The Sunday List of Dreams by Kris Radish Read Free Book Online Page A

terribly comfortable t-shirt, makes a very large pot of coffee, tosses out the champagne bottle, and shudders when she looks around the garage.
    “Number three, I hear you,” she says out loud as she drops the bottle into the blue recycle bin and realizes that she is going to lose her mind if she doesn’t keep moving. One day on the couch has not only made her rear end sore but it’s also made her anxious. Three months is 90 days. She’s only got 89 days left.
    The last message Connie sends O’Brien via her cell phone is a tiny whimper of hopeful action.
    “I’ve got to do something,” she whines. “I’m going to start dismantling the house again and browse through my list. I’m fine, baby. Go have fun with Mr. Nice Ass. I’ll see you next week.”
    Connie goes down the hall to her room, throws on a jogging bra, a pair of black sweatpants, and a t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off that’s left over from the last breast-cancer walk, and heads for the garage.
    The garage is a formidable mess. A disgusting tangle of shit with a capital S. Mountains of boxes, some of them actually hers, are stacked against both sides and up against the old workbench on the back wall. Every single box needs to be looked through and Connie guesses there might actually be one or two items she wants to keep out of the entire collection. At least half a dozen of the boxes are Jessica’s. She’d had Macy drop them off three years ago before Jessica left for New York and for what she called “the manufacturing opportunity of a lifetime.” Jessica took off with her business degree and six years of marketing and managerial experience in her portfolio and Connie has not seen her since.
    And not much before that, either.
    Simply looking at the boxes with her oldest daughter’s name on them brings Connie to a dead stop. Her heart races. She will touch them last, when her courage is at an all-time high. She will touch them when the patron saint of hopeless causes brushes his shoulder against hers, or later in the day when everything else is finished—whichever happens first. Connie purposefully walks past Jessica’s boxes and, in a show of control, to convince herself she can do it, she kicks open the garage door and starts on the SHIT.
    And there is definitely shit. Years and years of shit that has been stacked in corners, piled on top of the totally dormant workbench, hanging from the rafters like loose ends of a life that needs to be tied together to form something new, anything new. A car has not been parked inside of the garage since…when? Maybe just before Macy got her driver’s license, before the world started turning sideways, the father left, and Jessica left, came back and then left again, so it seems, for good.
    Connie has pawed at the boxes and broken pieces of furniture on and off for months but the garage needs a serious and final assault. She knows that to get to #31—signing the final house papers—she has to purge, push, and pull. Fortified with an entire pot of coffee, more sleep than she’s had in years, and the terrific advice from the Oprah show that she watched hours ago about reorganizing your life, Connie is determined.
    By mid-afternoon she has called the local St. Vincent de Paul Store and begged for a truck to come clear away what she thinks is “most of the good stuff” and when the truck shows up the workers are not disappointed. They score a lovely but beaten dining room table, a not-so-bad floral couch, three lamps, 12 boxes of paperback books that Connie kisses good-bye right in front of them, eight bags of used female teenage clothing and six boxes of “assorted” shit that includes Halloween costumes, flower vases, mismatched glasses, and some doodads Connie thinks may have been from her ridiculous wedding.
    And the garage is still not finished.
    Connie is so proud of what she has done, so excited about almost getting number three off of her damn list, that she goes to bed early. Putting on the