Dangerous Ladies Read Free Page A

apartment by tilting it sideways in the freight elevator, a maneuver that made her cover her eyes and pray to the gods of furniture placement.
    Her entreaties must have worked, because they planted the sofa and the chair in front of the small propane fireplace, put the ottoman between them, and moved her end tables into place.
    Surely her luck had turned. The sofa wasn’t damaged. The colors and fabrics were exactly the way she had ordered them. They would fit perfectly in the new apartment she and Alan would move into when they married. It was only later that night, when she stopped unpacking long enough to drop into the chair, put her feet up on the ottoman, and look, really look at the furniture, that she realized the sofa was eighteen inches too short.
    She’d received the love seat, not the full-size sofa she’d ordered.
    She spent the whole night on her hastily made bed, worrying about making the phone call to Amy, her salesperson at Samuel’s Furniture.
    That, at least, went well. Amy was apologetic, behaving just as well as Brandi could have hoped, but the fact was that she had to wait another six weeks until the actual furniture she’d ordered arrived, and for a few minutes it seemed as if that sucked more than anything else that had happened in this horrific, endless week.
    Until the phone call she picked up because she thought, honestly thought, that Alan was calling to tell her he was coming over at last.

    Instead, it was her mother.
    “Well? How did the move go?” As always, Tiffany sounded like a cheerleader bolstering her team’s spirits before the big game.
    Brandi stared around at the endless parade of boxes. Empty boxes piled catawampus against the wall. Flattened boxes stacked by the door. Boxes, far too many boxes, still taped shut and scratched with black Magic Marker from her last two moves. An endless supply of boxes, no stereo system in sight, and pizza for dinner again. “Well, I’ve been unpacking for a day and a half and I haven’t seen Alan. Not once.”
    “Now, sweetheart, I’m sure he’s busy. After all, he is a physician.” Mother’s Tennessee accent sounded soft and tender.
    Brandi didn’t know why she’d bothered to complain. It was pure exhaustion and loneliness that made her give in to her irritation and criticize her fiancé to, of all people, her mother. “He’s not a physician. He’s a resident.”
    “That poor boy. I saw on 60 Minutes how those hospital administrators work their residents ninety-six hours at a time. And you said he was brilliant. Remember? You told me he was the top of his class and all eyes were on him.”
    For once Brandi wished her mother would take her side. About anything. “He hasn’t called, either. He may have e-mailed, but I don’t get connected to the Internet until next week.”
    “I hope you didn’t call him. A nagging woman is an unpleasant creature.” Tiffany was the personification of 1950s Southern womanhood.
    “Yes, Mother, I know, although if he’d remember me long enough to do as he promised, I wouldn’t be seized by this overwhelming desire to nag him.” Brandi scratched her nails against the grain of the fabric on the couch, watched as the brocade rose in four welts, and wondered which one of them she wanted to scratch—her mother or her fiancé. “But I’d like to point out that I’m a lawyer who relocated from a lovely, soft, warm city to be close to my fiancé. I’m about to start my first full-time job at a major Chicago law firm, and I’m
going to be working all the time. He could at least call to see if I’ve frozen to the side of the Dumpster taking out my trash.”
    Mother’s voice took on that pious tone that made Brandi want to shriek. “To keep her man, a woman always has to give one hundred and ten percent.”
    “How did that work out for you?”
    The sound of her mother’s shocked inhalation brought Brandi to her senses. She loved her mother, she really did, but Mother had been Daddy’s first