Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Jory: Sam, we’re talking about––
Sam: Right? And don’t sigh, all pained and whatever—just answer.
Jory: Yes, Sam. Naked is best.
Sam: Yeah, see. I figured.
Jory: You’re very smart.
Sam: I keep telling you that.
That’s a wrap, all. Have a wonderful rest of May, and enjoy the weather before it gets stupid hot.
JUNE 2019
Hello, all, Jory Harcourt here, and welcome to my column, He Said, he said, June 2019. Today I’m going to tell you all about some excitement we had last week. It got a little crazy, but it turned out okay in the end.
It all started with pounding on my door at four fifteen in the afternoon. Normally, I’m not even home at that time, but I got off work early because I met a client at a restaurant in Oak Park and decided to call it a day after that. If you were talking to a whole team of people about marketing their online coloring app, you would need a break too. I mean really, what is there to it? How are you supposed to make that any more than what it is—a great way to zone out for hours? It’s like that game where you feed the koi to make them bigger. It’s for turning off your mind, and I’m the king of that, but come on. Anyway, I was in the kitchen, talking to the cat, asking questions about his day because, well, he was blue, so clearly, he’d gotten into something, when somebody started pounding on my front door.
Upon answering I found Angie Gleason. At one time, back when Kola was ten and her daughter, Ella, was the same age, we had been friendly. Now, with Kola sixteen and her daughter the same, we were no longer close. Things had changed between us when she showed her true colors at a parent-child pancake breakfast and said that no, she didn’t believe that my husband and I had any right to raise children. Two men shouldn’t have been able to, and it was, and I quote, an abomination. So that killed the friendly-acquaintance thing right there in its tracks. It was a surprise to find her on my doorstep looking frantic.
“Angie,” I said in greeting.
“Is Kola here?” she snapped at me.
“No,” I replied, not adding that he was at an internship at the Field Museum until six. It was none of her business. “What can I do for you?”
She took a shaky breath. “I—Janet Pomeroy called me a few minutes ago and said that he was going to a clinic with Ella because her daughter, Marlo, wouldn’t go. I need to know where she is, Jory, right the hell now!”
I squinted at her because she was making zero sense. “My son is at an internship, and he doesn’t even talk to your daughter anymore—you made sure of that—so the two of them being at a clinic together is not even remotely possible.”
“She’s underage, Jory!”
“So is he,” I reminded her, hearing my voice rise, the prickle of anger washing over my skin. “Get off my porch, Angie,” I snapped, turning and walking back into my house, slamming the door behind me.
She started screaming through the door that she was going to call the police, and I yelled at her to go ahead. And no, it wasn’t mature, but how dare she question my kid.
Taking a few quick breaths to calm down, I started walking around the house in search of the source of the blue that had made my normally white cat a lovely, albeit odd, shade of periwinkle. There was nothing out of the ordinary downstairs, except that people had left their cereal bowls in the sink for the maid that we’d never had, so whether they were in a hurry or not, that was not acceptable. We’d have to have a talk about that over dinner.
Upstairs, it hit me, and I realized that the only reason I hadn’t gone to my daughter’s room first was that Angie had rattled me. It hadn’t even seemed odd to me at the time that the dog didn’t greet me when I got home, as the blue cat had.
Jogging down the hall to my daughter’s room, I found our Chihuahua, Dobby, on the floor chewing on a large plastic tube of paint. The second he saw me, he got up, abandoned the tube, and trotted over, tiny tail wagging. My eyes filled instantly, because I thought, yeah, this is it, the dog’s dead, but when I picked him up, there was no blue on him anywhere. On closer inspection of the mutilated tube of watercolor, the words NON-TOXIC were a relief to see. Additionally, from the cat-sized smear of azure blue, Dobby had enjoyed chewing on the tube, but it didn’t look like he ate any of the paint. He was simply the facilitator of the puddle that Chilly had, for whatever reason, rolled in.