Good Christian Bitches Read Online Free PDF Page B

Ann’s time anytime.
    “When’s she getting back?” Amanda asked.
    The receptionist shrugged. “I don’t know if she’s getting back today,” she admitted. “They’re halfway to Plano.”
    “I’m supposed to pick up some keys from her,” Amanda said, her sense of amusement about the whole thing, such as it was, rapidly fading. “Didn’t she say anything about me?”
    “Let me get someone who can help you.”
    I’m being treated like an outsider, Amanda thought, and she definitely didn’t like it.
    “Yes, yes, I’ll help her,” a voice familiar to Amanda called out from a cubicle halfway to the back of the agency. “I know all about it.”
    I know that voice, Amanda told herself. I just can’t place it. I’ve just been away too long.
    Suddenly Heather Sappington emerged from the cubicle and slithered down the hall. Once again, Amanda thought she was imagining things. The last time she had seen Heather had been fifteen years earlier, at a Longhorn Ball where Heather had gotten famously drunk and had danced solo with a cowboy hat, doing something that resembled a dirty-cowgirl stripper routine. She was last seen that night kicking and screaming, being literally carried off by a security guard who, by day, was a lineman for the SMU football team. Rumor had it, and a highly accurate rumor it was, that once he had carried her off to her car, she returned the favor by bringing him back to her place, a somewhat dingy two-story apartment she shared with her ninety-four-year-old grandfather on the other side of the acceptable boundary line of Hillside Park.
    Certainly, neither Heather nor the security guard was seen again at the event, even though their departure took place around ten p.m. and he and the rest of the SMU football team—along with off-duty Dallas cops patrolling the perimeter of the event on horseback—had been hired to be there until two a.m. A neighbor of Heather’s said that he was awakened by a large man barely fitting into a sport coat carrying a bag of clinking empties past his home; his first thought was that the guy had murdered Heather’s grandfather and stolen his beloved coin collection. When the police stopped him a few blocks away, it turned out that all he had in the bag were empty vodka bottles that Heather had asked him to remove on his way out.
    The next morning, Heather, looking only slightly worse for wear, appeared in her usual pew at Hillside Park Presbyterian, praying earnestly for salvation—or maybe praying that the football player would keep his promise to call her again sometime. The only clue to the fact that she might have had a longer or more tiring night than the rest of the congregation was the fact that she was the only one out of the 1,100 penitents present wearing sunglasses indoors. But that was Heather, Amanda realized. A bottle of vodka in one hand and a Bible in the other; there wasn’t a single Bible study or party she had ever been known to miss. She was just as famous for passing out the Rabbit, a battery-operated sex toy, her personal favorite made famous on Sex and the City , to her single girlfriends as she was for giving sets of coffee mugs bearing different Bible verses on each to her married friends.
    “Oh my gosh,” Amanda said, trying to look happy to see Heather, whom she had never really liked. That night fifteen years ago was only the first episode that came to mind, but there were many others. Amanda felt that if you were going to be a party girl, be a party girl. If you were going to hold yourself up as a fine Christian woman, be more mindful of the behavior you demonstrate—but how you could serve two such radically different masters never made sense to Amanda.
    Heather came rushing over to Amanda, gave her a hug and a few air kisses, and studied her from top to bottom.
    “My, my. So you’re back in Dallas!” Heather exclaimed, and Amanda sensed that Heather was trying to restrain her sense of glee that yet another marriage had