Mean Woman Blues by Julie Smith

her mother, too, and all her siblings— no one in the family opposed him— if they all were going to be like that, she didn’t care if she never spoke to them again. It didn’t occur to her she might need them sometime.
    She could hear her father now: “You made your bed; you lie in it.”
    That was what he said when she told him, two years into their marriage, that Charlie was cheating on her. Blithely, she filed for divorce, which was exactly what Charlie wanted, having hidden all his assets from her. So there was really no community property except their reasonably modest house, and Texas law— notoriously unfair to women— is extremely stingy with spousal support, not even granting it in a “young” marriage. Because Karen had been married less than ten years, she got none. But there was still the money from the sale of the house, and she could always get a job.
    However, she failed to get one in her field, elementary school education, and ended up teaching aerobics. She invested wisely in a tiny condo— having barely enough for the down payment— and could just scrape by. She was making it on her own, even going back to school, and proud of herself— until income tax time. She’d had no idea she was going to end up owing ten thousand dollars.
    “No problem; they’ll make a deal,” her accountant said. “Just explain your situation, and they’ll set up a payment plan.”
    But she could never get them on the phone, and they didn’t answer her letters. Then one day they sent
her
a letter, saying they were going to put a lien on her house if she didn’t pay them by a certain date.
    Well, she couldn’t have that. She needed a new car, but with a lien on her condo, no bank would give her a loan.
    Panicked, she called the accountant, who asked her if she could come up with any part of the money. “Sure,” she said confidently. “I still have my engagement ring. It ought to bring about five thousand dollars.”
    “Sell it,” he said, eyes cold and unfriendly. “I’ll make the deal myself.”
    And he did make the deal: five thousand up front and the rest in monthly payments.
    She sold the ring, paid the five thousand, and within a week, the IRS slapped the lien on her. As if there’d never been a deal at all.
    She was so depressed she started watching daytime TV, which was how she found the show that changed her life. They
loved
her story.
    Who wouldn’t? Who doesn’t hate the IRS? Hundreds of calls came in from taxpayers who’d been similarly burned, so many that the next week the station abandoned the normal Mr. Right format (one wrong righted, another stated) and devoted a special hour-long show to what it called “The Treachery of the Tax Collectors.”
    The IRS took such a beating they did something no one had ever heard of them doing before: They said there’d been a “mistake” and removed Karen’s lien. Car dealers all over town called
her
, offering extraordinary deals. But as it turned out, she didn’t need their charity. Her father, in a grand, public gesture of conciliation, gave her a car himself. She’d “suffered enough,” he said.
    But, really, social pressure had shamed him into reconciling, and she knew it. Not that she cared; she’d gotten used to her family’s ostracism a long time ago.
    But the best part was that David Wright, Mr. Right himself, a lovely man, seemed to take a personal interest in her, even got her a job at the station. Like Superman, he seemed to have swooped down from the sky to rescue her.
    One day she asked him to have coffee with her, to thank him personally. He went, and he couldn’t have been nicer or more gracious. But she had known that was how it would be. He didn’t try to grab her leg, didn’t tell off-color jokes, didn’t flirt, didn’t behave in any way at all that a perfect gentleman wouldn’t.
    A week or so went by, and he asked
her
for coffee. It got to be a regular thing before she realized she was falling for him. She’d never