“Hey, Mama…Yeah, I’m good…Yep, still visiting my friends when I’m not working…Yep, yep, Trevor’s still playin’…and Joe, too…I’m not gonna talk about that. Not gonna talk about that either.” The shine in Darla’s eyes faded with each comment. “Nope, not that either.” She frowned. “How’s Uncle Mike? I can change the subject if I want to. Yeah, speaking of changing subjects, Mama, what is this shit you’re sending me?”
Josie heard Aunt Cathy shout, “SHIT? That ain’t shit!”
Darla held the phone away from her ear about a foot and just shook her head. When the yelling stopped, she replaced the phone on her ear. “Okay, Mama, why do I have fifty romance novels from your favorite author?”
A squeal of delight came through the phone, and again, Darla stretched her arm out to avoid being deafened. The sounds made Josie’s cat sprint from the room and hide under her bed.
“I won! I won!”Josie could hear Aunt Cathy crowing.
“You won what?” Darla barked towards the phone.
“I won the fifty romance novel contest!” The elated voice came tinnily through the speaker.
Josie froze, her eyes locking with Darla’s. They simultaneously put their hands on their hips, cocked their heads, and said quietly, “Contest?”
“Contest, Mama?”Darla repeated, holding the phone close again.
Josie couldn’t hear the answer anymore, but Darla’s face ran through about nineteen different emotions in two minutes of just listening to her mother. Her brow furrowed, then one eyebrow cocked up, then her eyes got wide, then she did a facepalm to the forehead, then she began pacing the length of the living room, her foot brushing against an old, braided rug that Josie had gotten for free when a previous upstairs neighbor had moving out.
Finally, Darla said, “You’re using our address?” and Josie got it. She just shook her head and padded her way into the kitchen, Dame Maggie Smith on pause for quite a while, she imagined, before she and Darla would get back to the Abbey. As she made herself a cup of decaf, she waited, hearing intermittent bits of the conversation.
“No, he’s not na**d all the time. Yes, things are working out with Josie. My job? It’s going good. I don’t know, she’s got this doctor she might be…”
Josie slammed the green fertilizer company mug on the counter, and poured herself a vicious cup of decaf, sprinkling a little cinnamon in for the hell of it and then adding a heavy dose of milk. She heard the snap of a phone shutting, and then the slam of it against a table.
“You won’t believe this one!” Darla shouted.
“Let me guess—she’s using this address and your name for sweeping.”
The look of genuine shock on Darla’s face, as if she couldn’t put together a paint-by-numbers scenario that all added up to one color, made Josie laugh.
“That’s exactly what she’s been doing. How did you guess?”
“It’s the most logical explanation for why we’re getting all this crap.”
“Don’t tell me that a foam toilet paperweight from a pharmaceutical company is crap now, Josephine. It is perfectly good winnings, with a manufacturer’s retail value of $13, which Mama will use to calculate out her hourly rate of $3.22 for all her hard work.” Darla had taken on the supercilious tone of Cathy at her best, and it made Josie shrug and smile.
“You know, I don’t care if she does this if it makes her happy,” Josie said.
Darla sighed with relief, her shoulders dropping. She folded herself into a chair, her br**sts reminding Josie of Laura’s swell. They seemed to have gotten, in triplicate, everything that Josie had not received from the Endowment Fairy, and she wondered what it would be like to be that lush. Had Alex found her wanting? Was her boyish figure not quite what he needed? Why was she even torturing herself like this? She was the one who had stopped even trying. Then again, he was the one who accused her of violating the most basic of professional trusts.
“I think we can expect a steady supply of this stuff. I’m glad you say that you don’t mind ’cuz Mama seemed so happy to be able to now have two addresses where she could sweep from, and she said that if we get anything good that she can use to please send it back to her, otherwise it’s ours to keep, and it’s her way of thinking about us in the big city.”
Josie held up the green mug with gusto. “To Cathy,” she said. Darla scrambled to get a glass of water and the two toasted to Darla’s mom and Josie’s stalwart aunt.
“What kinds of contests does she enter, Darla?”
“Cash, trips, kitchen makeovers, new houses, gift cards to restaurants, jewelry, books, magazine subscriptions, although she stopped doing that when we got about two hundred of ’em. That kind of stuff.”
“So, you could win any of those things?”
“I could win a year’s supply of LSAT tutoring, for all I know,” Darla said. “It’s never anything good, it’s always this crazy stuff that companies are giving away ’cuz they’re tryin’ to boost morale or—spread the word about their product. At one point Mama found a glitch in the software for one of these websites, and we won three hundred stuffed hot dogs.”
“Three hundred what?”
“Stuffed hot dog plush toys, yeah,” Darla said. “Mama took a bunch of ’em and shoved ’em in a pillowcase and said it was a pillow. The rest she gave to some humane society shelter for the dogs. It’s what she does and it makes her happy.”
“At least now we know where all this is coming from.” Josie wandered back and started fishing through the box of books. “Her Highlander’s Heinie?” She looked at Darla. “Seriously?”
Darla shrugged. “I’ve heard worse.” They laughed.
“I guess it can’t be any worse than Downton Abbey, right?” Josie said. “Shouldn’t we get back to find out what James will do next and with which nobleman?”
Darla threw her arms around Josie suddenly. The hug caught her off guard, but she liked it. No one had touched her in days. “Thank you, Josie.”
“Thank you,” she said, pulling back. “You’re helping me make some sense of this crazy business we’re both working in.”
“Once we get this figured out, let’s move on to your crazy love life.”
“My love life isn’t crazy, it’s nonexistent.”