LITMIR.BIZ

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squawked and announced I was ungrateful, poorly trained as a daughter, rebellious, and so on. “You’re already humiliating me, Isabelle.” She threw up her arms in the pink robe. “Humiliating!”

      I knew the doctors would never accept any extra money from me, but they whipped her out pretty quick, the stretcher rolled around the corner, and Cecilia, Janie, and I sagged against the wall, hip to hip.

      It was nine o’clock in the morning.

      “Is it too early to get drunk?” Janie asked.

      Cecilia grabbed her purse. “Nope. Not to me. Get your rears in gear.”

      We got our rears in gear.

      We left Momma’s room, then waited in the hallway for Janie to go back in, check we hadn’t left anything, and tap all the tables in the room four times.

      We heard her tapping.

      She smiled as she passed through the doorway.

      We were ready to go.

      “Did you smile?”

      We nodded.

      She made us go back through the doorway smiling.

      Janie always knows when we’re lying.

      The three of us found a breakfast diner about two blocks from the hospital, then decompressed in our own ways.

      Janie took the sugar packets out of the container and divided them into groups of four. She shook salt out of a container onto her saucer and divided the salt into groups of four. She muttered.

      When the waitress, a skinny girl with dyed black hair, sauntered over, I ordered coffee and toast and a round of beers.

      Cecilia ordered two breakfasts of eggs and bacon. The waitress raised her eyebrows at Cecilia’s order.

      “I overeat so you can feel better about yourself,” Cecilia snapped, hands crossed on the shelf of her stomach.

      The waitress cracked her gum. “Whatever. We got fruit y’know, you can order that, less calories…and all that stuff.”

      “I don’t want all that stuff. I didn’t order it, did I? Did you see me open my mouth and order a plate full of damn fruit?”

      “No, you didn’t. It’s a suggestion, don’t get your panties in a twist. A diet suggestion. Helpful, you know.” She dropped her gaze to Cecilia’s stomach.

      “Sexy, isn’t it? One day, you too could have this. You could have a stomach big enough for a small calf to rest inside.”

      The waitress rolled her eyes.

      “Aren’t you Beck’s daughter?”

      “Uh…yeah…you know my mom?” Now the waitress was nervous.

      “Yes, I know your mother. Tell her I said you need better manners around fat people.”

      “I didn’t say you were fat.” She cracked her gum twice.

      “You didn’t have to. Now bring me my double order of bacon and eggs without the attitude. Perhaps sometime today you could decide in that pointy, black head of yours not to judge people’s worth solely on the size of their gut. Think you could do that? Too much for you?”

      “No.” She scribbled on her pad. “Shit,” she said quietly.

      “Shit yourself. Hey, Beck’s daughter, I’ll make you a deal. I won’t tell you that at first I thought your nose piercing was a black bugger if you lay off with your weird sneers.”

      “Uh. Whatever.” The waitress scampered away. “Yeah.”

      “I hired a private investigator,” Cecilia said.

      “You what?” Janie asked, her head tilting up. “What for?”

      “Because I want to get laid, Janie, that’s why. He’s going to find me a man who wants to have sex with a female King Kong.”

      I laughed. “Excellent. You can make monkey noises together.”

      “I feel so nervous when I’m with both of you,” Janie complained, fingering the sugar packets.

      “We feel nervous with you, too, shrink tank,” Cecilia said.

      “Don’t ever say I’m a shrink tank,” Janie huffed. “You mean sister.”

      This was going to get warlike. Here came the peacemaker. “Why did you hire a private investigator?”

      “Because I need her investigated.”

      “Who?” Janie asked.

      I didn’t need to ask.

      “ Her . The husband-stealing witch.” Cecilia slammed her coffee cup down. “The loose slut. The whorey home wrecker. The woman who met Parker on the Married But Unhappy Web site.”

      “A Married But Unhappy Web site? I didn’t even know that Web sites like that existed,” Janie said. “It would make a great beginning for a murder. Maybe a woman murderer—she went after cheating husbands and sliced off a ball.”

      “Please. I’m going to eat.” I sat back in my chair. “So you’re going to find out who she is, what she is, her past, her secrets…”

      “Yep. I know she’s twenty-six. Parker’s forty-two. She’s thin, blond hair, boobs the size of Kentucky. She knew she was cheating with a married father. He’s rich. He’s successful. He’s a fuck face. I hate her, I already know that.”

      “I hate her, too,” Janie said.

      “Me, too,” I added. Everyone had to hate the woman who took away your sister’s husband. It was an unbreakable rule. “I would like to smoke her body over a fire and feed her to a cannibal. I never liked Parker.”

      “Me, either,” Janie said, shuddering. “Scumfuzz.”

      “Gee! What a surprise!” Cecilia put a hand over her mouth, eyes open wide. “I’m simply shocked! Floored!” She waved both hands. “When you both staged an ‘intervention’ two months after we met and again two weeks before my wedding to—how did you say it?—knock some sense into my stupidity? That was a small clue. And, let’s see, Isabelle, for years you came to visit me at my house only when Parker wasn’t there.”

      “That’s because Parker’s insufferable.”

      Plus he’d made a pass at me. He was a little drunk about a year after the wedding, but drunks do what they want to do while drunk and use the drinking as an excuse.

      We were out on the deck and Cecilia went inside to bake him his favorite cookie, snickernoodle, because he’d told her to. Parker took a lurch toward me, a hand brushing my boob. Instead of apologizing, he left his hand hanging in the air above my breast as if he was massaging it. “You’re beautiful, Isabelle. God almighty, you’re beautiful. I didn’t marry the beautiful sister, though. I married Cecilia. We lost out, big-time. Big-time. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. We can change this.”

      He moved forward to kiss me, his lips puckered, his tongue darting out an instant before his lips landed on mine.

      He slung an arm around my waist and hauled me in. I do not shock for long, but for a millisecond I did. When that millisecond was over, I shoved Parker, karate-kicked him in the chest, and flipped his legs, and he went right over the railing and landed on his head after torpedoing a rosebush.

      He passed out as soon as his head hit the ground and did not appear for an hour. He had scratches all over his face and a massive bump on his head.

      He caught me by my Porsche before I left. (That was my first Porsche. It was red. Fast. Slick.)

      “You bitch.”

      I laughed. “You make a pass at your wife’s sister, and yet I’m the bitch. Now this is what a bitch would do, so we’re clear what a

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