Etta Mae's Worst Bad-Luck Day Read Online Free Page A

I’m complaining. I like a woman who can give as good as she takes.”
    “You just like a woman, period, Bobby Lee Moser.” Darla Davis came to mind, and it took an effort of will to keep my professional cool. “But I thank you for the warning. Now, if you’ll stop hanging on my car, I’ll be on my way.”
    He stood up, tipped his hat at me, and said, “Give me a call sometime. I been missing you.”
    I looked back in the rearview mirror as I pulled onto the road. I saw him laugh and shake his head, then walk back to his car. While I was still watching him, Trisha Yearwood came on the radio singing “There Goes My Baby.” I almost sprained my wrist switching her off. That man could get to me like nobody else, keeping me on edge and about half excited every time I was around him. The problem was, he did it to every woman he met. Bobby Lee and I had been off and on more times than I could count, and it’d usually been his flirty ways that’d turned me off. I’m the jealous type, and I couldn’t put up with all the women he drew like flies to honey. I swear, the man would hit on a holly bush if he thought it was female.
    Thank the Lord I wouldn’t have to worry about Mr. Howard in that regard. When you’ve got a man in a wheelchair or stumbling around on a walker, you pretty much know where he is and what he’s doing every minute of the day.

Chapter 3

    I pulled into the back lot of the square white house that Lurline rented for her business. It was just a four-room, one-bath milltown house like all the others on a side street in downtown Delmont.
    A lot of small businesses and lawyers’ offices had set up shop in the area after the thread mill closed some years ago. Lurline had fixed up the former living room as a waiting area for families who wanted to make arrangements for home care of their elderly loved ones. She had it decorated with a hooked rug, a deacon’s bench, wingback chairs, and lots of doilies to keep the upholstery clean. Oh, and a brass eagle over the fireplace. Whatever her other faults, I had to give her credit for good taste when it came to home furnishings.
    She’d made the former front bedroom into her office, and it was Early American too, but with a professional look from all the wood-grain file cabinets. Half of them were empty, I happened to know.
    Entering through the back door, I marched through the kitchen, which was reserved for EMPLOYEES ONLY . That’s where I’d spent hours and hours training Lurline’s new girls in how to give bed baths and take care of bedsores and check urine for sugar and so forth and so on. And the thought of what I’d done for her made me even madder as I stormed through on my way to her office. She was lucky to have me since I was the only one of the Handy Home Helpers with a degree in assistant nursing from the Abbot County Technical College, although, to be fair, she did help pay for my education. But I’d paid her back a thousand times over, according to my calculations. You’d think she’d show a little appreciation.
    I poked my head into the waiting room to be sure no one was there, then walked right into her office. When she looked up and saw me, she closed her checkbook and frowned.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be seeing your patients?” She pulled the schedule in front of her, studied it, and said, “You’ve got Mrs. Evans and Mr. Hughes today. Surely you haven’t finished already.” I noticed she didn’t mention Mr. Howard, so she’d known he was off the schedule.
    I could’ve snatched her bald-headed for letting me go out there without a clue.
    “Lurline,” I said, surprised that steam didn’t come out of my mouth at the same time. “What in the hell did you think you were doing? Did you think I wouldn’t know it was you?
Why,
is what I want to know.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was sulling up something awful. I could see it in her face, the way her prim little mouth tightened up, and hear it in