So Sweet a Changeling: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 6)

Chapter Nine: Lauren, Sunday

Lauren spent her morning in the home office, scanning photos of Umberto DiTomaso, whom she'd called Pappa to the consternation of everyone in Joe's family, for the slideshow; it had always been a tongue-in-cheek title, meant to irritate her father-in-law rather than endear her to him, and Umberto had seen right through it but never called her on it, responding always with a curl of his lip or a raised eyebrow. 

Throughout her marriage to Joe, and even before it, she'd navigated her relationship with her in-laws using the following guiding principle: "I don't like you and you don't like me, but let's be civil for Joe's sake." Later she'd added, "and for the sake of the kids," when Naomi and Tosh had come along. Those had been particularly challenging years, the ones leading up to their births, because of her previous two miscarriages, the responsibility for which they, especially Joe's mom, had lain at her feet. Was it any wonder, then, that she wouldn't sit shiva, or whatever the Catholic equivalent was called, with Joe's mom, uttering prayers she didn't know for a man who'd been at best cold to her and at worst openly hostile? Was she to swallow every injustice they'd done to her simply because she wasn't their ideal of a wife for their son?

She felt a spiteful satisfaction knowing Pappa, who over the years had taken the time to instruct her on her many faults, chiefly that she wasn't Catholic and that she'd led their son into sin, had been a sinner himself, but that satisfaction was tempered with the knowledge that he hadn't run around on his wife with a younger woman, but with Mrs. Anderson, of all people. She still couldn't wrap her head around it. She knew they'd been close, but not that close.  

Good on Mrs. Anderson, she thought. In 1971 she would have been... 66 years old, and doing it with a man probably half her age, when even now it was normally the other way around. Lauren only hoped she'd be capable of getting it on at that age, although, if she said so herself, she was doing quite spectacularly at the moment, and her sexual score-sheet had only jumped in value in the last five years; she was getting more action now than she'd gotten in her youth, and it was all due to the friends she'd reunited with after thirty years' estrangement. Not only was she getting it regularly from her husband, but from her best friend and lover Rachel as per an agreement she'd made with Joe so he could see Joanie on the side; and then, whenever Rachel felt generous, she brought Al into the mix so Lauren could feel him pressing her into the mattress. Sometimes Joe got to have Rachel in recompense for this, and sometimes it was in Lauren's company, and sometimes with Al in the room too, but those times were rarer because Joe and Al felt uncomfortable being naked around each other.

Then there was Sunny. He was an interesting new notch on her belt, his talents having been put to use recently one evening when she and Joe had agreed to a longer swap just with Sunny and Tej. Sunny had been trying to impress her with some positions he must have found in the Kama Sutra or some other manual, but impressed she'd been; the next time she was with Al, she'd ask him to try them with her too, whenever that would be. He'd been less accessible, lately, seeing his old girlfriend Agnes, and Lauren, who had no right to be, was jealous. She'd wanted to be Al's only other woman after Rachel, and now she knew how Joanie must have felt when she'd learned Joe had been with Rachel.

Was it odd that she wasn't jealous that her own husband now had the privilege of having had the attention of four different women, and that the other three liked to regale her with stories of how hard they came with him because of the size of his equipment? Tej seemed particularly smitten of it; she'd had a post-game recap with Lauren the day after their swap (Lauren had instituted the practice of the recap after the first time they'd all participated), and had been proud to announce that she'd squirted for the very first time while riding Joe in reverse cowgirl position, but then she'd pleaded with her not to tell Sunny about it, or he'd be wild with feelings of jealousy and inadequacy.