. ‘No’ to the roof for the preschoolers, but ‘yes’ to a set of striped picnic basket plates for five hundred and thirty-five dollars.”

      Lara’s blond hair was ripped up tight into a bun. Bright blue eyes summed me up pretty quickly. I knew that she was taller than me, but almost as thin as the twitchy-eyed but beautiful psychic.

      She was wearing proper beige pants. Proper, boring flat shoes. A dull blue blouse that was buttoned straight up. A mediumsized gold cross hung around her neck.

      “Nice black eye,” she observed. “Who did that to you?”

      I was not surprised by her bluntness. “My ex-fiancé. Fine family. Fine old, respected Bostonian family,” I muttered. “Fine, proper, respected men dot the family, and they all take fine, old potshots at their wives. Apparently they don’t beat up on their girlfriends—no, scratch that. Those scandals are covered up. Who wants to argue with a fine, old respected family, especially when they imply that the woman, the hittee in question is clearly an addict and a slut and after the family money by filing frivolous lawsuits.”

      “Ah, I see. Don’t worry. They’ll slip right into hell when they die. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that wife beaters and child abusers go straight on down. Forgiveness does not extend to those who hurt the innocent with no remorse.” Lara took another long sip of her wine, then tiredly ripped the rubber band out of her hair, letting her blond locks fall about her shoulders.

      She undid the top few buttons of her sweater and the stiffly starched white blouse, twisting her neck around from right to left as if the shirt had been strangling her.

      The transformation was astounding. Lara had gone from looking like, well, like a proper, devout minister’s wife, to looking like a college student who sat around with friends and drank every night.

      Lara raised her glass to me, her mouth trembling. “You’re lucky you left. You would have had to be prim and proper your whole life, and you would have to smother exactly who you are as a woman. Forever. You would have to do what everyone expected you