Death Before Facebook by Julie Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

goes.”
    “How about the password?”
    He said something that sounded like “Skip to my Lou.”
    “Huh?”
    “I said it was embarrassing.”
    “I think it’s sweet.” Wow. Not just sweet. It was downright moving.
    “Take it down—Skip2mLu. My darlin’.”
    “Aren’t you romantic.”
    He was silent.
    “Hello?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a good question.”
    “What’s a good question? What are you talking about?”
    “We’ll talk about it later.”
    “What? We’ll talk about what later?”
    “I’m just not ready yet. I can’t talk about it now.”
    She hung up with fear at the back of her throat. It wasn’t like Steve to put her off, to say ambiguous things.
    He’s met someone else
, she thought.
    Why wouldn’t he have? There were two thousand miles between them. They couldn’t go on like this forever, and they didn’t plan to. Steve talked all the time about moving to New Orleans. He loved it, it was becoming his second home. Or so he used to say.
    And now she knew she would call Jimmy Dee. Anyway, he had a computer and she didn’t. On second thought, why call?
    She popped over.
    “Auntie!” Eleven-year-old Kenny ran for her. He was still cuddly, still a little boy.
    “That sounds sooo dumb! Why don’t you just call her Skip?” said Sheila, the thirteen-year-old.
    Kenny looked crushed.
    “Because it’s not my name. Auntie is my name.”
    “Short,” said Jimmy Dee, “for Aphrodite. Because your auntie is a goddess among women. Or, if you want to know a secret, simply a goddess. It used to be Affie, but she’s so modest she insisted on Auntie so no one would know. Keep the secret, would you, angels?”
    “Affie! Affie!” Sheila was convulsed in giggles, giggles of the most contemptuous thirteen-year-old sort. “Affie, Affie, Affie.”
    “Stay for dinner?” Jimmy Dee was keeping his tone light, but Skip saw the plea in his eyes. She needn’t have worried about intruding.
    “What are we having?”
    “To you, fettuccine quattro fromaggi. To Kenny”—he dropped a hand on the little boy’s shoulders, and Kenny smiled up at him—“macaroni and cheese. To Sheila—”
    “Pig slop.”
    “I beg your pardon, my good young lady. I bet you’ve never seen a pig in your life, much less slop.”
    “I used to ride horses,” she said, and stalked out.
    Skip said, “You know that expression ‘tossed her head’?”
    “I do it often.” He pantomimed removing his head and throwing it to Kenny, who laughed as if it were the first time he’d seen it.
    “But some people
really
do it.”
    “Come, let’s go toss a salad.”
    The kitchen was shiny as a new car and up to the nanosecond. Two teams of workmen had worked for six months to tear out the four apartments into which the gorgeous old house had been divided, and make it whole again. The kids’ mother, ill with cancer, had died in the meantime, and they’d stayed for a while with their grandparents. Skip couldn’t believe it had happened so fast, but here it was—hardwood floors, paint as fresh as a breeze, and perfect, storybook rooms for each of the kids. Jimmy Dee had hired not only decorators, but child psychologists; he had consulted mothers, dads, and kids about how to furnish the rooms, what toys to get for Kenny, what half-teen-half-kid things for Sheila. Predictably, neither had said a word on seeing their perfect new rooms.
    Later, Kenny had grudgingly admitted he liked his, and Sheila had begun to complain about hers.
    “At least she’s talking,” Jimmy Dee said.
    Skip looked at him sideways. “You’re going to wear out your cheeks trying to keep smiling.”
    “How do you get a kid to like you?”
    “Expensive gifts?”
    “Didn’t work.”
    “Time.”
    “Cut up this tomato, will you?”
    “Dee-Dee, really. Her whole world’s been turned upside down. And besides that, she’s thirteen. If she weren’t surly, she wouldn’t be normal.”
    “See this hair?” He picked up a strand of it.