Coffee Gossip

Coffee Gossip

“And so I told her, ‘Cindy, you have got to stop this nonsense’. Naturally, I was talking about her husband’s cheating on her. She’s decided she wants a divorce, but ladies, we cannot let that happen. Then she began wailing about how shocking her life is and how unfair it is that her husband has been unfaithful to her,” Marie chattered to her friends Claire and Elizabeth as they nursed their morning coffees.

“What happened then?” whispered Elizabeth, anticipation evident in her voice.

Marie looked scornfully at Lizzy, “What do you think happened? I told her that no matter what Ricky had done she was his wife and divorce is against our rules, but matter what I hinted or warned she just wouldn’t budge.”

“So she’s really going to do it?” Nancy gasped, shock scrawled all over her expressive face.

“She’s so incredibly stubborn! She never listens. As far as I could tell she really meant it, so I warned her, ‘Cindy’, I said, ‘You do know that we can’t be friends if you go through with this’, but do you know what she said?”

“What?” asked the other girls; leaning forwards towards their ringleader to hang on her every word.

“I’ll tell you what,” Marie paused, enjoying the attention she was getting from her two sidekicks, “She stopped crying, and looked at me with puffy red eyes. I was about to suggest a cream for her to use – couldn’t have one of us walking around looking like that – but then… she spoke” Marie smiled slyly. She was loving this. She continued with the scandalous story, thinking to herself that she should have been an actress. “Now ladies, you will be shocked by our former friend’s behavior and blasphemy, but I must repeat verbatim, the Good Lord forgive me.” She closed her eyes and placed her hands in a prayerful position.

The other girls were sitting on the edges of their chairs, coffees quite forgotten in their eagerness to hear what their ringleader would tell them.

“She said to me – to her oldest and truest friend – that if I was ever her friend, I should be backing her. She said that as I was obviously more concerned with what our church would think than the fact that her world was falling apart, maybe she should cut our friendship right away to save me the embarrassment of association with her. And now comes the unforgiveable part girls. I am afraid that we can never converse with poor Cindy again. She has broken the rules and we cannot be seen to have any association with her any longer.”

 “What did she do?” the other two women whispered, enraptured by the outrageous tale.

“She told me to go and eat some holy dirt. Can you believe it? She disrespected our faith and us. We cannot let this happen to us girls. All this unpleasantness began when her husband was unfaithful. We must all go home, and check our husbands for the ‘signs’. Commandeer their phones and look through them, check their clothes drawers for hidden letters, call their offices to make sure they were there all the time they should have been, and visit their secretaries. We must protect what is ours, and unlike Cindy, we will not be dragged down to such a deplorable level.”

The other girls were speechless. They might hang on every scandalous word, but they had never dreamed that this would be the result of the story. Marie smiled craftily; it was so easy to make her little followers do what she said. Poor Cindy. Marie would help as much as she could, but she would not involve her naïve little followers in this. This was her own project, and while she would not let her simple friends get into any mischief, letting herself get into mischief was another matter entirely…