Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) Read Free

killing each other.
    Let me explain. Daughter Francesca came home because we’re about to embark on an eight-day trip to Rome, which is four days of book tour, plus four days of sightseeing. I’m a lucky author to have a European book tour, and luckier still to have Francesca come along, not only because she’s fun but also because she speaks Italian.
    All I can say in Italian is pasta.
    My books are translated into 30 languages, and I speak only carbohydrates.
    To get to the point, we’re set to depart on Sunday night, so I bring Francesca home on Thursday, with dog Pip in tow, and when we hit the house, we discover that the power is off from a summer storm.
    The good news is that I installed a generator last year, which means that five things in my house should still be running. I can’t remember which things, so I go around checking. You know where I go first.
    The refrigerator is fine.
    So’s the water and a TV in the kitchen.
    And so’s the oven, so you see my priorities immediately.
    But no air-conditioning.
    Not even a fan.
    I know this sounds spoiled, but it’s ninety degrees in the family room.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself, because at that moment, I’m thinking the outage is temporary and might even be fun. Francesca agrees. So we have a chuckle, go make dinner, and eat. It’s our candlelight adventure until the TV stops working, because the cable is down.
    Hmmm.
    This is usually the time when someone says how great it is when the electricity goes off, and people can really talk to each other, and blah blah blah.
    I disagree.
    I like electricity.
    I’m power-hungry.
    Plus the Internet and TV don’t prevent me from talking to my daughter. We’re a family of two women. We never shut up.
    By nightfall, there’s still no power. I’m bummed that the sink is full of dirty dishes. She’s bummed that its ninety-three degrees in the family room. And upstairs in the bedrooms, it’s even hotter.
    Long story short, by bedtime, we begin to disagree. Francesca wants to sleep in the family room with the screen door open, but I say no, because psycho killers will enter and do their worst.
    We have our first fight of the weekend.
    I win, which means we sweat upstairs, safe and sound, but it turns out that she’s right, because Little Tony, my black-and-tan Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, almost has heatstroke. We move downstairs to the family room.
    Psycho killers stay away, as they like air-conditioning, too.
    Day Two dawns, and we sweat and swelter. We can’t do much but eat and we did that already. We’re not fighting per se, but we don’t like each other’s tones. I know that I’m the cranky one. I whine and complain about the heat, the electric company, and the oil spill in the Gulf, for good measure. On the other hand, Francesca keeps coming up with ideas to solve our predicament.
    Who raised this child?
    Her Day Two idea is that we should go to an air-conditioned place to cool down, so we go to the mall and buy mascara.
    This is what girls do in an emergency.
    But I find myself cheering up, so we stick with her plan, and on Night Two, we go to the movies and see Knight and Day. We become friends again, as we like Tom Cruise. Francesca dubs the power outage Tom Cruise Appreciation Week.
    On Day Three, I call the electric company just to yell at the recording, but Francesca’s Night Three idea is that we go sit outside in the backyard, where it’s cool, and watch a DVD on my laptop, which still has some battery power.
    I start whining. “Are you serious? It’s dark and there are bugs.”
    She says, “We can watch Collateral. It’ll be like a drive-in movie.”
    “But what about the psycho killers?”
    “Mom, it’s Tom Cruise Appreciation Week.”
    And she’s right. So we go outside and sit on two beach chairs with five dogs and a laptop. The moon is full, casting bright shadows on the lawn, and the fireflies twinkle around us, like peridots in the air.
    Our power struggle is over.
    And we