One Less Problem Without You Read Free Page A

them. Surely he hadn’t kept them for any purposeful reason. He’d probably just forgotten to delete them—raising the disturbing question of how many other e-mails there had been that he had deleted.
    It was too much to comprehend.
    In fact, really, all of it was too much to take. And it all just reminded me that I’d been taking too much for too long.
    After returning his phone to the nightstand, I went down to the kitchen, no longer giving a damn if I disturbed his precious sleep or not. I needed to relax. To him that would have meant that I should take one of the sedatives prescribed for me and just shut up, but after months of ever-increasing numbness on the pills, I’d realized that I was becoming Rip Van Winkle, which felt awfully close to becoming Judy Garland. I didn’t want that.
    That’s when I started making herbal teas. I’d gotten a book on them from the Internet, an introduction to growing, drying, and infusing herbs. It was pretty elementary, but I found that my own chamomile tea was far better, and stronger, than the stuff I bought from the grocery store aisle under the General Foods International Coffees.
    So I’d gotten pretty good at making my own infusions, if I do say so myself. Kava, vervain, and chamomile to relax. I know most people like to put a hint of lavender in, too, but that was too perfumy for me, so I kept it mild.
    Was it as quick as the pills? No. But that was good, because if it worked as quickly as the pills did, it probably would have been just as problematic. I didn’t have room for more problems in my life.
    So I heated the water on the stove and put the dried leaves into the silk tea bag. I added extra kava, as that was the most relaxing of the ingredients; then, in a moment that might have been ill advised, I got out the Corsair vanilla bean vodka.
    I was inventing an elixir, I told myself. Vodka Kavas. The perfect nightcap.
    As soon as the water started to boil, I poured it over the tea leaves, then let it steep for three minutes, taking a shot of vodka straight as I waited. Why not? It had been a bad night. No one could tell me I wasn’t entitled to a quick shot of help.
    As soon as the tea was ready, I removed the bag, dropped a few pieces of rock sugar in, and added a generous dollop of the vodka.
    It was fantastic.
    Or maybe it was just needed . Hard to say at that particular point. It was probably both, to be honest. At any rate, it warmed my soul going down, and eased my mind once it hit.
    Maybe it eased my mind a little too much, because soon I started to get a little wobbly in my anger. And by “wobbly” I mean “irrational,” and by “irrational” I mean I decided it would perhaps not be a terrible idea to make a tea to poison my husband.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    Prinny
    The truth was, she hated being called Prinny.
    â€œLillian” was so much more dignified. And that’s what she wanted, to be dignified, rather than Daddy’s Little Princess, aka Prinny. Even her “halo of golden curls,” as her parents had referred to her hair, made her look like a child’s imagining of a fairy-tale princess. Sounds like a silly thing to complain about until you realize no one takes you seriously. Prinny. It wasn’t a name that could be taken seriously. And yet Lillian might as well not have been her name, since no one had ever called her that.
    Even her classmates had ended up calling her Prinny, so the label her father had, with good and loving intentions, put on her as a child had now stuck with her almost thirty years into life. It had long since stopped conjuring a fairy tale and had more recently, she felt, made her sound like a little old spinster from Gone with the Wind .
    Not that she didn’t appreciate the fact that her father had cared so much; she did. He was all she’d had. Until she’d lost him. Now she had only an adversarial stepbrother and a kind but meek sister-in-law with