Introduction

A refreshingly honest, laugh-out-loud novel about losing the life you always wanted…and finding the life you were meant to have.

For the last ten years, Agnes Parsons’s biggest challenge has been juggling yoga classes and lunch dates. Her Santa Monica house staff takes care of everything, leaving Agnes to focus on her trophy-wife responsibilities: look perfect, adore her older husband, and wear terribly expensive (if uncomfortable) underwear.

When her husband disappears, leaving Agnes and their infant daughter with no money, no home, and no staff, she is forced to move across the country, where she lands a job teaching at an all-boys boarding school in the Bronx. So long, organic quinoa bowls and sunshine-filled California life. Hello, processed food, pest-infested house, and twelve-year-old-boy humor—all day, every day.

But it’s in this place of second chances (and giant bugs), where Agnes is unexpectedly forced to take care of herself and her daughter, where she finds out the kind of woman she can be. Ultimately, she has to decide if she prefers the woman and mother she has become…or the trophy life she left behind.

Authentic and sharply witty, Trophy Life is proof that granny panties and mom coats might not be the answer to everything; they’re simply comfortable (if slightly unattractive) reminders of what happens when one life ends…and real life begins.

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Excerpt

Part One: Summer

-1-

When you sneak down into the kitchen to make your husband’s green smoothie and forget to put the lid on the blender, and you’re perched on the counter staring up at the oozing ceiling, when the housekeeper shows up and is standing under you, it’s a good idea to be wearing underwear. I was not.

“Why don’t you let me make Mr. Jack’s breakfast,” Sondra asked, her eyes, thankfully, fixed on the ceiling.

“I’m fine,” I said, desperately swabbing away at the green juice that had started to drip down, while trying to keep my knees together. “I’ve got this.” I looked over at the clock: 7.55. I had five minutes to clean this before Jack walked in. Seven years ago, when I first saw this kitchen, Jack’s kitchen, I thought it looked like heaven. Everything was white, on top of white, adorned with more white. At first I didn’t understand why a compulsively neat person would want to decorate in white. But I soon realized that white kitchens and white bathrooms allowed people like Jack to eradicate dirt before it got too comfortable, before it settled in.

The green glob was doing more than settling in, it was threatening to take over.

The mop was useless, or perhaps I was, because all I was succeeding in doing was moving the smoothie around the ceiling, increasing the downpour of blended kale (handful), cucumber (1/4), almond milk (1/2 cup), shelled hempseed (2 tspn), and blueberries (dozen). I wiped some juice out of my eyes, wincing as I remembered adding the pinch of cayenne that Jack said was good for memory.

Sondra forced herself to look at me. She often had to force herself to look at me. “You ok, Agnes?” she asked as I stood on the counter, my eyes now squeezed shut, mop overhead.

Drip.

“I’m fine,” I moaned. Damn, that cayenne burned.

“I’m here early anyway,” she said. “It’s no problem for me to make it.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Drip. It may not have been a problem for Sondra to whip up Jack’s daily green smoothie in addition to all the other cooking she was doing for us, but I wanted to make this smoothie. I needed to make this smoothie. I needed to do one thing in this heavenly kitchen other than sit at the island and eat what was given to me.

“You don’t have much time,” she said, unspooling a heap of paper towels and mopping the counter and floor, while motioning to the clock on the wall with her head. “He’ll be down soon and I don’t think you want him to see this.”

She wasn’t wrong. I didn’t want Sondra cleaning up my messes, but I really didn’t want Jack seeing them.

“Fine,” I said, lowering the mop in defeat. I looked down at myself. My oversized tank top was covered in green juice, my eyes still crusted with sleep, my hair unbrushed. The wrinkles which I had apparently gifted myself for my 35th birthday were screaming for a tub of spackling paste. There was a lot about this Jack didn’t need to see. I squatted as demurely as possible and handed the mop to Sondra.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I keep telling you,” she replied, helping me off the counter and looking up at the ceiling, “stay away from the kitchen.”

--

By the time Jack came looking for his smoothie, the kitchen was once again, a scene of white-on-white order and serenity. Sondra handed him a glass. I watched him take a sip, my eyes moving from the silver at his temples, to his perfect jaw, and then resting on the shoulders of the suit that I knew would be just as pristine at the end of the day as it was now. I briefly wondered how someone so together could choose a woman who just minutes ago had been standing on the counter waving a mop around. Jack may have been the older man, but I was the one out of my league.

“Delicious, Sondra,” he said, smiling at her. Sondra was no less taken with Jack than I was. She beamed and managed to give me a healthy dose of side eye without even looking at me. Whatever. I’d earned it.

I sat in front of Grace’s high chair and began feeding her a bowl of puréed organic pears. I had neither purchased the pears (Sondra), nor puréed them (Alma, our nanny).

“Is Alma late?” Jack asked, finishing his smoothie and putting the empty glass in the sink.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s just me and Grace for breakfast.” Always happy to disapprove of Alma, Sondra tutted loudly and placed her hands on her hips. I looked over at her small, round compact body and wondered how much tutting she did when I wasn’t in the room. She was still disapproving audibly when Alma ran in.

“So sorry I’m late,” Alma said, throwing her purse down on a barstool. “Bad traffic this morning.” She swooped in and took the bowl of fruit from my hands. I had no choice but to yield. This was, after all, why Alma was here.

Now that order had been restored in his kitchen, Jack bent down and kissed the top of Grace’s head and then moved over to me and put his lips on my neck. He’d just showered after spending an hour with his trainer. I breathed in the scent of his cheek. I could spend all day smelling that man.

“Meet me at the spa,” he said in my ear, reminding me that this was the last Tuesday of the month and therefore time for our monthly massage. “Then we can grab dinner,” he added. I also knew what that meant. It was Tuesday. Tuesdays were sushi.

--

Later that day, when I first realized something was wrong, I was naked and face down on a table, my arms pinned down by my sides, my head shoved into a spongy donut pillow. The beds in the couples massage room were placed in a v-formation, so if I lifted my head, I was staring directly at the empty pillow of what should have been Jack’s bed. But Jack, who set all the clocks in the house ten minutes ahead, was now thirty minutes late.

“We could try him again,” said Lynne, my masseuse. She and Misha had been giving us our weekly late afternoon massage for seven years. It had been an engagement present from Jack. “The gift that will keep on giving,” he’d promised.

“No,” I said, staring down at the creamy tile floor. Jack didn’t answer calls from numbers he didn’t recognize. “I should probably call him from my phone.” I was starting to feel queasy and worried that I’d drool through the hole in the pillow, so I flipped over onto my back and stared up at the ceiling, which was painted a very light blue, layered with gauzy white clouds.

Lynne looked down at me, her face leaning over mine. She ran her fingers through her cropped hair. Both women were blonde and tan, their faces smooth. But Lynne was fifty-five, old enough to be my mother.

I needed to get up off the table and call Jack, but I couldn’t move. Lying there, sensing that first small, almost imperceptible shift in my fortune, I was frozen, all my clothes and phone stashed in a locker in another room. In hindsight, I would have preferred to have been clothed and upright. In hindsight, I would have liked a phone.

I forced myself to sit up, letting the sheet fall down to my waist. I brought my knees up to my chest to give myself some coverage.

“I have to go,” I said, swiveling and swinging my legs off the table, pulling the sheet with me.

“Agnes,” Lynn began. There was something about her voice that told me I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. “Agnes,” she repeated, reaching for me, touching the sheet, which was now acting as a toga.

“Listen,” she took a deep breath, a look crossing over her face. I knew this look. This was the look of the bearer of really shitty news.

“Jack hasn’t paid us in a while.”

“Yeah,” added Misha.

I blinked and Lynne continued. “You know, it’s not like him. He’s usually on time with his payments.” I shifted my eyes to Misha but she looked away. She hadn’t been touching me every week for seven years. She didn’t owe me anything.

I wanted to tell Lynn that there was probably a perfectly good reason that Jack would suddenly stop paying, but I couldn’t think of one, and although I opened my mouth, nothing came out.

I clutched the sheet and eyed my robe hanging on the back of the door. I was freezing.

Lynne took a step closer to me. “There’s more,” she said.

Of course there is.

“Roger called him a few times, but Jack hasn’t returned any of his calls.”

“Yeah,” Misha chimed in. She nodded, her ponytail swaying with her. I wanted to tell her that if she didn’t want people to know that Misha the Santa Monica masseuse was really Michelle from somewhere in New Jersey, then she probably should say “Yeah” a lot less often. But I just turned and looked back at Lynne.

“I have to go,” I said, standing up and pulling the sheet around myself. I shuffled to the door and looked back at Misha née Michelle and Lynne with her mommish hair, and although I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on, I did know that my monthly late afternoon couples massage would be a thing of the past.

---

I called Jack as soon as I got outside, doing my best impression of a wife who was concerned, but not panicked. I leaned on the wall, dropped my purse at my feet and watched the contents spill out onto the sidewalk. I took a few deep breaths before I spoke, swallowing back the bitter taste in my mouth.

“Hey, it’s me. Just wondering where you are. Call me when you can.” I didn’t need to remind Jack that you don’t stand up someone with a history like mine. I thought about calling again, but instead I sent a text What’s up? No massage today? and walked the three blocks home as quickly I could.

When I got to the block before the beach and turned onto our street, I found Alma, our nanny, sitting on the wrap-around deck with our six month old Grace. They were perched on a blanket, playing with painted wooden rings. You had to look pretty hard in Santa Monica to find a toy made from plastic. I walked up the front steps, onto the deck and sat in a chair at the large table, my arms resting on the thick planks of reclaimed wood. Grace looked up at me, her one clump of thin blonde hair gathered in a clip above her forehead.

“Alma,” I began. “Has Jack been home?”

“Not yet.” She said. “No massage?”

“No. No massage.” I slid down off the chair and sat on the deck with them. I picked up Grace and put her between my legs. She was not yet sitting up on her own, so she leaned against me for support.

“You want to give her the bath tonight?” asked Alma. Jack never understood why I bathed Grace while Alma was on duty, but I often did. The bathroom off her nursery was one of the smallest places in a house full of large, open rooms. It was manageable for me. I knew where to sit, where to be.

“No, you do it,” I said. “I need to figure out where Jack is.” Alma shrugged and carried Grace inside. I tried Jack one more time, but when the phone went to voicemail again, I hung up and texted him. I didn’t trust my voice.

Home now. Call when you can.

I looked out at the ocean and saw the sun making its way down. Maybe this was nothing. Maybe something came up at work and he really was just running late. But Jack didn’t run late. Jack never ran late. I thought about what Lynne said about missed payments and unreturned phone calls, and an awful, familiar feeling was moving up through me and I could not shake it off. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

- How do you think the way Agnes grew up impacted the choices she made and the way she tried so hard to make it work with Jack?
-How did her interactions with her students help her become a person who could eventually walk away from her marriage?
-What is the hardest thing about watching a friend choose the wrong spouse?

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