LITMIR.BIZ

      KENSINGTON BOOKS

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

      for JWR, with a wink

      Contents

      The Knockout

      Unzipped

      Double Dee

      1

      Sofia picked up the remote and turned off the baseball game with one press of her press-on fingernail. The screen went black. “They lost, Ruthie. Pay up,” she said with a smirk.

      “How could they do this to me?” Ruth wailed. “I love the Mets.”

      “Then you’re a fool for love. You owe me.”

      “Guess so.” Ruth grabbed her beat-up purse off the coffee table. She took her wallet out, parted the leather folds, held it upside down and shook out a bus ticket. “But I’m broke.” She shook the wallet again. A small blue feather drifted down.

      “Is that all you have?” Her cousin raised a perfectly tweezed eyebrow. “A parakeet feather and a bus ticket? I shoulda known.”

      “That’s right. Until next Friday.” Ruth mentally calculated the budgetary impact of losing a $50 bet to her cousin. “You know this means no new birdcage for Bambino. No new raincoat for Tuff.” Her little mutt looked up at Ruth with a sad expression, and jumped on the couch beside her.

      “You’re breaking my heart.” Sofia tapped a cigarette out of the pack in her other hand and sucked it between her lips.

      “No smoking.”

      Sofia gave her an insulted look and spoke around the unlit cigarette. “I’m not smoking it, I’m sucking it. Do you see a lighter in my hand?”

      “No. Just wanted to make sure.”

      “I don’t smoke unless I see an ashtray, and this is your place, so no ashtrays. Okay, tell you what. I’ll give you the cash.”

      “Huh?”

      “The Pet Palace on Fordham Road is having a sale on birdcages,” Sofia said in a coaxing tone. “Beeyootiful white wire birdcages with bonus plastic bell. The Bambino would love one. But if you take the fifty, you must do my bidding. You said you would.”

      Ruth groaned. “Oh yeah. That contingency clause I supposedly agreed to—you mentioned it at a critical point in the last inning. I don’t remember anything except the outfielder dropping a fly ball.”

      “I do.”

      “So tell me. What do I have to do?”

      Her cousin looked her up and down. “Get dressed up and get out in public.”

      “No.”

      “You can’t say no. You want that fifty, I know you do. All you hafta do is strut your stuff and that ugly dog in front of Mrs. Agnelli and all the neighbors and God himself.” Sofia took the cigarette out of her mouth and crossed herself with it in her hand. “Who will not believe that you actually own nice clothes.”

      “I don’t. You gotta lend me some.”

      “Not a problem.” Sofia cast a disparaging glance at Ruth’s sweatpants, grubby T-shirt and scuffed sneakers.

      Tuff made a yarping noise. Ruth pulled the dog closer to her. “He’s upset. You didn’t have to say he was ugly.”

      “I was being polite,” Sofia pointed out. “And it won’t kill you to get dressed up and get out. All you do is sit in this rent-controlled apartment and write those freaky little poems. You haven’t worked in, what, a year?”

      Ruth shrugged and stroked Tuff’s coarse fur. “I’m on hiatus.”

      “Yeah, from life.”

      “My dad told me to find myself before he died. You know he left me money. Not much, but enough.”

      Sofia took the cigarette out of her mouth and eyed her narrowly. “At least that whore he left your mother for five years ago didn’t get it all.”

      “No, because Mom had a good lawyer. And she’s been living it up ever since at Lake Como,” Ruth pointed out.

      Her cousin shook her head sadly. “Which means you have no one to look after you but me. I’m tellin’ ya, Ruthie, their divorce gave you a complex. You think being happy is wrong. You didn’t even have a good time in college. No, you hadda go and major in English, so you could be unsuccessful. You don’t go out, you don’t date. And you need a makeover anyway.”

      “Thanks a lot.” Ruth glared at Sofia, who set down the cigarette and took out a compact. Parting her lips, Sofia examined her long, sweeping eyelashes for glumps of mascara. Not a glump in sight. Ruth wondered how Sofia managed to look so good just to watch a ball game. “For your information,” she began, “I have been thinking of writing experimental short fiction instead.”

      “Oh, please.”

      “I have a few chapters of a novel on my hard drive. Does that impress you?”

      Sofia shot her a hopeful look. “Is it a romance novel?”

      “No. But the screenplay I started has romantic elements.”

      “You could write for the soaps!” Sofia’s expression was awestruck. She even looked at Ruth instead of the little mirror in her hand.

      Ruth only shrugged. Her cousin was a lifelong fan of The Young and the Restless, a show that Ruth privately thought of as The Hung and the Reckless. All the characters did was sleep around with everyone in the little town of…what was it called…Glandview?

      She snapped out of it when Sofia clicked the mirror shut and gave her a worried look.

      Ruth sighed. Her cousin meant well. “Okay, okay. When it gets dark, I will put on borrowed finery and go for a walk.” Tuff wriggled with enthusiasm and yarped loudly. “Uh-oh. He heard the W word.”

      Sofia stuck the cigarette back in her mouth and frowned, making it hang down. “Why dontcha get a normal dog? He can’t even bark.”

      “Later, Tuff. Not now. When my evil cousin goes home. She’s making this up anyway. I never agreed to this.”

      Sofia shook her head. “Where’s my handbag?”

      “What does it look like?” Ruth said innocently.

      “Black patent leather mock croc. As if you didn’t know. You’re stalling for time.”

      “Why would I do that?”

      “Because

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