Live a Little by Kim Green Read Free Book Online Page B

nightmare that won’t end until somebody important gets shot for ratings.
    When I wake up, there is breakfast on a tray on my bedside table, and the room is ruddy with morning sun. My neck feels stiff, as if I dreamed too deeply to make the usual nighttime movements. I lift the platter lid, which some resourceful person has created out of an only slightly dingy hatbox, and sniff: steaming eggs crisscrossed with shredded cheddar and chives, chubby strawberries, and a fragrant sprinkling of bacon over the eggs that was probably rescued from last night’s green beans. Still, I have to give it an A for effort. I lean over the accompanying pink and yellow mottled rose and inhale deeply before drifting back into the mound of pillows. Delicious. A rose! A freakin’ rose!
    Shit, I’m dead.
    I have entered the hereafter. I must have. How else to explain the otherworldliness of my current circumstances? Breakfast in bed. Uninterrupted sleep. Absence of needy humans. Starched sheets. Quiet. Good smells. These are not things that happen to me on a regular basis.
    I wiggle my toes, wondering at the authenticity of sensation, the clarity of sight. I’d envisioned something more ephemeral, gauzy, a simulation of real life, minus the bad parts, of course. Breezy islands and starlit nights. Gentle slap of angels’ wings. Skinny jeans. Sweeping flights over the unknowing heads of my loved ones, me impishly dropping hints of my presence— a whiff of perfume here, a ghostly reflection there. Piles of M&M’s. Good books. Viggo.
    “Mom?”
    Taylor pokes her head into my afterlife bedroom. The living spend so much time enticing the dead to return to the corporeal world; nobody warns you (the dead) about them (the living) dropping by.
    “You were a wonderful daughter,” I say. I want her to think of me fondly after Phil remarries.
    “Uh, thanks, Mom. Do you need me to feed you the eggs now?”
    I breathe in the unmistakable aroma of laundry detergent, which seems to be emanating from the basket in Taylor’s arms.
    Laundry. Basket. Taylor?
    Yep. Definitely dead.
    “Everything smells so
real,
” I whisper.
    Taylor drops the basket and kneels next to me. “Mom, Dad and Micah and I talked after you went to bed, and we want you to know we’re going to do everything we can to help out right now. You have to rest, you know? You’re, like, the most important thing to us. We know you’re going to get better.” Her pretty brow puckers. “Mom, where do you keep those little bags that make the clothes smell good? I couldn’t find any, so I squeezed in just the littlest bit of that Tom’s toothpaste. It smells, like, almost the same.”
    Toothpaste. In the dryer.
    Alive. Fuuuuuck.
    I sit up. Then I instruct my daughter on the particulars of all things domestic, laundry-compliant, and lavender-scented. I eat my eggs, which have cooled under the hatbox and taste somewhat of cardboard. I read the style section in the newspaper. I worry. I try to decide if I really do have cancer after all, or if I am insane, or something infinitely worse.

CHAPTER 5
     
Night of the Living Dead
    Later, I attribute it to being one of those hell-bent days. Every mom has them. The kind of days when you’re in and out of the minivan a dozen times before noon, strangling on the seat belt, racing from school to market to soccer field, flinging a batch of snickerdoodles in the oven, forgetting to set the timer, burning the batch and (unsuccessfully) substituting corn syrup for the goddamn depleted sugar when you have to mix a second batch, dropping the dog off at the vet and discovering it’s the wrong dog, returning home to find you left the garage door open and the tandem bike’s gone, stolen by some neglected neighborhood rich kid or flinty-eyed gardener, forgetting you told Carla Bonafacio you’d water her hydrangeas while they were in Puerto Vallarta, discovering said hydrangeas lifeless with heat, accidentally taping over Phil’s ’Niners match, thereby