Lydia Read Online Free

was good and slathered, Roger wiped it back and forth over the shiny pig.
    “You think that mop is new?” I asked.
    Honor opened her door. “This is going to be a hoot.”
    I repeated what I had said earlier. “Are you sure?”
    As the females unloaded, I sat watching the front door of the house where I had grown up. “You guys go ahead. I have an errand.”
    Gilia stopped unlatching Esther’s child seat. “What kind of errand?”
    “I should run into Jackson for potato chips. This is a bunch of people, it would be a shame to run out of potato chips.”
    Not one of the five women bought the gig. Even Esther knew I was lying through my teeth.
    “What’s your husband up to?” Eden asked Gilia.
    “I’ve found you save a whole lot of time if you don’t try to figure that out,” Gilia said.
    As the pregnant girls huffed their way out of the van, Gilia came around to the driver’s-side window. She leaned in and kissed me on the tip of my nose.
    “The tires are okay,” she said.
    “I could have done better.”
    “Listen to me.” I listened. “Your mother will take all the guilt you have to give. Don’t waste any on this.”
    ***
    The whiny kid banged on the bathroom door again, but Shannon ignored him. He could just go piss on a bush like everyone else in Wyoming. The whole state thought nature was one big commode, the way they acted. The kid would have to find a way, if it was the emergency he claimed it was.
    Shannon was sitting on the toilet in Lydia’s cabin with her head down between her knees, trying to sniff her crotch. She knew Tanner had only been trying to hurt her, he probably said the same thing to every woman who had the gall to split up with him. She knew he was lying. And yet, the seeds of insecurity had taken root.
    Why did men have to go and wreck whatever good memories were left when a relationship ended? That was the eternal question. She and Tanner had been close once—two months ago—so close it was hard to conceive of being apart. They laughed together. They talked all night and held hands in public. There had been deep trust, and now, simply because she wasn’t in love with him, Tanner was smashing every warm moment from the past. You only hate the ones you sleep with. Shannon suspected this was a Southern attitude. Californians didn’t automatically hate everyone they stopped having sex with.
    She sniffed again, exploring for rankness. Fish. Sweat socks. She’d read people can’t smell their own body odors, which is why some people get into crowded elevators smelling like week-old roadkill. Deodorant companies spend millions of dollars on advertising for the sole purpose of making us paranoid. Shannon considered this inhumane, right up there with clubbing baby seals. The world is ridiculous enough without commercially caused anxiety.
    The kid banged the door. “I gotta go.”
    “Stick it in a jar.”
    The kid kicked the door.
    Shannon gave it up. There was no way to tell if she smelled, and no one she could ask. She stood, pulled up her panties and jeans, and crossed to the mirror to study her face for signs that she was turning twenty-nine in August.
    The trip out from Carolina had been a royal pain in the butt. From Atlanta to Salt Lake, she was trapped next to a man whose stomach gurgled. He pretended it was her making all the racket, like a kid in third grade who farts, then blames the girl sitting in front of him, minding her own business. The other passengers believed him.
    Then, from Salt Lake to Jackson Hole, it was a woman reading—out loud—from a book called Attacks of the Grizzly . “Listen to this, way back in 1923, two cowboys on horses roped a bear, and an idiot Yellowstone Park ranger rammed into the grizzly with his motorcycle.” The woman had Certs breath and leaned into Shannon as she ranted on. “The bear ripped the ranger apart and started to eat him, but one of the cowboys finally killed him. The bear. The ranger didn’t pass out or anything. Just