The Backup Plan by Sherryl Woods

Author:Sherryl Woods [Woods, Sherryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Unknown
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2005-05-21T23:00:00+00:00

Dorothy sat at the dining room table long after Dinah had disappeared upstairs. She had a million and one calls left to make, but she couldn’t seem to work up the enthusiasm. It seemed as if she’d made the exact same calls to the exact same people for way too many years now. She was the go-to woman, the one everyone in town expected to pull off fund-raising miracles.Over time, she’d assembled list upon list of the best caterers, the best donors, the best hotel ballrooms, the best florists. She could call any of them on a moment’s notice and put together an event that would dazzle. Was her legacy going to be that she knew how to get people to part with their money?

Ironically there was no one on any of those lists who she considered to be a friend, at least not one to whom she would divulge the things that were troubling her. Perhaps that was why she’d said too much when Dinah had given her an opening just now. She was searching for some meaning to her life and she wasn’t finding it on her own. She’d hoped that maybe her daughter could shed some light on it.

Certainly there was an important place in the world for what she did. Arts organizations, children’s charities, the homeless, historic preservation projects all needed more money than cities, states or the federal government could provide. And as much as they needed the dollars, they also needed the attention that a successful event could muster. It helped to draw in new volunteers for the shelters, docents for the museums, new audiences for the arts.

It wasn’t as if she’d wasted her life. It was just that lately she was feeling more and more incomplete, as if there was something more she should be doing to fulfill herself and not just the charity coffers.

She wondered if Marshall felt a vague dissatisfaction, as well, if that explained his increasingly short temper, his more frequent absences from the dinner table. Was it even possible he was having an affair, one it was more difficult to carry on with Dinah now living at the house?

She was distractedly tapping her pen on the table when Maybelle breezed into the dining room, her face full of disapproval.

“Why’d you go and dump all your problems on that girl’s shoulders?” Maybelle demanded indignantly. “Don’t you think she has enough on her mind?”

Dorothy stared at the housekeeper with dismay. “I never meant to add to her problems. It just sort of bubbled out.”

“You sure about that? Maybe you were sitting in here feeling sorry for yourself and saw a way to get some sympathy.”

Dorothy accepted most of Maybelle’s scoldings as her due, but not this one. “I most certainly did not. Besides, maybe it’s good for her to finally know the truth.”

“That you and her daddy got married because she was on the way? That’s exactly what every woman wants to find out when there’s not a thing in the world she can do about it,” Maybelle chided.

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