Week Forty Four
The Book Club
Their cars were too big. Giant European behemoths made almost exclusively for soccer players and rich American housewives. With chairs wrapped in the skins of almost extinct African mammals, and a climate controlled system that simulated the delicate atmosphere inside the Vatican archives. They had names like Diane and Carol, and they were acutely aware of their position high atop the socio-economic food chain.
What started as a club to review books recommended by television talk show hosts while imbibing in rosé, quickly turned into something more sinister. And it started when Susan arrived at the book club with a dented bumper and what appeared to be blood on the grill of her Range Rover.
She said it was a squirrel. Then a coyote. Then she settled on it being a deer. She’d hit it while she was texting her daughter Kamryn about setting up Kamryn’s appointment to get lip injections. Kamryn, being 13, felt like her mother was pressuring her into getting them. But just as Susan typed out, “Kam, I don’t want the other mothers to see my daughter with thin lips and think I’m a bad parent” she’d hit … it. Something big. Something no longer moving.
Instead of going out to check on it. Instead of calling the police, Susan drove on and parked at Brenda’s and mentally prepared to talk - in depth - about the complex love triangle at work in Tender Lusts.
They were deep diving on chapter 27 when Tabitha’s need for sexual gratification from her boss comes to a head when Susan broke down.
“I can’t. I just can’t. You guys, I think I killed something with my car.”
And with that, all seven women found themselves staring at the front of Susan’s Range Rover and discussing what she possibly hit. It was when Brenda pulled out an unmistakable human tooth from the carbon fibre hexagonal pattern of the grill that Susan smiled.
———
They agreed not to tell anyone. Keep it a secret. Let the poor fool who decided to jog in the dark on a twisty Connecticut back road suffer. They cleaned off the car, and off the six women went into the night.
Susan hadn’t felt so alive in years. She gripped the steering wheel of her land tank and floored it around and over the rolling hills that littered Fairfield County. She kept a watchful eye out for anything and anyone crossing her path. She wanted nothing more than to feel the bone-pulverizing impact once again.
Brenda couldn’t fall asleep. She tried to peg down what it was that kept her awake, what strange emotion it was. Because it wasn’t fear. It wasn’t anger or sadness. And around 2 o’clock in the morning, after much contemplation, Brenda decided she was jealous.
On Diane’s drive home, she began breaking for a squirrel that ran out ahead of her Lexus, but replaying Susan’s smile over in her head, wrath funneled through her muscles as she gunned the SUV and found a satisfying bump and crunch as two tons of Japanese steel popped the life out of the poor woodland creature.
Carol, who was admittedly the most shook up over Susan’s revelation, rolled down the window and tossed her copy of Tender Lusts behind a stonewall that separated the road from a horse farm. She was too proud to associate with the book club anymore.
Sharon’s husband hadn’t come home in a week. He was either in Hong Kong, or Singapore, or Kuala Lumpur. She couldn’t remember and she didn’t care. With her kids asleep, Sharon listened to the silence of her home. And that’s when the idea struck her. She went to the garage and stared at the front of her X5 with a glass of scotch in her hand. She slowly and drunkenly searched her garage, found some rope, a pitch fork, and a box of nails. Once she was done, the front of her BMW looked - while not exactly like something out of Mad Max - like it could do some serious damage to anyone who came into contact with it.
Kimberly stood in front of her SubZero as it cast its welcoming light over her collection of All-Clad pans, glimmered off the polished marble back splash she’d imported from Italy, and twisted and turned as it refracted off the neatly organized bottles of various artisanal oils she’d purchased in New York. She was chewing on a hangnail trying to stifle her want of food. Nothing in the fridge seemed to please her appetite. She wanted something else. Something more. Something raw. And with that, she found herself driving her G-Wagen back and forth in the approximate location that Susan had her accident. Once she spotted the blood on the road that trailed off into the woods, she instinctively wiped a line of drool from her lips, stopped the car, and walked off into the moonlight.
Finally, Paula drove her Porsche Cayenne back towards her gated community. On the way, she began texting Brent - the guy she’d met during a girls’ night out - and with whom she’d been having an affair for the past two months. He’d sent her a dick pic and when she attempted to send him back a topless selfie, she slammed into a deer turning it into a cloud of red dust and sending her SUV spinning. Regaining control, she pulled the car over, finished sending the selfie to Brent, and took a look at the front of her car. It was drivable, but destroyed.
———
Kimberly was hosting the following week’s book club. When the women showed up - including a reluctant Carol - each had something different about them. Something primal and excited. They distractedly tried to discuss the ending to Tender Lusts, but the topic kept returning to Susan’s accident the week before.
And that’s when the curiosity spilled over, and they split into two groups while piling into Paula’s new Jaguar F-Pace and Sharon’s BMW X5. The sun was quickly setting, and they determined the best place to find joggers would be on the road that ran along the beach.
Sharon spotted him first, a man in his mid-30s wearing earbuds and running at a good clip away from them.
“He’d never know what hit him,” thought Sharon.
She aimed the pitchfork tied to her bumper at the jogger, and with her friends cheering her on, she gunned the accelerator. The pitchfork hit him just above his tailbone, ran through his abdomen, and exploded through his running shirt. He had only a split second to know what happened before being pulled under by the truck’s massive wheels that crushed what remained of his body.
Both cars stopped. Excitedly, the women ran to the man’s remains and tossed what they could of him into the ocean. Kimberly placed what appeared to be part of his shoulder into a Ziplock bag she’d brought along for just the occasion. They threw the damaged pitchfork into Sharon’s trunk, cleaned off the car as best they could, and went on their way.
Paula’s target was near the nature preserve. She tagged him quickly, and in her haste, she accidentally spun him off her hood. He landed in the grass on the side of the road, and was still alive.
In the back of the car, Brenda said, “Uh, Paula, he’s still moving.”
“Let’s end this!” shouted Paula, throwing the car into reverse and landing the car’s left back wheel directly on the man’s back. Carol opened a bottle of champagne and poured it into the plastic travel glasses she’d taken from Kimberly’s pantry.
———
The following week, Carol hit two people - teenagers - walking by the side of the road. Diane took out a coyote and a bicyclist near the Inn.
Susan bought books of stickers for the group, small emblems they could put on their fenders. Not unlike a fighter pilot’s victory markings or a football lineman’s quarterback sacks, each represented a kill. At the end of the summer, Sharon was leading with 8 followed closely by Diane’s 7. Book discussions gave way to topics like body disposal, car bumper reinforcement, and which SUVs provided the most torque.
Despite the increase in front end damage to SUVs across town, the local police chalked the uptick in vehicular manslaughter to texting while driving. Plus, hefty donations by several prominent families in the town to the department’s Police Athletic League forced them to lay blame on kids from the poorer towns in the region.
Late in September, the book club was out in force. October 1st was the end of the “season” and they’d decided to crown a champion - the woman with the most kills - on that date. And it was on a backroad near the country club that everything came to a head.
Paula opened her car door as she bore down on her target. The door slammed into the man, shattering the door’s window, and wrapping him like a reverse “C” around the satin grey body work. Paula peeled him off, and placed him on the ground. Walking back to the car, Paula was working out how best to angle her car in order to finish him off. From the backseat, she heard Carol say, “Oh fuck!”
Carol had only met him once or twice, usually during their children’s horse shows at the Hunt Club, but through the ruined flesh on the man’s face, she recognized him without question. The man coughing up blood and spitting out teeth was Sharon’s husband.
Sharon was with Brenda and Kimberly on the other side of town, but when Susan called her to tell her the news, she made Brenda beeline it toward the country club.
“Sharon, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t…”
“You killed my fucking HUSBAND, Paula! MY FUCKING HUSBAND.”
“Yes, I know. But I… I… I didn’t know he-”
Sharon grabbed Paula’s cable knit sweater and threw her to the ground. She was on top of her slamming her in the face repeatedly with the horribly expensive diamond ring the dead man next to her had bought her 15 years before. Blood poured out of Paula’s nose when Susan finally pulled Sharon off of her.
The next day, Paula - with swollen eyes and a broken nose - went out and put a new kill sticker on her fender.
———
No one expected Sharon to show up at book club the following week. Her husband’s funeral was that morning, and no one had heard from her since the incident. It was October 1st and the women had decided to call it a draw and award champion status to both Sharon and Paula, who, despite killing someone’s husband, still deserved the credit.
But out in the driveway, they heard the loud roar of a V8 engine. Behind the wheel of an electric yellow Hummer, Sharon was revving the engine as fire flashed through her eyes. As Paula, Susan, and Carol approached, Sharon threw the truck into gear and slammed all 5,000lbs of American overcompensation into the ladies.
Stepping down from the truck, Sharon calmly held the mangled wrists of each woman checking for a lack of pulse. With a smug satisfaction, she went back into the Hummer, grabbed something out of her purse, and placed 3 more kill stickers on her fender.
