I Still Dream About You: A Novel Read Free Page B

carton, then mash it around, and Robbie would never know the difference anyway. Brenda was deep in thought. Surely, when the Whirling Dervishes were not whirling, they had to wear regular clothes, at least when they traveled. They couldn’t fit on a plane in those tall cone hats, particularly not on the small jets where the ceilings were so low, but maybe they traveled in buses like the country-western stars did. Buses had tall ceilings. But then, she realized, they couldn’t take a bus all the way from Turkey, and so they had to fly sometimes or maybe they took a boat. She glanced over at the photograph in the newspaper again, and those tall hats looked very heavy to her. She began to wonder how much they weighed or if the Dervishes ever got headaches from wearing them, and before she knew it, Brenda looked down and saw that she had gone through half the pint of Robbie’s ice cream.
    Oh, damn it! There was no way she could hide that now. Shewas going to have to run out to the convenience store and buy a new pint to replace it. The last time she had done this, she’d filled the carton with water, but when Robbie had opened it and seen that it was mostly ice, she had suspected something. Brenda turned the carton over and looked to see if Robbie had put a mark on the bottom. Robbie was on to all her ice cream tricks and sometimes put an X on the bottom to try to catch her, but there was no mark on this one. Good. She couldn’t afford to get caught cheating on her diet again.
    She had been caught red-handed just three months ago, and with Robbie being a nurse and worried about Brenda’s health, it had not been a pretty scene. Even though Robbie was her younger sister by seven years, she was very bossy. She was also much taller than Brenda was and as skinny as a rail. Unfortunately, Brenda had taken after their mother’s side of the family and was only five foot five, and at the moment, she was at her medium weight of around 166 pounds. Her good weight was 150 pounds, and 178 pounds was her top. Consequently, Brenda had three different sets of clothes hanging in her closet, labeled GOOD, MEDIUM , and FAT AS A HOG . She had not been in her GOOD range since Hazel Whisenknott had died, over five years ago. “I eat out of stress,” she told Robbie, and now, between work and nephews driving her crazy, she was just on the verge of having to switch from her MEDIUM to her FAT AS A HOG wardrobe again, which meant she was going to have to switch shoe sizes as well. Robbie said she was the only person in America who gained weight in her feet.
    Brenda went ahead and finished the last of the ice cream and wrapped the empty carton in tin foil and hid it at the bottom of the garbage can under the sink. She rinsed off the spoon, dried it, and put it back in the silverware drawer, then picked up the stalk of bananas in the bowl on the counter. She took a carton of milk out of the refrigerator and grabbed the new box of Cheerios from under the counter and put them in a paper bag, put her new Tina Turner wig back on, grabbed her purse, and headed out the door. She didn’t want to go out, but if she got caught eating ice cream again, there would be all hell to pay, especially after what had happened just three months ago.
    When she and Maggie had found out that the house they had in escrow and had worked long and hard to sell had major structural problems and the buyer had backed out, Brenda had been very upset. Not only had they lost the sale, but she was hoping to buy that new fifty-inch television set with her part of the commission. Brenda knew darn well she shouldn’t have done it, but that afternoon, she had driven over to a part of town where no one knew her (and Robbie was unlikely to see her) and stopped at an ice cream place. She went in and ordered a large hot fudge sundae with whipped cream, three cherries, and nuts on top. She was heading back to her car with it when, suddenly, a boy ran up and tried to snatch her purse right