Good Grief Read Online Free Page B

slow leak of crazy juice seeping into my brain. My palms sweat and my throat squeezes shut. It’s hard to talk or swallow.
    I work a splintery wedge of spanakopita down my throat as a marketing communications director tells a funny story about her Emma’s play date that morning.
    “Chocolate pudding. In her
ear
!”
    The other mothers hoot and toss back their heads. I laugh, too. But the thing is, Marion’s coming over in the morning to corral Ethan’s earthly possessions for the Great Goodwill Giveaway, and suddenly I can’t breathe.
    I lurch into the powder room, lock the door, and stand at the sink, peering into a china saucer of pumpkin-shaped soaps. Their cinnamon smell burns in my nose. I could call Marion and tell her I’m sick, but she’d drive over anyway and let herself in with her key. Stamp her little brown loafers on the front mat, roll up the sleeves of her pressed white blouse, and get to work packaging up Ethan. I’d like to get that key back from her, but I’m not sure how I’d ask, so I burrow into the medicine chest, finding baking soda toothpaste and unopened toothbrushes, then the Xanax. I have my own prescription at home—from Dr. Rupert—but I’ve taken it only once so far, preferring to rely on frozen waffles instead of pills. This
is
the guest bath and clearly the toothbrushes are for guests, so maybe the Xanax is, too. Probably not, but my throat is so tight and the air in the room is so thin.
    “What’s your number?” the hostess asks as I emerge from the bathroom.
    Why? Does she need to give it to her lawyer so he can call and sue me for stealing her drugs? I stutter out my home phone number.
    “No, silly,” she says, caressing my arm and leading me back into the crowd. “Your raffle ticket number.” I remember that when I arrived at the party, her daughter handed me a curly pink ticket, dropping its twin half in a paper bag.
    “Oh.” I dig into the pocket of my slacks, pull out the ticket, and hand it to her.
    “Read the number again,” she tells her daughter, a pretty girl with long strawberry blond hair.
    The girl reads the number, and her mother hugs me and says, “It’s
you,
Sophie. We have a winner!” She smells good and I would like for her to keep hugging me, but she pulls away, raises my arm over my head, and spins me toward the crowd. Everyone claps and I feel my face heat up. It turns out the party prize is a week’s worth of free home-delivered meals from Waiters on Wheels. If anyone sees the irony in the fact that it’s “dinner for two,” they don’t let on.
    At home, even though my brain is a dim wad of Xanax and red wine, I can’t sleep. I miss having Ethan to gossip with about the party. It was kind of a mean game, but sometimes we’d play Who am I?, imitating the guests.
    I sit up in bed with a family pack of Oreo cookies, twisting them open and licking the cream filling until my tongue feels raw. The walls around me creak and sigh, as if the empty house can’t settle down and get comfortable. I stack the cookie shells on the clock radio, then get to work on the pile, chewing and swallowing without pleasure until I can’t really taste the chocolate anymore—until the cookies begin to seem more utilitarian than sweet, more like glue or caulking that welds things back together.
    I dig two, four, six more cookies from the family pack, noting that in a
normal
family, each person would eat maybe four. I chew and chew until my gums burn and my head tingles from the sugar. Sandy crumbs spray the sheets, and chocolate collects in the corners of my mouth like potting soil.
    It’s morning and I’m dreaming that I’m getting up and then I’m down again and then I’m trying to lift my head and arms but they are as heavy as logs and then I’m underwater and then I am not underwater, I’m just perspiring under this quilt, which is like a lead blanket. Finally I’m awake. My mouth is filled with moss. No, that is my tongue caked with cookie sludge. A