Down on Love by Jayne Denker Read Free Book Online

Maybe, George thought, that could change now they were adults. But then again . . . one look at Sera’s hard eyes staring at her and she wasn’t so sure she could pull it off.
    “What?” George said, peering at her sister over the screen of her laptop. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
    “Do you ever put that thing down?”
    “What . . . my computer?”
    “Duh.”
    “Leave her alone, Sera,” Jaz murmured.
    Good ol’ Jaz. She always had her back. Of course, Sera was having none of it.
    “You think you’re going to be attached to your computer twenty-four hours a day? Because I’ve got news for you—Amelia won’t let that happen.”
    George softened what would have come out as an aggravated growl if she’d let it, turned it into a sigh. “No, not twenty-four hours a day. But I do have things to do on my blog every day.”
    “Weird way to waste time.”
    Waste time?! George bristled. “I’m not ‘wasting time.’ This is how I make my living.”
    Sera smirked, clearly skeptical. “Hardly the same as that job you quit last year.”
    “I didn’t quit. I was ‘downsized.’”
    “And you stayed unemployed. Because Thom told you to.”
    George knew what Sera was getting at. She’d had a job at a pretty important ad agency, as a copywriter. Trouble was, it was hardly Mad Men. In fact, it was damned boring, her days filled with the senseless efforts of trying to write something clever that would convince the widget-deprived they needed to buy more widgets. When the downsizing news came through, George was sort of frightened, but sort of excited at the same time—finally she was going to have the freedom to find another job, one that had to be more interesting than the last one. But then Thom had suggested she stay home and he’d “take care of her” so she “wouldn’t have to run herself ragged” commuting and taking care of all the homemaking tasks as well (because somehow Thom got out of pitching in on the whole chores-and-errands thing by wailing that his job was more important than hers).
    She’d found herself agreeing to the change, with reservations, which turned out to be prophetic. Sure, she didn’t have to go out to a job, but it turned her into a housekeeper—an unpaid one. And it put the last nail in the coffin of her isolation. She’d hated it. After five months of nothing but cooking and cleaning, she’d started looking for another job, but Thom had always found fault with every one she bookmarked on the career sites—long hours, too far away, not really her field, beneath her, etc.
    “I can’t believe tossing up a post or two about how awful your boyfriend was gets you an income,” Sera scoffed.
    George had never expected to find her calling online, of course. And now she had to defend it to her sister, who just didn’t get it—or refused to try. George opened her mouth to speak, but Jaz got there first.
    “Are you kidding? This little girl makes hurting people laugh. That’s good therapy. Not to mention she gives great advice if somebody asks for it.”
    “You read her blog?” Sera asked, shocked.
    “All the time.”
    George turned to Jaz. “Thank you, Mrs. Down-Montgomery. I like you a whole lot better than my real sister. Just wanted you to know.”
    “Right,” Sera said with a punctuating snort. “She’s a regular Dear Abby.”
    “I don’t do that a lot,” George demurred. “And if somebody writes to me with a major problem, like they’re being abused, I give them the names and numbers of agencies and professionals to contact. I’m not qualified to counsel them and I know it. I don’t overreach.” She frowned, confused at her sister’s strong negative reaction to her livelihood. “Look, my blog is meant to be fun, and it helps people. I enjoy it. Why do you have such a problem with it—and you haven’t even read it?”
    “Some people have real lives and real problems,” Sera said, lifting Amelia out of her high chair. “And real