LITMIR.BIZ

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      PLEASE DO NOT PARK IN THE PASTOR’S SPACE. IT IS PERMANENTLY RESERVED AT ALL TIMES.

      It was all I could do not to laugh and not because it was funny, but because I was terrified. Queen Liz could get a little crazy sometimes and Ryan didn’t do well with public displays of madness. He liked to keep his crazy at home.

      As she did in my nightmares, Ryan’s mother stood in the third row, talking to the church secretary as if there weren’t fifteen hundred other people in the room.

      It was hard to hear her, but I’d been cut by the Queen’s sharp whispers enough times to make it out.

      “I don’t even appreciate that, Pastor. Who gave you that space, anyway? I’ve been parking there for thirty years.”

      I looked over to see what Ryan had to say, but it was too late. The brothah had used my exit.

      My husband was gone.

       Chapter Two

       “S ometimes I think you make this stuff up,” Dana said on the phone the next morning as we ran through the updates for her bath-and-body Web site. She had a new product line for babies, called Water Lily. It was based on the products she helped me make for my daughter’s sensitive skin.

      Lily hasn’t had one rash since I started using the products and all the moms at church ask me what I did for her. I felt good about that until I realized it meant my baby must have looked bad enough for everyone to have noticed. I told them about Dana’s shop, Made of Honor, and most of them knew about it already since they’re franchised all over Illinois, but she hadn’t made the baby stuff available in her stores yet. Some drove a few hours to Leverhill, unable to wait. Thanks to my daily needling, she’d finally agreed to at least put it on the Web.

      The keys clicked under my fingers as I typed the changes she’d given me. “I wish I did make this stuff up, Dane. It’d be a lot funnier to watch on TV or something. But you know what they say, truth is stranger than fiction. It happened just like I told you.”

      God must have been with me to let me get some love in before service, because after his mother’s announcement about how that parking space had been hers for thirty years and she didn’t notice the five-inch-tall neon letters saying Reserved for Pastor, I hadn’t gotten so much as a kiss out of Ryan. He’d dived back into work a day early and he’d dived deep.

      I’ve only seen the back of him, wandering down the hall, his voice shouting into the phone, since. I must say, though, it wasn’t a bad angle. I could have done without the screaming, though. He needed a management-style makeover. And he needed it, like, yesterday.

      Just then, an e-mail from Dana popped into my box with attached photos and descriptions of the new products. I’d twirled the phone cord around my elbow, about to explode with glee. Nothing like a click-chat, where we talk and e-mail back and forth. It drives Ryan crazy, but a man who e-mails people in the same house with him has no room to talk. None. Besides, everybody can’t go blind and break their thumbs on a PDA like him. The prescription on my glasses is strong enough as is without trying to read some tiny screen.

      I opened the files and smiled with satisfaction at the product photos. “I really like how these came out. I don’t know why you seem so reluctant about the baby line. It’s some of your best stuff yet.”

      I could almost see Dana shrugging two hours away. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’s the baby thing. I don’t feel qualified. The wedding stuff I can do in my sleep, though sometimes it’s a nightmare. I’ll have to tell you about our latest bride when we have more time. Remind me. Anyway, I almost feel like this is your line, Tracey. I made suggestions, but you researched everything, tested everything…”

      Wow. Dana sounding insecure? Too weird. Too much like we were discussing infertility treatments. “Wait? Are you guys trying to get pregnant or something? Is that it?”

      A pause on the line. A long breath. “Yes, we’re trying. Sorry I didn’t tell you. I guess I thought we’d be pregnant the first month and all I’d have to announce was a baby on the way. It’s turning out to be harder than we thought. God knows, though. I guess I shouldn’t have been so concerned when you got pregnant so fast with Lily. You were the lucky one.”

       Sometimes I wonder. “Don’t sound like that, okay? Now that I know you guys are trying, I’ll be praying and available for random Googling on any topic you need. You know I’m good for that.”

      “Yeah.”

      The gaping silence, a rarity between us, widened until we both fell in. Refusing to accept it, I climbed out first. “Okay, I’d love to sit here and quietly contemplate this with you, but the boob buzzer is going to go off any minute now, so if you want to talk about it—”

      “I don’t.”

      Right. No more than I wanted to talk about the comment Queen Liz gave me after church on Sunday.

      “Oh come on, Tracey, what size is that skirt, a fourteen? You’re better than this. I know your mother died, but she must have taught you something.” She’d said this easily, my mother-in-law, like a knife slicing through butter.

      I refrained from telling Liz that despite our short time together, my mother did teach me something that seemed to have been left out of her own home training: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

      As the alarm next to my breast pump rang in the bedroom, I hung up with Dana and scrambled down the hall, stopping to smile at myself in the mirror on the wall. If there’s one thing that thirty years as a fat girl had taught me, it was that I had a pretty face.

       Such a pretty face.

      Ryan was the first guy I dated who didn’t say that. He was more fascinated that my laptop had a Linux partition. Go figure. Now it seemed I was doomed to just a pretty face again. Only, this time, it didn’t look quite so pretty.

       Please join the Queen for a breakfast of scones and tea on the veranda….

      I wake up then, just as I’m about to drown in my bowl of Raisin Bran. Not a very royal way to die. I sit up in the tub and push the bath tray forward so that I can stand up. Dana always thought it was weird that I could eat breakfast in the tub. What she doesn’t realize is that I could live in there (at least for a weekend). A good stock of food, a stack of books and basket of Dana’s products and Princess Tracey would be good to go.

      Today, though, I’ve just got to go. I pushed my reign back a day this week, so as not to encounter the natives. Lily was sleeping on the floor in her carrier. It was her first time in the royal restroom, but I thought she could be trusted.

      I got out of the tub, toweled off with my secret thousand-thread-count towel and applied Smooth, my favorite product in my friend’s new product line for mothers. This week’s scent was Mango Mama and I was feeling it from head to toe.

      “This number does not define you. God does,” I whispered to myself as I stepped onto the scale, adorned only with my crown and a hopeful smile. My belly looked smaller in the mirror at least. I got up the courage to look down, again having to strain a bit to see over my stomach. Mirrors were deceiving. The numbers, happy ones, blinked back up at me.

       159.

      Maybe my scale worked after all. I certainly hoped so. Funny how the numbers on this thing appeared so rosy and cheerful all of a sudden. Last Sunday, they looked like something out of a horror movie. I glanced into the steamed-over mirror, and traced the circles under my eyes with the tip of my finger. I should have added a facial, as well. No time now. Despite the good news about my bubble butt and its imminent demise, my face looked like I’d been kicked around the farm a few times.

      Then Lily started screaming, like she’d been doing for the past five days. Straight. One more reason that I was just now getting to wear my crown. I didn’t think I’d make it this week at all. We were going to the doctor today to see what was wrong. Of course, that

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