The Great Escape

“My crap? You’re the one who thinks Frosted Flakes are antioxidants!”

She had that right. He jerked his head toward the refrigerator. “Help yourself to whatever’s there. We’ll be getting deliveries twice a week. The fruits and vegetables are coming later today.”

“I don’t want her lousy organic food. I want my own.”

He understood the feeling.

Overhead, the treadmill began to run. He told himself not to ask, but… “You don’t happen to have any of your bread stashed away someplace, do you?”

“A fresh loaf of cinnamon raisin where you can’t find it,” she retorted. “Eat your heart out. Oh, wait. You can’t. It’s not organic.”

She stomped outside and slammed the door behind her.

SHE’D LIED ABOUT THE BREAD. She also hadn’t slammed a door since she was fourteen. Both felt really good.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t brought her yellow pad with her, and she’d promised herself she’d write for real today. She wasn’t going back in through the kitchen, so she cut around behind the house and mounted the three steps that led to the deck outside her bedroom. She’d left the sliding doors open to catch the breeze. The screen caught in the track. She gave it an extra nudge and stepped inside.

Panda was already there.

“I want my bedroom back,” he said as he walked out of her closet, carrying a pair of sneakers that she happened to know were a size twelve.

“I rented this house for the summer,” she retorted. “That makes you the interloper, and I’m not leaving.”

He crossed to the dresser. “This is my room. You can sleep upstairs.”

And lose her private exit? No way. “I’m staying right here.”

He tugged open the drawer that used to contain his underwear, but now held hers. He reached inside and pulled out a midnight-black thong.

“Your things are in the bottom drawer,” she said quickly.

He ran his thumb over the silky crotch. As his eyes caught hers, she was hit with another of those jolts of sexual electricity that proved exactly how disconnected a woman’s body could be from her brain.

“Here’s the part I don’t get.” His big fist swallowed the thong. “Knowing the way you feel about me, why are you still here?”

“My attachment to your house overrides my complete indifference to you,” she said with remarkable steadiness.

“My house, not yours,” he retorted, his eyes on her right shoulder-she had no idea why. “And if you make one more change to it, you’re out, regardless of what Temple says.”

Letting him have the last word would have been the mature thing to do, but he was still holding her thong, and she didn’t feel like being mature. “Are you offering her your complete line of services?”

Once again, his eyes drifted to her shoulders. “What do you think?”

She didn’t know what she thought, so she shot across the room and snatched back her thong. “I think Temple’s the kind of woman who’s not easily conned.”

“Then you have your answer.”

Which told her exactly nothing.

“That’s what I thought.” She stuffed her thong back in the drawer, retrieved her writing supplies, and left the same way she’d come in.

My mother is a- So many things to choose from.

My mother is a notoriously hard worker.

Or maybe…

My mother believes in hard work.

Lucy clicked her pen.

The United States was built on hard work.

She tried to find a more comfortable position.

And so was my mother.

Lucy crumpled the paper. Her attempts at writing were going even worse than her encounter with Panda, but this time she had an empty stomach to blame it on. She abandoned her yellow pad and rode into town, where she gorged on two chili dogs and a large order of fries at Dogs ’N’ Malts, the most food she’d eaten in months, but who knew when she’d get a chance to eat again?

When she returned to the house, she found Temple in the almost empty living room watching television, a couple of DVDs of Fat Island on the floor by her bare feet. The brown and gold loveseat where she sat was one of the few pieces of furniture left, since Lucy had transferred the better pieces to the sunroom as replacements for what she’d thrown out.

Temple grabbed the remote and paused the television on an image of herself. “I’m just taking a fifteen-minute break.” She acted as if Lucy had caught her munching a chocolate bar. “I’ve been working out for three hours.”

The chili dogs rumbled unpleasantly in Lucy’s overstuffed stomach. “You don’t have to explain to me.”

“I’m not explaining. I’m-” Looking exhausted, she slumped back into the loveseat. “I don’t know. Maybe I am.” She pointed toward the frozen image of herself on screen. “See that body,” she said with such self-loathing that Lucy cringed. “I threw it away.” She hit the play button and captured her sleek screen image in the middle of a furious diatribe directed at a sweet-faced, sweat-drenched, middle-aged woman who was fighting tears.

“There’s the door! You want to leave? Go ahead! If you don’t care, neither do I.” The veins on Temple’s slim neck popped, and her perfectly glossed mouth formed a snarl. “Get on the boat and off the island. Let everybody see what a loser you are.”

The woman was openly crying now, but Temple continued to berate her. It was painful to watch. Even more painful to imagine what kind of desperation would drive someone to let herself be subjected to this kind of abuse.

The woman’s tears only fueled Temple’s scorn. “Boo hoo. This is what you’ve done all your life. Cry about your problems instead of fixing them. Go on! Get off the island! There are thousands of people waiting to take your place.”

“No!” the woman cried. “I can do it. I can do this.”

“Then do it!”

Temple hit the pause button as the woman began frantically pummeling a punching bag. Lucy didn’t believe self-loathing was the best form of motivation, but Temple thought differently. “Irene ran her first half marathon four months after we taped that episode,” she said proudly. “By the time I was done with her, she’d lost over a hundred pounds.”

Lucy wondered how many of those hundred pounds Irene had been able to keep off without Temple around to scream in her face.

“God, she looked amazing.” Temple turned off the television and stood, wincing slightly as she straightened. “The critics are always putting me down. They’ll compare me to trainers like Jillian Michaels-say she has a heart and I don’t. I have a heart. A big one. But you don’t help people by coddling them, and I’ll match my results against hers any day.” She jerked her head toward the stairs. “I’m going to do some upper body work. From the looks of those arms, you should join me.”

The face of the sobbing woman flashed through Lucy’s mind. “It’s not a good time for me.”

Temple’s lip curled. “There’s never a good time for you, is there, Lucy? You can always find a reason not to take care of yourself.”

“I take care of myself.” Maybe it was Temple’s intimidating glare, or it could have been the second chili dog, but she didn’t sound convincing. “I exercise,” she said in a firmer voice. “I don’t love to, but I do it.”

Temple crossed her arms over her chest like a prison warden. “What kind of exercise?”

“Push-ups. Some crunches. I walk a lot. Sometimes I run.”

“Sometimes doesn’t cut it.”

“In the winter, I go to the gym.” Three times a week, if she was lucky. More often twice. But hardly a week went by that she didn’t get there at least once.

Temple flicked her hand toward Lucy’s body as if it were spoiled meat. “Are you really satisfied with the results