How Stella Got Her Groove Back Read Free Page B

roam around the house while I talk but give them my undivided attention, listen to what they have to say, what they’ve been going through, how they’ve been feeling. These are people I do care about but now they’re just on the B list. My life has gotten too busy. And it’s time for me to slow it down.
    I will also cook. I used to cook all kinds of interesting and exotic meals, but after Walter left, if Quincy couldn’t identify it he didn’t even want to try it. A double Big Mac and supersize fries and a nine-piece Chicken McNugget with a medium Sprite and apple pie is his meal of choice. I miss cooking. I miss smelling new smells and stirring new sauces and being surprised by the taste of something different. I will cook. I will make it a habit. I will even make some of those low-fat meals from a few of the fifty or sixty cookbooks I’ve purchased over the years and have yet to ever open.
    For the last two or three years I’ve been meaning to make a computerized printout of all my relatives’ and friends’ birthdays and even their kids’ and have it printed on a specially made calendar so that each day when I walk into my office all I have to do is look up and see whose birthday is coming up, and their card and maybe even a gift depending on their age and who they were would be a surprise and on time.
    I’ll also plant some flowers in the front and back yards since I’ve been reading about the Zen of gardening and how gratifying it can be, and since it’s been awhile since I’ve had sex I’ll take whatever form pleasure comes in. At any rate, I’ve heard that this gardening stuff can relax you and even give you some of those endorphins like people get when they exercise.
    This too is something I’d like to improve upon while my son is off to the Rockies with his how-did-I-ever-love-his-lifeless daddy. As it stands now, I am almost ashamed to tell people that I hired a personal trainer who comes to my house three days a week to make me pump and grind and sweat because the bottom line is that I’m lazy and have no willpower and have woken up too many mornings from dreams in which I worked out so strenuously and was truly too beautiful for a woman who’d just turned forty and I put stars like Cher and Tina Turner and Diana Ross to shame but it wasn’t until a year later after having a series of such dreams that I realized I had never broken a sweat let alone panted. It has taken me another year to get into the rhythm of working out and there are many mornings when I’d just as soon call in sick, but as a result of my desire to improve my health with the real motive being pure vanity I now am almost in shape although I still have my unfair share of cellulite, but it’s not as much as I used to have thank the Lord and I actually do have a number of muscles and my butt is higher and firmer than I ever recall it being but since I’d been paying the health club $105 a month for two years and had actually only been inside to give tours to visiting friends and relatives and inform them that whenever I had the time this is where I usually worked out though the truth was I’d only gone in there to sit in the steam room but since I now have two steam rooms—here and in my cabin at Lake Tahoe—there was really no need to waste my gas driving there so why bother, so last year I admitted to myself that I was bullshitting myself and since I have had a difficult time visualizing myself fat and slovenly and just plain old I decided—like they do in any twelve-step program—to turn myself over to a higher power. Her name is Krystal and she makes Cindy Crawford look like a zero and she only charges fifty dollars an hour. I used to use drugs that cost me more per minute. Which is one reason I could never run for public office. If anyone ever did a background check on me they’d be in for a big shock. But then again, they are always shocked at everybody else’s background when they’re running for public office,