Madam Of The House. Donna Birdsell

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      She blinked against the stinging behind her eyes— Cecilia Katz did not cry—and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray she kept on the deck.

      At least she had a night out with the girls to look forward to.

      The last time they’d gone out, they’d ended up in Atlantic City at three in the morning, playing craps with a busload of senior citizens from the Pleasant Park Rest Home in Jersey City.

      One hot roller, an octogenarian named Myra, walked away with a stack of twenty-five-dollar chips as long as her liver-spotted arm. But Cecilia and her friends hadn’t been so lucky. They’d cleaned all the change out of the bottoms of their purses, maxed out their debit cards, and had to pay the tolls on the way home with a credit card.

      But damn, it had been fun.

      She needed another night like that. Desperately.

      “Let’s face it, Cecilia,” she said out loud. “You need a lot of things desperately.”

      CHAPTER 3

      Everyone likes a new house. Everything is shiny and the roof doesn’t sag. But the older ones, they’re the ones with real character.

      Caligula, the club where Cecilia was supposed to meet Dannie and Roseanna, was cool and stylish, boasting faux-marble columns and several seating areas strewn with over-stuffed throw pillows and understuffed young women.

      Cecilia scanned the room, but Dannie and Roseanna hadn’t yet arrived.

      She checked her watch. It was early, and the place wasn’t anywhere near capacity yet. The hard-core partyers wouldn’t roll in until the next shift. At thirty-nine and three-quarters, Cecilia was well past her partying prime, sent down to the minor leagues along with the other Gen-Xers and the kids with fake IDs.

      Cecilia grabbed a table and lit a cigarette, watching the door for her friends. A heart-stoppingly gorgeous waiter in a short little toga and gold-leaf headpiece wandered over to take her order.

      “Would you like a drink?”

      “How about a club soda with lime for now. I’m waiting for some friends.”

      “Sure thing.” He winked, and her stomach fluttered just a little.

      She admired the flex of his calf muscles in the laced up sandals he wore. She imagined Jake would look pretty good in that getup.

      Oops. Another impure thought for confession. She was really racking them up.

      The DJ made an announcement to kick off Caligula’s ’80s night, and started with one of Cecilia’s favorites, “Superfreak” by Rick James. She watched the door as a group of twenty-something women trickled in, with tiny shirts and tiny waists and tiny rhinestone-studded cell-phone purses hanging from their wrists. They pretended to ignore the group of twenty-something guys hanging by the door who were giving them the once-over.

      Dannie and Roseanna came in behind the young women, their heads pressed together, laughing. They made no bones about checking out the guys near the door, and much to Cecilia’s satisfaction, they got several appreciative glances in return.

      The women located Cecilia and navigated through the growing crowd.

      “Hey, chicklet!” Roseanna plunked down into one of the seats and gave Cecilia a peck on the cheek. “How’s it going?”

      “Eh. How about you?”

      “Eh.”

      “How’s work?”

      Roseanna, a die-hard music fanatic, was a writer for the local music-scene magazine. She always joked it wasn’t so much the poor man’s version of Rolling Stone, it was the really, really destitute man’s version.

      “I don’t know, Cece. Maybe I’m getting too old for this job.”

      “Oh, come on. You know more about music than anybody I know.”

      Roseanna shook her head. “I just can’t get into the new stuff, you know? I feel like my parents sometimes. I just want to say, ‘What is this crap? This isn’t music.’”

      “Well, sit back and relax, ’cause you’re not going to hear any of that crap tonight,” Dannie said. “It’s all oldies but goodies here.”

      As if to punctuate Dannie’s words, a song by Roseanna’s all-time favorite band, the Aching Loins, blasted out over the dance floor. The three women screamed.

      The hot waiter materialized with Cecilia’s club soda.

      “No way, Spartacus. Take that back,” Dannie said. “And bring us a round of Gladiators.”

      In a couple of minutes he returned with a trayful of pretty pink drinks.

      Cecilia removed the pineapple wedge and took a sip. “Why do they call this a Gladiator?”

      Dannie gave her an evil grin. “Because it’s gonna kick your ass.”

      The Gladiator, did, indeed, live up to its name, and by the second round, the girls were making some noise.

      They tore up the dance floor to “Love Shack” by the B52s, “You Spin Me Right Round” by Dead or Alive, and “Head to Toe” by Lisa Lisa, and had returned to the table when Roseanna pointed to someone who’d just come in the door. “Look.”

      A tall woman in a red silk jacket scanned the crowd. She looked familiar.

      “OH. MY. GOD. It’s Grace Poleiski,” Dannie said.

      “I saw her at Beruglia’s when I went there for lunch today,” Roseanna said, grinning. “I didn’t think you guys would mind if I invited her.”

      “Are you kidding!” Cecilia laughed. “It’s gonna be just like old times.”

      AFTER THE USUAL NICETIES about who’d lost weight (Cecilia and Roseanna), who’d lost a husband (Grace, Cecilia and Dannie) and who’d lost the ability to party all night and still function in the morning (all of them), the waiter appeared with a tray of pale-orange shots.

      He set one in front of each of them, pulled a pack of matches out of the folds of his toga and lit the shots. Low blue flames danced on the surface of the liquor.

      “Don’t forget to blow ’em out before you drink ’em,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of mishaps.”

      Roseanna smiled. “Remember when Dannie accidentally lit her hair on fire while she was smoking a cigarette in the girls’ bathroom?”

      “What did she expect?” said Cecilia. “She used so much hairspray, her hair wouldn’t have moved in a hurricane.”

      “Come on.” Dannie laughed. “My hair wasn’t any worse than anyone else’s. In fact, I remember Grace getting hers tangled in the volleyball net in gym class. That hairdo had to be at least a foot high.”

      They all cracked up.

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