The Accidental Book Club by Jennifer Scott Page B

began to go white in the creases. She leaned forward over the counter, her gut with its narrow strip of apron pressing into the glass on the other side. “I thought it was—”
    “Janet!” a voice barked, and Janet jumped, her hands flying up to her collarbone. A bald man, looking trussed-up in an apron that matched Janet’s, was churning toward her. “I thought I told you to shave more sale ham.”
    “I was just about to,” Janet said, her voice going tiny and the whites of her eyes turning bloodshot and glassy as she turned them toward the floor. “I’ve got a customer.”
    “Looks to me like you were standing around gossiping with your ‘customer.’” He made air quotes with his fingers. “We don’t pay you to chat with your friends,” he said, pulling himself up tall and placing his hands on his narrow hips. “Get to work or give me your apron. There are a hundred people out there who would love to have this job.”
    “Yes, sir,” she mumbled to her shoes, and Jean felt so embarrassed and guilty for her friend that she found herself growing warm.
    The man stalked away, shaking his head and muttering something about “lazy cow” under his breath. Jean watched him go, her mouth hanging open. When he had gone and she’d refocused her attention on Janet, the poor thing was twisting the bottom of her apron between her hands and swallowing repeatedly, as if to swallow the whole episode inside herself so that no one else had to witness it.
    “What a jerk,” Jean started to say.
    But Janet had finally swallowed enough to find her voice and at the same time said, “Can I get you anything? Because I need to, um . . .”
    “Shave some ham,” Jean finished for her. Janet nodded, fumbling with a box of latex gloves, and Jean decided that the best way to be Janet’s friend in this moment was to let it go. She ordered her kettle fried turkey, took the bag of meat, and said good-bye. She forgot the cheese.
    Besides, she had something much more pressing to worry about.
    Something she hadn’t realized until Janet mentioned
Blame.
    The book club.
    It would be meeting again soon.
    And Bailey, just as snarling and nasty as that man, would be there.

EIGHT
    E ven though Janet had reminded her that day at the supermarket, it was still days before Jean opened up her copy of
Blame
again
.
She’d stumbled across it on the coffee table and had been startled by the realization that she had still barely cracked it open. She’d gotten only about twenty pages into it, and had until the next meeting to read another six hundred of them. Thackeray was nothing if not prolific.
    She plopped onto the couch and began reading, slipping over the words like an icy highway.
    Blanche’s daughter, Trina, was a disgusting mound of a thing, wrapped in a stereotypical fat-girl jolly shell. Blanche could scarcely look at the girl without wanting to overdose the pain of her failure away. Instead, she threw snack cakes at Trina like a zookeeper to a gorilla, and owned the blame for what she’d done to contribute to the death of expectations of humanity . . .
    Truth be told, Jean hadn’t finished the book because she hadn’t really cared for it. It was offensive, difficult to swallow. How had it been getting so many rave reviews?
    But it was not like Jean to abandon a book. She was not the type to give up entirely. She had a book club discussion to lead, and how could she lead a discussion without having read the book, no matter how disgusting it was?
    She remained there until afternoon came and the sun bore down on her hard through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the shadows coming off the trees were long and dark.
    She remembered reading her first Thackeray novel with Wayne. Kenneth had just left for college. She and Wayne were fresh empty nesters, and Jean had been gutted with loneliness. Even though she’d never been the “playing type” of mother, and she’d never quite felt in her own skin around her children, she’d