Best Friends, Occasional Enemies

by Lisa Scottoline; Francesca Serritella

  The magazine even showed a library ladder in the laundry room. I don’t even have a library ladder in my library. Okay, maybe I don’t have a library, either. But I do have a dining room with bookshelves.

  Also the laundry ladder was painted lavender. And the laundry room wallpaper was covered with painted lavender plants. And on the counter was a pot of fresh lavender.

  We get it.

  But that isn’t even my point. My point is that as I kept reading, the magazine started showing photos of men fixing all the broken things in an old house. There was a tall man with silvery hair installing a new windowsill of cellular PVC, to replace a rotting one. And a stocky guy with a brushy mustache drilling upward into a ceiling beam. Then a red-haired landscape contractor bringing a lawn back to life, plus a smiling man with a screwdriver, above a caption that read MASTER CARPENTER.

  My interest in the magazine was growing, but it wasn’t about the PVC sills.

  The magazine was morphing into a man catalog.

  And I started thinking, maybe I should order me some Master Carpenter for Christmas.

  In other words, This Old House got This Old House very interested.

  There was a heavyset guy installing a base cabinet, above the caption GENERAL CONTRACTOR. A bald dude, the Plumbing and Heating Expert, fiddling with some red pipes. A younger guy with a caulking gun, whose caption read, HOST.

  I didn’t know what he was hosting, but I knew who was hostessing.

  What’s sexier than a man with a (caulking) gun?

  You have to understand that these men wouldn’t have turned heads if they were walking around the mall. But installing drywall, fixing pipes, and painting things?

  They’re Mr. Right.

  And not because they’re hot, but because they’re actually doing something. And in the fantasy, they’re doing something for me, which means I don’t have to do it myself. Also that it would get done right.

  They’re Mr. Done Right.

  Remember, I’m the freak who painted her entire first floor in two days, and it looks it. In fact, I learned from This Old House that those blobs of orange paint I left on the white ceiling are called bleed lines.

  Except that my ceiling isn’t bleeding, it’s hemorrhaging.

  Bottom line, I have to buy a replacement magazine for my neighbor.

  And I’m subscribing to This Old House.

  I hope it comes in a plain brown wrapper.

  Little Dog, Big Pill

  By Lisa

  The night started out quietly, but it didn’t end that way.

  I was sitting across the family room from Penny, my old golden retriever, who’d just had the doggie equivalent of a total surgical makeover. She was lying on the couch, her head stuck in a plastic cone, because I had to fix all manner of old dog things that were happening to her.

  That they sound like things that are happening to me is purely coincidental.

  She was forming little fat deposits everywhere and they were starting to sag. I also have saggy little fat deposits. I call them breasts.

  My other saggy fat deposits aren’t little. I call them buttocks.

  Well, that’s only what I call them in print.

  Also, she had started to sprout brown warts on her face. Some were flat, and others protruded, like the one on her left eyelid. When I asked the vet what caused them, she answered, “They’re skin tags and they come with age.”

  I blinked. I remembered that that was exactly what my dermatologist had said to me, when I showed him a new brown mole on my own eyelid. The left eyelid, same as Penny. He’d said it came with age and called it a skin tag, too, but I secretly wondered if that was just a nice way of saying it’s an age spot.

  Bottom line, Penny and I have age spots. Due to the fact that we have age.

  Age, Spot, age!

  Yes, I have an age spot on my eyelid, and you can imagine how fun that is when I’m trying to put on eye makeup. If I want to put on eyeliner, I draw a straight line until I come to the age spot, at which point I make a sharp right turn and go around it, like a jughandle off of Route 38 in Cherry Hill.

  And imagine trying to put blue eyeshadow over a brown age spot. No amount of powder can hide the spot. Blue plus brown equals men turning their heads away in revulsion.

  In other words, it’s a good look, for a Cyclops.

  Maybe I should buy a new color of eyeshadow, let’s say, in brown. We could call it age-spot brown. Then all my age spots would be camouflaged, but it would look like someone smeared dirt on my lids.

  Here’s mud in your eye!

  So I was looking at Penny and thinking these things when I realized that she needed her meds. I went into the kitchen, got her antibiotic, and hid it in some peanut butter. All the other dogs trotted after me, as they love peanut butter.

  Also anytime I go into the kitchen at night, we’re talking good news for dogs. I’m never going in for a snack of water, if you follow.

  Carbs are always involved.

  So guess what happened next?

  I started to give Penny her pill, but Peach intercepted it and gulped down the peanut butter with the pill inside.

  Uh oh.

  Suddenly the night was no longer quiet. Peach is a tiny Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and she weighs 10 pounds. Penny weighs 80. I checked the medicine bottle and the label read CIPROFLOXACIN, 250 MG. You don’t need to be Doctor Doolittle to know that it was too big a dose for Peach.

  So I’m on the phone to the emergency vet, whom I have on speed dial, and they tell me that the dose may be toxic for Peach, so I have to call Poison Control.

  “But I’m calling you,” I say, into the cell phone. Meantime, I’m hurrying for my car keys with Peach. “I’m on my way.”

  “If you bring the dog here, you’ll still have to call Poison Control.”

  “From your office?”

  Little dog, big head

  “Yes. And they’ll tell you what to do.”

  I can’t believe my ears and I’m jumping in the car. “So I call for the diagnosis and I treat her myself?” That’s what I say, but I’m thinking: Really? Can I operate on her, too? And if I do your job, will you do mine? Because I got a novel that ain’t gonna write itself.

  So, absurdly enough, I call Poison Control from the car, at speed, and for sixty dollars charged to my VISA, a vet tells me that Ciprofloxacin isn’t toxic in that dosage, but if I feed the dog a dairy product, it will prevent absorption of the drug.

  Which is how Peach and I find ourselves parked at a convenience store, sharing a midnight pint of vanilla Haagen-Dazs.

  Emergency carbs.

  The Flying Scottolines Reach Out

  By Lisa

  Cell phones are supposed to make communication easier, but it doesn’t work that way for The Flying Scottolines.

  We reach out and touch … trouble.

  It begins when I pick up Mother Mary at the airport, or at least I’m supposed to. I’m there early, confounded by the hi-tech Arrivals screen. It’s guaranteed that no Arrivals screen will give you a quick answer to when anyone is arriving. Why? Because as soon as you manage to locate the Departure City on the lists, the lists shifts upward. Your eye found Miami on the fifth line from the bottom, but as soon your gaze traveled across to Flight Status, you’re in Glasgow.

  In other words, once you find the Departure City, it departs.

  Doubtless this is because the new technology receives new flight information in nanoseconds and transmits it in even less than that, so nobody can get a quick answer from an Arrivals screen, which is how you know it’s working.

  So already you understand my theme of technology not helping.

  The Arrivals screen, as best as I can tell, is informing me that Mother Mary has arrived, or at least her plane has, but she’s nowhere in sight. I pace and pace, and then I start calling her cell phone, but there’s no answer. Half an hour goes by, and I call Brother Frank, back in Miami.

  “I can’t find her,” I tell him.


  He laughs, thinking I’m joking. “Very funny. I gotta go. It’s a new job, and my boss is around.”

  “Frank, I’m not kidding.” I know he has a new job, and I wouldn’t bother him at it, not in this economy. Never mind that I used to call him at his old job all the time and tell him I didn’t have her when I did, which is the kind of prank that The Flying Scottolines think is wildly funny. “I’m not kidding, Frank. I really don’t have her.”

  “You’re gonna get me fired,” he says, and hangs up.

  Long story short, I run back and forth, ask around, and finally go down to baggage claim, though she has no baggage. Actually, she is baggage.

  Just kidding.

  But there she is, out in front of the terminal. Mother Mary, all white hair and four feet eleven inches, standing outside the terminal at the curb. I run to the rescue. “Ma, what are you doing here?”

  “The man brought me here.”

  “What man?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Mother Mary isn’t confused, she’s angry.

  “But I never pick you up here. Plus I called you on your cell. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I had it turned off, for the plane. Now let’s go.”

  So we do, because another problem with technology is that you have to turn it on all the time, and I hope they fix that soon.

  And of course, the minute we get in the car, she wants to call Frank, to tell him not to worry. I know he’s not worried, and I don’t drive and talk on the phone if I can avoid it. But she’s convinced that he’s worried, and we can call from my car, hands-free. According to this technology, all I have do is to talk to my car and it listens, which would be great if it were fifty-five, single, and ran on testosterone.

  So I hit speed dial, and in a few minutes, the call gets answered. “Hel-lo,” someone says in an English accent. He sounds like Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, which doesn’t surprise me. My brother always answers my calls as Hannibal Lecter and calls me Clarice, which is another thing that The Flying Scottolines think is wildly funny.

  “Frank, Mom wants you to know she’s fine.”

  “Pardon?” Hannibal says.

  “I got Mom, and she’s fine.”

  “So sorry, Frank isn’t here.”

  “Frank, cut the dumb accent. I thought your boss was there. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Truly, Frank has stepped away. May I take a message?”

  Which is when it hits me that this is the best Hannibal Lecter impression ever, and Frank’s new company has offices in Britain.

  And this is probably his boss.

  So I did the mature thing. I panicked and hung up.

  Which is yet another problem with technology.

  That you can get your brother fired, hands-free.

  Don’t Look Now

  By Lisa

  Here’s what just happened to me:

  I couldn’t turn around.

  What am I talking about? Let me explain.

  I was sitting at my kitchen island, writing on my laptop and watching the football game. The refrigerator was to my right, and an iced Diet Coke and a bag of tortilla chips were close at hand.

  This is called a home office.

  And the dogs were sleeping where they usually do, on round little beds behind me, like Muppets on tuffets. One of them made a funny sound, so I turned around to check on them.

  Or tried to.

  Because I couldn’t turn around, not all the way.

  And there was nothing wrong with my back, and I wasn’t sick or anything. I just had to make an effort to turn all the way around.

  What?

  And this happened the other day too, when I was walking the dogs and heard a car coming down the road, so I turned around to see how close it was. But I couldn’t see.

  My nose was in the way.

  I couldn’t see behind me without turning my whole body.

  What’s going on?

  I went on the Internet and got the answer I feared.

  I’m fifty-five.

  I did a search, and there was article after article by doctors, physical therapists, and scientists, all saying the same thing. That women lose flexibility as they age.

  Hmm.

  I knew that, as an abstract matter, but I didn’t think it meant I couldn’t even turn the hell around.

  I didn’t even know which part of me had gotten inflexible. One medical article talked about how “women 50–71 years could expect problems with shoulder flexion, shoulder extension, shoulder transverse extension, hip flexion, and hip rotation.”

  I don’t know what they’re talking about, but it can’t be good.

  And I don’t know whether it’s shoulders or hips that are the problem when you can’t turn around.

  But in all the articles, the advice was the same. As one website said, “These data indicate that aging women can improve and/or maintain shoulder and hip range of motion through participation in regular exercise done three times per week.”

  First off, “aging women”? How dare you. Go to hell.

  Second, always, with the exercise. I walk the dogs two miles a day, every day, and I ride a pony that’s older than me. What else do you want?

  Exercise was the wrong answer, to me.

  It doesn’t seem fair that you should have to do something just to stay the same. Here’s my reasoning: I expect to exercise if I want to lose weight. That’s a change in the status quo. I also expect to exercise if I want to get stronger. Also a change in the status quo. If I want to change something, I should have to do something extra.

  But that’s not this.

  I don’t want to change anything. All I want to do is turn around. And until today, I could turn around like a champ.

  I needed a better answer. I went back online onto Google and plugged “I’m 55 and I can’t turn around,” but I learned nothing new except that Isaac Hayes wrote a song called “I Can’t Turn Around.” He was in his thirties at the time, so I guess he really didn’t exercise.

  Bottom line, I refuse to exercise just so I can turn around. So the answer is clear:

  I’m going to stop turning around.

  Then I started thinking.

  Maybe it makes sense that as we get older, we can’t turn around. Maybe as we go along in life, we’re not supposed to be looking back.

  This is especially true if you’ve lived my life, where I’ve made major mistakes, and I’m not even counting Thing One and Thing Two.

  In other words, as we get older, don’t look back.

  Look forward.

  Keep going.

  Walking is fine.

  Put your past in the rearview.

  If it were so great, you wouldn’t have left it behind.

  See ya on the road.

  Mousetrap Part III—Modicum of Solace

  By Francesca

  The week following my visit from Creepy Exterminator, I found myself back at my apartment without my best friend, my faithful spaniel, Pip, who was safely away from the mouse poison, staying with my mother.

  Not that said spaniel did much to protect me from vermin or drug-fueled exterminators. Still, I missed him terribly. I was all alone.

  With the mice.

  I sat in the new quiet of my apartment, trying to work, but I was on edge. I caught myself listening, waiting for the suspicious rustling of a rodent, or worse, the sound of one of my not-so-humane traps going off, or the very worst, to see some poor poisoned mouse stumble out into the hall, foaming at the mouth, eyes wild and accusatory, shaking a tiny fist in my direction.

  In my imagination, all mice die with drama fit for the stage.

  Only a sense of guilt and revulsion could compel me to do what I did next; I decided to go to the gym. It seemed like a productive thing to do with all my nervous energy, and it would be good to get out of the house.

  I arrived at the gym, buoyed by that smug sense of optimism that comes after I put on my sneakers but before I actually brea
k a sweat. I was bounding up the steps to the second floor of cardio equipment, when I ran into my friend who works there as a trainer.

  Before I could even say hello, she said, “You will not believe what I found.”

  She led me to one of the back offices and reached into the wastebasket. “I showed it to my manager, and she said to throw it away, but I folded it up in this napkin so I could get it again.” She retrieved some wadded up paper. “Do you want to see it?”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, sorry.” She looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “It’s a bed bug.”

  I gasped. Bed bugs, the modern plague of Manhattan! Nothing inspires more dread and horror in a city-dweller than these hideous little bugs. Infestation and its accompanying shame are contagious. I actually took a step away from her.

  “Oh don’t worry, I killed it first,” she said with a little too much pride.

  Well, I was curious; I had never seen one in real life. I peered into the tissue. It looked kind of like a tick, only uglier.

  “I found it on the stretch mats.”

  Ew. “And your manager told you to just throw it away?”

  “Yeah. But I had to tell you.”

  “Thanks, hon.” I went to hug her but thought better of it—a pat on the arm would do. “Well, see ya!”

  “You’re leaving?”

  I nodded and jogged out of there. Fitness is not worth the danger of an insect that sucks your blood while you sleep.

  Beauty is skin deep. Bed bugs burrow under your skin.

  Later on, back at the apartment, I got a little hungry, but the prospect of cooking was less appetizing with the memory of mouse droppings on my kitchen counter still fresh in my mind. I decided that without the dog to worry about, I should take my laptop and go camp out at a café, like writers do in the movies. It seemed more glamorous than my usual writing on the couch in stretch pants.

  I arrived at a nearby coffee shop, appropriately in costume with my shoulder bag and plastic-rimmed glasses, feeling like a romantic comedy might just pop up around me at any moment. I nabbed the last free table and ordered a veggie wrap and an iced tea.