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moaned, chewing slowly to fully savor the experience.
    “How long has it been since you’ve had one of those?” Joe asked, and she opened her eyes to find him watching her.
    Keri swallowed, already anticipating the next bite. “Years. Too many years.”
    He laughed at her, and they enjoyed some idle chit-chat while they ate. She brought up the movie and he talked about it in a generic sense, but she noted how careful he was not to say anything even remotely interview worthy.
    There would be no tricking the man into revealing something that would get Tina off her back.
    “You know,” she said, still holding half her cheeseburger, “I really want to enjoy this meal more, and I can’t with this hanging over my head. What’s it going to take?”
    “I gave it some thought before I came, and I think you should come with me.”
    “Where?”
    “To where I’m going.”
    Keri set the cheeseburger on the plate. “For two weeks?”
    The length of time hardly mattered, since she couldn’t return to California without the interview anyway. But she’d like an idea of what she was signing up for.
    “Whether you’re there for two weeks or not is up to you. For each full day you stick it out with the Kowalskis, you get to ask me one question.”
    Keri, unlike Joe, did have a poker face and she made sure it was in place while she turned his words over in her head. “When you say the Kowalskis, you mean…”
    “The entire family.” The dimples were about as pronounced as she’d ever seen them. “Every one of them.”
    Her first thought was oh shit . Her second, to wonder if People was hiring.
    Joe reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded sheet of spiral notebook paper. “Here’s a list of things you’ll need. I jotted it down in the parking lot.”
    Keri unfolded the paper and read the list twice, trying to get a sense of what she was in for.
    BRING: Bug spray; jeans; T-shirts; several sweatshirts, at least one with a hood; one flannel shirt (mandatory); pajamas (optional); underwear (also optional); bathing suit (preferably skimpy); more bug spray; sneakers; waterproof boots; good socks; sunscreen; two rolls of quarters.
    DO NOT BRING: cell phone; Blackberry; laptop; camera, either still or video; alarm clock; voice recorder; any other kind of electronic anything.
    She had no clue what it meant, other than Joe wanting her half-naked and unable to text for help.





Chapter Two
    The first day of the annual family vacation was always hell for Terry Kowalski Porter. Her twelve days of fun and relaxation were book-ended by two days of wanting to throw herself under a speeding RV.
    The convoy of Kowalskis usually managed to make it up the interstate and across Route 3 in a somewhat organized fashion, but as soon as they entered the campground they scattered, leaving Terry to run her ass off helping everybody get settled in.
    First, her parents, because their forty-foot luxury liner on wheels brought all campground activity to a screeching halt until it was docked. Leo Kowalski refused to let anybody else drive the baby his son had bought him, so Terry’s main purpose was keeping her impatient brothers on a tight leash while Dad executed a precision eighty-point turn to back it in to their site.
    Then came landing pads, leveling and sewer pipes. Water hoses and electrical connections. They had the routine pretty much down by this point, but heaven forbid Leo and Mary Kowalski not have drama.
    “That seem level to you, Mary?” One thing about their parents, they were loud .
    “I’m inside, Leo! How would I know?”
    “Are you listing to the left?”
    Next came her middle brother Mike and his family, who needed three adjoining sites for their sprawl. The first site held their RV—a much smaller one than their parents’—in which Mike, Lisa and their two youngest boys slept. The site also held a multi-burnered barbecue grill-slash-cooking center so massive it took all three brothers plus the