Page 26 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

When Luke answered his cell phone, I went through the explanation again. “Hold on,” he said, then I listened to a variety of noises that ended with the sound of a door closing. “I’m outside now, where I can talk.”

“Jazz?” I asked, just to make certain. I didn’t have to elaborate.

“Oh, yeah.” He sounded weary.

“He won’t be suspicious because you’ve gone outside to talk?”

“No, I’ve done that a lot lately.”

“Is he seeing anyone? Making noises about actually filing for divorce?”

“Nada. For one thing, he can’t live with me if he’s going to cheat on Mom. And for another, he gets sick to his stomach and throws up when he starts talking about them not ever living together again. This whole fu—” He caught himself before the f-bomb exploded. “—situation is stupid. They love each other. What the hell this standoff is accomplishing is beyond me.”

“They’re showing each other how upset they are,” I explained. I sort of understood it, except they were going to extreme lengths to make their separate points.

“They’re also showing the world that they’re idiots.” Luke was definitely not a happy camper.

I bypassed that comment, not wanting to get into the question of idiocy. Personally, I was on Sally’s side. Luke wanted his parents to work things out, but he was a guy; he probably thought his mother was taking interior decorating too seriously. I’m not sure it’s possible to take decorating too seriously, but I’m not a guy.

“Has Jazz said anything that might hint how he wants this to play out? Does he want Sally to apologize, or just call and ask him to come back?”

“In a way, this is all he talks about, but he doesn’t say anything new, you know? It’s the same thing, over and over again. He was trying to do something nice for her and she blew up in his face, wouldn’t listen to reason, then she went crazy, etcetera, etcetera. Anything useful there?”

Only that Jazz still had no appreciation for how hard Sally had worked collecting and refinishing her antique furniture. “Maybe,” I said. “I have an idea, anyway. How about your mom? What has she said? What’s your take, as a guy, on this whole thing?”

He hesitated, and I knew he was struggling to be fair, to not take sides. Luke’s a nice guy, despite his hot sheets. As far as I was concerned, his sheets qualified as community property, and by that I mean anentirecommunity. When he finally did settle down, I thought I should probably advise his chosen love to burn all his sheets, because that kind of nasty can’t be boiled out.

“I kind of see both sides,” he finally said, pulling my thoughts away from laundry problems. “I mean, I know Mom worked really hard refinishing the furniture, and she loves antiques. On the other hand, Dad was trying to do something nice for her. He knew he was clueless about decorating, so he went to an expert, and he paid a small fortune to have their bedroom redone.”

Okay, this was interesting; my vague idea was getting firmer. I also had an ace in the hole I could pull out if my idea didn’t work.

My phone beeped to let me know there was an incoming call. “Thanks, this has been a help,” I said.

“No problem. Anything to get him back home.”

We said our good-byes and I flashed to the incoming call. “Hello.”

There was a pause, followed by click, then a moment of dead air, then finally the dial tone. Puzzled, I checked the Caller ID, but since I’d already been on the phone the call hadn’t registered. Mentally I shrugged; if whoever it was wanted to talk, he or she could call back.

I spent the rest of the afternoon being bored out of my skull. I didn’t have anything there I was dying to read, and it was Sunday, so of course there was nothing interesting on television. I played some games on the computer. I looked at shoes on the Zappos website, and bought a pair of snazzy blue boots. If I ever took up line dancing, I was set. I looked up some sea cruises, just in case we ever had a chance for a honeymoon, because so far this year it didn’t look possible. Then I looked up birth control, to see how long it would take my body to return to normal after I stopped taking the Pill, because if possible I wanted to time my babies so I’d have them in months that had pretty birthstones. Mothers have to think about things like this, you know.

My interest in online things exhausted, I tried to find something on television to watch. Frankly, I’m no good at being a lady of leisure. The prolonged inactivity was eating at me, making me feel as if my muscles were getting cramped and stiff. I couldn’t even do yoga because bending over wasn’t a fun thing to do right now; the increased pressure made my head throb. I did some tai chi instead, flowing and stretching, which relieved some of the cramped feeling but still didn’t give me the high I got from a really hard workout.

Wyatt still wasn’t home by supper, but I hadn’t really expected him. I’ve been involved in crime scene investigations, and nobody gets in a hurry, which I guess is a good thing when you’re gathering evidence and taking statements. If he made it back by bedtime, he’d be doing good. I nuked a frozen dinner, and called Lynn while I was eating to assure her I would be back to work tomorrow. She was relieved, because Sunday and Monday are her normal off days. After pulling double duty on Friday and Saturday, she needed the rest.

And since Mondays are always long days for me—I both open and close at Great Bods, meaning I’m there from six in the morning until nine at night—I neededmyrest, too. Even though I’d been doing nothing but lying around for three days, I was tired, or maybe that was because I’d been doing nothing but lying around. At eight o’clock, I went upstairs and took a shower, then carefully dried my hair.

While Wyatt was gone and I could concentrate, I got my pad of paper and sat down to work on my list of his transgressions. I thought of all the things he’d done to annoy me, but “Laughing at my idea of tantric sex” just didn’t have much punch. The sheet of paper remained disturbingly blank. Good God, was I going soft? Losing my touch? Making lists of his transgressions was one of my greatest ideas of all time, and now that I couldn’t think of a thing to write down I felt the same way Davy Crockett must have felt at the Alamo, when he ran out of bullets—sort of “Well, shit. Now what?”

Not that this was at all the same thing, because Davy Crockett died, but you know what I mean. Not only that, just exactly what else do you expect when you decide to fight to the death? Youdie.That’s what the part about “fight to the death”means.

Big duh, there. Not to take anything away from ol’ Davy.

I looked down at the paper and sighed. Finally I wrote, “Threatened to piss on me.” Okay, so that was more funny than annoying. I chuckled just reading it. This wouldn’t do at all.

I started to tear off the sheet and start fresh, but in the end decided to leave it. Maybe I just needed to prime the pump, and I had to start somewhere. Next I wrote, “Refuses to negotiate.”

Oh, man, this was pitiful. He’d actually done me a favor by refusing to negotiate over the last-name issue, because now he owed me. I scratched out that item.

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