Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,7

the gym on the way home. She wasn’t always the best about that, but better late than never. Because—job hunting. And never mind that her heart sank into her stomach and she got those panic flutters at the thought. You were proactive, that was all there was to it, and if you were going on interviews, you made sure your best skirt wasn’t tight around the waist. People noticed that sort of thing, and besides, she hated Spanx.

Was it too late to get in no-Spanx shape before her layoff?

Yes. But still.

That was why, though, she did the stair climber, not the elliptical machine, on which you went more slowly when you got to a good part of your book and which was, let’s face it, the closest thing there was to dawdling along the sidewalk as you read said book. She’d been way too out of breath on those stairs today. She wasn’t any older than Blake Orbison, and if he could spring up them two at a time, she could at least not gasp like a dying guppy as she dragged herself to the top.

Right. Torture Stairs climbed, a quick shower, after which her face remained red but too bad, and one final stop at the grocery store where, tossing a pound of flank steak (Reduced for Quick Sale!) into her cart, she wondered at what point in her life she wouldn’t stop at the grocery store on the way home from work.

The point, maybe, when she was responsible only for herself, dressed in breezy, wide-legged trousers with a jacket thrown casually over her slim(mer) shoulders, having a quick meal of Chinese vegetables at a tiny hole-in-the-wall known only to locals before stepping briskly into the elevator of her modern apartment block, furnished with her usual cool, modern sensibility in tones of gray-blue and chalk-white.

(Ha. As if. Hey, it was a daydream.)

Should all that sound lonely and sad? Why did it sound good instead? Because Blake had made her think about it, that was why.

She’d spent so many bleary-eyed nights, when Dyma had been a colicky baby, watching 70s sitcoms on late-night cable. Turned down low, so her mom and grandpa could sleep. She’d held her red-faced, grumpy infant with her shock of black hair that always stuck straight up and her legs that stuck straight out when she was mad, which was most of the time, thought about waking up at seven for school the next day, which was in about four hours, tried not to think about how differently this was turning out from what she’d imagined, and watched Mary Tyler Moore in her perfectly neat, elegantly arranged apartment, with a big M on the wall that proclaimed that this was a space that belonged to her and only her, hanging out with her work colleagues who were like family, at a job that always looked like fun, then talking things over with her wisecracking best friend. She’d thought how incredibly glamorous that life would be, and how she wasn’t ever going to have it.

Mary’s life hadn’t actually been anything close to glamorous, she realized now. Less Sex in the City and Manolo Blahniks and more A Quiet Existence in the Midwest. Maybe that was the point, though. It had seemed attainable.

Well, in somebody else’s reality. Except that her life was fine. She’d done great. Everybody always said how great she’d done. Everybody except her mom, who’d said, only a week or two before she’d suddenly succumbed to the heart attack caused by the lupus that had plagued her for so long, “You should get out of here, you know, spread your wings. Once Dyma graduates, why not? What’s holding you here?”

“Well, you,” Jennifer had answered. “Grandpa. Everybody. Also, I have a great job now. Hey, this is my big step, right? I’m doing great.”

“Except that you’re still here,” Adele had said.

“I like it here,” Jennifer had answered.

Her mom had just looked at her. Now, she remembered that look as she threw a max pack of TP and a bag of coffee into her cart, then a packet of egg noodles and a pint of light sour cream, a half-gallon of OJ, two family-size boxes of not-quite-Cheerios and two gallons of milk—feeding milk goats would have been more economical than Dyma’s milk habit, and how could one teenage girl go through that much cereal? She added a few regular old white mushrooms, wondered what the fancy ones actually tasted like, threw in some anemic-looking February tomatoes, looked