LITMIR.BIZ

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filtered her shock. Em was nothing if she wasn’t the epitome of Southern decorum.

      That Southern diplomacy was why Dixie had given her the position of general manager at Call Girls Inc. She was tactful, kind and able to appease even the crankiest of customers.

      And she always did what was right and decorous—even if it killed her. Though, mostly this behavior was due to her incredibly kind heart. She’d earned Marybell’s deepest respect since coming to Call Girls, newly single after her ex-husband had all but abandoned her and her boys to live his life as a cross-dresser.

      Em was down-home tough. Soft and pliable like Play-Doh on the outside, but made of steel parts of resolve on the inside. There wasn’t a coon dog’s chance in purgatory she’d acknowledge just how astonished she was.

      Instead, she carried in a large Crock-Pot bowl with two heart-covered oven mitts over her hands to protect them from the heat. Em assessed Marybell for a moment, brief and fleeting, before her eyes flickered, and proper Em was firmly back in place. “We brought you...” She almost stuttered the words, gazing down at Marybell. But then she caught herself reacting and forced her shoulders to square and her spine to straighten. Em cleared her throat. “Soup,” she finished with a warm smile full of perfect white teeth and ruby-red lipstick. “Chicken soup—for your poor, flu-riddled soul, you sweet, phlegmy angel.” Em set the Crock-Pot on the old chest Marybell used as a coffee table, dropping the mitts next to it.

      Marybell murmured a thank-you into the collar of her bathrobe.

      Em flapped her hands in the way she always did, signifying that her kind gesture was much ado about nothing. “Did you really expect we’d let you suffer all alone? Not on my watch, miss. Mercy, we’ve been worried to death about you ever since you called in sick earlier today, sugarplum. Dixie said you sounded like a congested bullfrog, and weak as a kitten to boot. You hafta feed that cold. Which is why we all cooked up something and forced our way in here like the interfering henpeckers we are.”

      “Rolls,” LaDawn repeated again stiffly, clearly still experiencing aftershocks of the “holy Hannah in a wet suit” variety. “I brought rolls. With butter.” She pointedly tapped the basket.

      Marybell smiled in an abstract, afraid-to-meet-their-eyes way, too cold to pull her hands from the confines of her bathrobe to take a roll, too rattled to move. “Yum, butter. How kind. Thanks, girls.” She dabbed at her eyes, red-rimmed and drippy under the mask.

      Now that formalities and justifications were made, she waited, quietly, if not inquisitively, for an answer to the unspoken question.

      Why haven’t we ever seen who the real Marybell Lyman is?

      They all waited.

      For an explanation about her appearance, with plenty of side-eye and questions in the form of an entire conversation played out with only the expressions on their faces.

      Em folded her fists at her waist, resting them on her slender hips, her teeth working the corner of her lower lip.

      Dixie placed her forearm over her chest, resting her other arm in the crook of it, and cupped her chin with her hand, blatantly stumped.

      LaDawn just left the opportunity for flies to congregate in her mouth, which was now, unabashedly, wide-open.

      Marybell waited, too. Her fuzzy, medicated brain was searching for a way to handle this without turning it into a topic of long discussion wherein she explained why no one ever saw her freshly scrubbed face.

      Under any other circumstances, mentally guessing who’d crack first under the pressure of etiquette would have been as much fun as watching Nanette Pruitt bluster when Marybell sat next to her in church and sang “Onward, Christian Soldier,” loud and entirely off-key.

      The stunning difference between this MB—sans red-and-green-spiked Mohawk, heavy eye makeup, nose ring and facial piercings—and the one sitting before them had to be killing them.

      This was the Marybell Lyman not a solitary soul had seen in at least four years, except her bathroom mirror just before she spent an hour applying the “people shield.”

      If she were a bettin’ kind, she’d lay bets on LaDawn, the most vocal of their group, and while Southern to her last breath, she was also unashamedly opinionated and outspoken. There was no subtext to LaDawn, and it was probably one of the things Marybell loved most about her. She was an ex-lady of the evening, or as she jokingly called her former profession, a “companionator.” Words weren’t something LaDawn struggled with.

      Yet nothing. The old clock on her coffee-with-cream-painted wall ticked away the seconds while each woman internally struggled with her appearance and fought not to visibly squirm.

      Marybell’s sudden sneeze into a crumpled tissue made all of them jump, forcing her to address the issue. If she made light of it, they would, too, and she needed them to make light. She prayed they’d follow her lead.

      “My nose ring is at the cleaners,” she teased, breaking the ice with a honking snort into a brand-new tissue.

      Dixie finally spoke, her voice just above a whisper, as though if someone heard her, she’d be tagged responsible for letting the cat out of the bag. “If I didn’t know this was your apartment, I’d never have—”

      “Known you from a hole in the wall!” LaDawn crowed, her voice now located. She planted her hands on her hips, encased in her usual skintight jeans, and pushed her hair over her shoulder with daggerlike-tipped fingers of glittery purple. “Dang, girl.” She pulled the words from her lips as if she were pulling a thick milk shake from a straw. “You’d better hurry up and get better so you can do up that hair before the town fair starts next week. I’ll never be able to find my way to the cotton candy stand if that Mohawk o’ yours isn’t stickin’ out in every direction, pointin’ me to the land of sugary pink heaven.” She chuckled, leaning forward to tweak a wet strand of Marybell’s hair with affectionate fingers.

      Marybell sniffled, wincing at the sharp tug to her sinuses, afraid to let loose a sigh of relief. Keeping her chin tucked inside her bathrobe, she forced a chuckle. “Oh, you hush, LaDawn. You don’t need me to do that. You have Doc Johnson to light your way.”

      LaDawn chuffed, popping her dark-purple-lined lips. “Don’t you talk to me about Doc Johnson. That man hasn’t come callin’ in three solid days.”

      Em, obviously unable to stand it anymore, plopped down on the couch next to her, directing LaDawn to bring her a bowl and ladle from the kitchen. She smoothed the fan of her skirt over her knees. “First off, Cat sends her love. She didn’t want to, but we made her stay home. Wouldn’t be good for her to catch somethin’ from you with the baby on the way.”

      Marybell loved Cat Butler. A free spirit, a hugger, one of her first real friends, and now madly in love with Flynn McGrady and well on her way to beginning their family. “Tell her I said thank you, and keep that bun in the oven safe.”

      Em popped her lips. “So, how is it that we’ve been friends for all this time now, and we’ve never seen the true Marybell?” She plucked at the eye mask, making Marybell swat at her hands. “Well, almost the true Marybell. You’ve seen us in all sorts of manner, miss. Drunk, seminaked, riding a mechanical bull, for heaven’s sake. Fair is fair.” She asked the question as though it were some slight for Marybell never to have revealed herself without her makeup and gel-spiked hair.

      She really wanted to ask why they’d surprise-attacked her with food and hospitality when she’d expressly told Dixie she’d be fine and back at work within the week. All she needed was some rest and cold medication. She’d done that with the fervent hope they wouldn’t catch her exactly as they’d done.

      But leave it to Em and Dixie to have to see for themselves she wasn’t going to do something as dramatic as die of the latest illness they’d hunted down on WebMD.

      Still, her friends made her smile. They were a reason to get up these days when for so long, there wasn’t any reason at all.

      They were loving,

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