Good Christian Bitches Read Online Free PDF

Hillside Park Presbyterian to Anderson Realty in Hillside Park Village; it was a short drive from anywhere to anywhere else in the neighborhood, which was one of its charms.
    Amanda glimpsed herself in the rearview mirror. I must look horrific, she told herself, running a hand through her humidity-dampened hair. Again she found herself missing the cool ocean breezes of Newport Beach.
    To Amanda’s surprise, the office was practically empty. Real estate was hitting a slow spot, which meant that a whole bunch of people in the community who had been flipping properties for fun and profit were now stuck with unoccupied rental houses, underoccupied apartment buildings, and even a few office buildings. Nobody was going to go belly-up, though. It wasn’t that kind of place.
    “Hello,” Amanda said to the receptionist. “I’m looking for Ann Anderson.” The receptionist smiled, clearly agreeing this was the only place to buy a house in Hillside Park.
    Certainly, there were plenty of other agencies from which to choose, but it seemed unpatriotic to go anywhere else. And besides, if you didn’t list your house with Ann, or if you didn’t buy from her when you were upgrading, you and your spouse would pay such a high social price that it didn’t make sense trying to save the one or two percent discount other brokers offered. Not buying or selling with Ann Anderson was like not responding to a chain e-mail and sending it on to six more people. A husband’s business would dry up, his tee times at the club would mysteriously vanish, and restaurants would somehow lose his reservations. Not to mention their names disappearing from every social mailing list on the planet.
    As for the wife, it was even worse. Ann’s mother, Catherine, even in her eighties, was still the grande dame of Hillside Park social matters, and she was still the ultimate arbiter of those who were “good people” and those who were not. You didn’t get anywhere in life, or in Hillside Park, by crossing the Andersons. And since the firm was so well-connected, the Andersons always did a great job of representing their clients, because they had more buyers and sellers than the rest of the agencies in the neighborhood put together. Put that all together and it would never have occurred to Amanda to go elsewhere.
    Ann had helped Amanda, by long-distance phone and e-mail, in locating an appropriate four-bedroom home to rent for a year or two while Amanda figured out what the next direction of her life would be. To her credit, Ann had been extremely discreet with regard to information about the collapse of Amanda’s marriage and her return with her children to Dallas—she hadn’t told more than a dozen people, which, in Hillside Park terms, is about as close as a person can come to depositing a secret in Fort Knox. That’s probably how they made the connection in the Bible study, Amanda realized. One of Ann’s dozen divas she’d confided in had not kept her confidence. They say a woman’s loyalty only lasts as long as it takes her to hang up and dial again.
    “I’m sorry,” the receptionist, a plain-looking woman in her early twenties, said over her dark-rimmed glasses. Ann had a thing about not hiring attractive young women. They kept getting snatched up by the male home buyers, single or otherwise. It just took too long to train new ones. “She’s out with a client.”
    Amanda checked her watch. They were supposed to meet at three thirty, and it was three thirty. “I was supposed to meet her right about now,” Amanda said, surprised and slightly miffed. The receptionist gave her a conspiratorial grin.
    “It’s some guy from Kentucky,” she confided. “They’re looking at ranches.”
    “Oh,” Amanda said, nodding, as if she was supposed to take some sort of comfort from the fact that Ann was out with a heavy hitter and not with some Regular Joe just looking for a house.
    Anybody who was wealthy enough to buy a ranch could afford to command