I Almost Forgot About You Read Free Page B

that success and happiness and love were in the cards. We didn’t worry about the future. We were more worried about the next time we were going to get laid.
    Now you fall across the bed when you’re not sleepy but just tired of the way you live—or aren’t living. From the outside you shouldn’t be complaining, but success and a good credit score can’t love you. Or give you an orgasm. You even empty the trash and wonder what you’re really throwing away. You comb your hair and put on makeup and buy something pretty to wear and get your nails and toes painted hot pink even though you don’t feel hot, and you wonder who will even notice. You shave your legs and under your arms and get your eyebrows waxed, and you wonder who will notice. And then one day, out of nowhere, you stop wondering and start worrying that the best part of your life is behind you. Is this how it’s going to be forever? Is this all there is?
    God, you hope not.
    —
    On Friday night I decide not to help Detective Goren solve any murders. Fuck him. In fact, I don’t turn the television on at all. I take a bubble bath. I shave my legs and my underarms. I give myself a mud facial. I pluck my eyebrows. I put on a comfy pair of pink cotton pajamas that I folded quite nicely last week. They still smell clean. I fall asleep before ten.
    On Saturday I decide not to go to Costco or Home Depot or Target or the grocery store for anything, because there is really nothing I need.
    I go to the movies.
    I buy a ticket to see
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
not realizing it’s a Woody Allen movie, and as usual it’s smart and entertaining but there’s not a single person of color in it. I manage to laugh anyway.
    Afterward I walk outside and into a nice restaurant and have lunch: butternut squash soup and a Caesar salad.
    When I get home, I decide to reread
The Alchemist.
    Oh. What a night.
    On Sunday morning at seven o’clock sharp, I text Wanda,
meet you at the reservoir. i’ll be there at eight.
    She replies,
will meet you there! hooray!
    Wanda happens to be my cheerleader. She’s worried that her best friend might die a lonely spinster, which is why she’s the nostalgia queen and continues to remind me of when we were hot young things who used to make men take a number. Well, now my number is 175 pounds. She’s been happily married to Nelson for thirty-two years. They chose not to have children and never apologized for it. “Three’s a crowd,” she told me right after they eloped in Maui. Wanda’s been my best friend since college. And even though she’s opinionated, often misses the mark as well as the point, it’s also the reason I love her. She stands her ground, and I can count on her getting on my nerves at least once a week. She’s the sister I never had. She pretends to golf for a living but has yet to earn a dime. Not that she needs it. Wanda’s also the only black person I know who was born with a gold spoon in her mouth, which is probably why she’s on so many benevolent boards. There isn’t a week that goes by she’s not at some dull dinner celebrating or honoring someone worthy, but Nelson just stopped coming up with excuses and just started saying, “I don’t want to go.” He’s an accountant who spends most of his free time reading espionage novels and watching reruns of
Star Trek.
These banquets are also an excuse for Wanda to get dressed up. But for some pathological reason, she’s cheap as hell, can’t dress to save her life, and doesn’t buy anything unless it’s on sale. She spends most of her free time in outlets.
    Wanda decided over pizza one night to major in psychology, which is probably one reason she was unemployable. But she’s enjoyed not working and is addicted to a number of old-lady hobbies. Scrapbooking is one, and because they had zero children, her scrapbooks are full of pictures of all the dogs she and Nelson have rescued from the pound over the years that have since passed on. Creepy. Then