Odd Stuff Read Free Page A

windowsill. Tears threatened again.  
    The next room, by process of elimination, had to be the spare room and the origin of Vickie’s calls. I opened the door and grinned. 
    Also redone, but a little off in nailing the attempt to make Vickie feel at home. Mia repainted the room soft pink and decorated heavily with teddy bears and ballerinas. The quilt even had A-B-C blocks on it spelling Victoria. I smirked at Vickie. 
    “Mom, this is a baby room. I can’t bring people in here.”
    I laughed. “But you couldn’t possibly make new friends, or so you said, anyway.”
    “Mom, seriously.”
    I forced down the rest of my laughter. “We can move some stuff from your old room in and hang some posters and you won’t even notice till we get a place of our own. We can put Naked Jonas’s—” 
    “Naked Brothers and Jonas Brothers, Mom.” 
    “Whatever, we put him over the teddy bears and we put Aaron McCartney—” 
    “Jesse McCartney, Mom, god, you have no taste in music—” 
    “Whatever, Vickie. We put his big blond head over the kittens and it will be fine.”
    She thumped back on the bed. “Just go work. I’ll come down if I need something.”
    She proceeded to plug in her iPod and tune me out to some fluffy boy band and the ever present hand-held video games on the tablet. I hated that stupid toy. She played that thing more than she read, lately. I could punch her dad for getting a tablet for a ten year old. Besides, I wanted one. 
    I kissed her forehead and headed down the hall to dump my backpack onto Mia’s huge bed. Black silk sheets and a red silken spread were covered with at least ten pillows, and I giggled a little at the thought of sleeping in such a suggestive bed. James, my ex-husband, was a lawyer. We had not shared a suggestive bed. We had a sensible bedroom, tans and neutral tones for a calming environment, blah blah blah . He and the podiatrist probably had handcuffs and a torture chamber. Men . Disgusted with myself for traveling down that well-worn trail of thought again, I turned to leave the room. 
    Shutting the door, I could have sworn I heard something in the room, and I opened it again to look. 
    Nope, nothing. Writing it off as exhaustion, I stepped back toward Vickie’s room. “Brat child,” I called.
    She looked up and took her earbud out of one ear.
    “Here. Do not use up all the minutes.” I tossed her my spare cell phone, the one that had belonged to her dad. Guilt was an excellent parental motivator. Dr. Phil would hit me right about now.
    “No way! You said there was no way you would give me my own phone!”
    “Yeah, well, no calling back to Pennsylvania after nine, and use it to get a hold of me.” 
    She leaped off the bed and hurled herself at me. “You are the greatest mom ever, you know that? We will make this work, I swear. I will do so good at school, and I will—” 
    “Okay, okay, enough with the promises that you’ll never keep. You run the minutes up or eat all the data on my plan, and you won’t have a phone. Not kidding, young lady.” 
    “Yes, mom!”
    She bounced back to her bed and began playing with the ring tones.
    I bounced a little myself as I jogged back down the stairs. Who knew? Give a kid a cell phone and become a hero for a day. Eat me, Phil .
    Walking back into the shop, I curled up with the spiral notebook and waited for customers to come pouring in.
    And waited.
    By seven-thirty that evening, I had read the entire notebook. I knew nothing about anything I had read. I think I could have read a VCR manual and understood more about what I was reading than this mish-mash Mia had left me. Tonight, I had the ghost hunting thing and I needed to stop at the Natural Foods store and pick up some iron supplements for someone named Marcus.
    Tomorrow, I needed to get some munchies for the “circle.” What was the circle anyway? There were long lists of things like “the circle” that Mia assumed I would understand without explanation. She