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“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 slight
ly 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.”
