Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 72980 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72980 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
“True. I’ve seen tampons slapped on a canvas and someone labeled it art.”
My nose scrunched. “I know, right!”
Lynetta blinked. “That artist bought said canvas, Maddy! You’re vandalizing vehicles you don’t own. Stealing socks you don’t own. Are you having a midlife crisis?”
What in the bad karma had I walked into? I’d thrown the same question at Washington. “Hello, I’m younger than you!” I spun to face her in the all-cream living room. “Moreover, I don’t steal socks. I borrow them.”
“And never return them.”
My shoulder lifted. “Not my problem. You never asked me to return them.”
“I did, Maddy.”
Oh, yeah. She did. A lot, especially in the past year. After Elijah passed, I filed for divorce and fell back on sibling rights. The right to become her roomie. “Listen, I have never bought a pair of socks in my life. I don’t intend to now. I mostly wear stilettos. So, I don’t know why my big sister is refusing to fund this habit.”
“Very essential habit.”
“Somewhat essential. I wear red-bottom—” Wait. I’d sold those. Dang. “I wear heels.”
“Mm-hmm. I know precisely what you’re thinking.” She settled on the edge of the couch and groaned. “Madison, I’ve seen your tacky bids online to sell shoes. Yesterday’s ex-fashionista is today’s sock thief.”
“Ha.” I flopped onto the couch beside her. “Wait. You should buy my designer heels since you save the world. One natural tragedy at a time, right?”
“I’m an emergency management consultant.”
Meh. Whatever that meant. However, in my family, a consultant had the same ring as a PhD.
My sister smiled, which would’ve made me less prone to jumping back if that was her usual expression. It wasn’t. “I know what to get you next Christmas, Madison.”
“Red-bottom heels?”
“Practical things. Like socks. And an alarm.”
“An alarm?” My head fell. My meeting. It should rescue me from living with this neat freak, which I once was … as a married woman.
I rushed into my room, tugging off the pajama pants. I kicked the fuzzies somewhere into the abyss, picked up the first pair of pants near the door. Maybe I’d worn them once or frice. Dang! Was that a word? No clue.
Depression had turned my bedroom into a clothing minefield. The little I hadn’t sold to survive. Some of them, though, I’d sold because this ex-fashionista often wore clothing once. The three matching Air Force Ones my small family and I wore to a picnic at the park were gone. The emerald-green Dolce & Gabbana I wore to Elijah’s mémère’s restaurant opening? I had sat that on the curb, even though I’d promised Elijah I’d keep it after he’d spilled Holy Trinity Mac & Cheese on it.
Sometimes you had to sell the past before it sold your sanity.
Halfway out the door, while buttoning my pants, I heard a whistle from somewhere.
“Shuddup!” I called out, zipping them up, and I rushed to my Daewoo.
A block away from the restaurant, I received a FaceTime call.
Annoyed, I slapped the button on my cell in the phone mount.
“You’re not at the meeting?” My father spoke in a thin, aged, and arrogant voice. Mom sat at his side, the fountain of youth, and another Lynn Whitfield doppelgänger. Mom’s wide brim hat kept out the Arabian sun. Or were they in Aruba? Our parents had Lynetta and me later in life. Dad had retired from a prestigious airline, and Mom had retired from mommyhood when I was sixteen. They started their lifetime of vacation.
“Have you moisturized this morning, girl?” Momma asked.
“This morning adjacent.” I couldn’t lie to my mom. I had done the nightly regimen she’d beaten into me.
“Are you in a fuzzy pajama shirt?” She gasped.
“Watch out now, Momma, you might wrinkle.” I turned into the lot. “Okay, gotta go.”
“No, wait. He’s a handsome young man.”
How many times had I heard handsome young man? Even when dating Washington, they wanted to pawn me off. Of course, then they thought Wash grew up in a broken home since his mom was a single mother of four. They didn’t know his youngest brothers, twins, came from another father. Good man. Virginia’s husband died too soon to save me from having to explain the situation in a way that would please Mommy Dearest.
I slid into the pea coat lying in the passenger seat and rushed into the French coffee shop for my noon meeting.
I thought they were introducing me to some thin-lipped, ghostly dude they’d befriended in Morocco. Instead, my eyes drank in a dark-skinned brother in a suit, who appeared to be kissed by the suns of every exotic location known to man. He was giving if Tyson Beckford and the dude from How Stella Got Her Groove Back had a baby …
I knew the actor’s name. But I was too young to watch it back in the day. In my room, in secret, a towel snugged beneath that fragment of a .0000001-inch gap beneath the doorway. Luckily, I never told on myself when it came to that movie and didn’t even close my eyes during the sexy parts.