* * *
Keely McBride rolled over, punched her pillow, flopped her head down once more, moaning in mingled mental agony and frustration. She couldn’t sleep. She might never sleep again. Ever.
How did insomniacs do it? Why hadn’t they all just said the heck with this baloney, killed themselves, and gotten it over with? What did people do all night long, when they couldn’t sleep? Count sheep? Ridiculous. Besides, it didn’t work. Keely knew, because she’d tried it.
The portable television set in her bedroom hadn’t helped either, even though she’d kept it on until two in the morning, watching infomercials, then a “Gilligan’s Island” rerun that had never been one of her favorites. Nothing. Not even one heavy, drooping eyelid.
In fact, if she got any more wide awake, she could stop wasting time and go re-shingle the roof or something.
She was just too nervous to sleep, too scared. She had one shot, just one, and it was coming with one Sadie Trehan and the next sunrise. How was she supposed to sleep? Giving up on what had been a bad idea from the moment she’d crawled into bed some six hours earlier, Keely tossed back the covers and headed toward the bathroom to take a shower.
It wasn’t as if the running water would wake anyone else in the house, because there wasn’t anyone else in the house. She was alone. All alone. Aunt Mary didn’t have any living houseplants, let alone a tabby cat or nervous lapdog to keep her niece company while the older woman was off honeymooning in Greece. You’d think one’s only aunt would have more consideration, damn it, because Keely could do with a purring cat or a yapping dog. She’d settle for a hamster and its squeaky wheel—anything to break the silence, anything she could talk to, complain to. Bitch to.
Keely had a lot of bitching to do.
For starters, she was in Allentown—back in Allentown—because her fledgling interior design business in Manhattan had gone belly-up only fifteen months after she’d first opened the doors.
How Keely hated to fail, especially when her one and only lover had so smugly declared “You’ll never make it without me” when she’d left his bed, his employ, and set out to buck the odds that 70 percent of all new businesses fail in the first two years.
God, how she hated statistics, being a statistic. Almost as much as she’d hated Gregory Fontaine—which she didn’t anymore, because to hate somebody you’d actually have had to have liked him at some point—and she’d figured out that there had been nothing likable about Gregory Fontaine.
He was handsome, sure. And successful. And he’d hired her straight out of college, the ink on her diploma still wet (and her only work reference from Aunt Mary, who anybody with even a pea for a brain would know had to have given a glowing recommendation, even if Keely had been the worst interior designer since the first jerk had hung a moose head on his den wall).
Ah, yes, Gregory Fontaine. He’d been suave and debonair and dined in all the right restaurants and knew the right people and could quote lines from every Neil Simon play. He also bit his toenails. Keely liked to remember that Gregory Fontaine bit his toenails. It was so vindicating.
Keely stood under the stinging spray, her head bowed so that her honey blond hair turned darkly golden. She poured shampoo into her hand and worked up a thick, creamy lather in her hair, trying to wash away any bad thoughts.
It didn’t work. It never did. She never felt more awake, aware, or alive just because she’d washed her hair. She certainly had never had an orgasm courtesy of some nature-smelling shampoo.
There was so much of life she’d missed out on. Spraying room deodorizer had never turned her living room into a flower garden. Toothpaste had never put a blinking, diamondlike starburst in her smile. No genie had ever popped out of her all–purpose cleanser bottle and danced her around her sparkling-clean kitchen. And as for her sex life? Hell, nobody had “validated her tires” since she’d waved Gregory Fontaine ta-ta eighteen months ago.
Her life was one huge downward spiral, that’s what it was. Business, gone. Manhattan apartment, gone. Future, gone. Love life? Hell, it hadn’t been that good, but that, too, was gone. Way gone.
Here she was, back in Allentown, back to her roots, back to the beginning, to the same bedroom at Aunt Mary’s she’d slept in while growing up, dreaming of getting “out.” She had not passed Go, and she sure hadn’t collected any money. If it weren’t for Aunt Mary, she’d pretty much be on the streets, or selling furniture in some shopping mall department store for nine bucks an hour and every third Saturday off.
“So, okay,” Keely told herself—and maybe the towel rack, or the toilet, or anything that might be listening—“maybe I have had one piece of good luck. Aunt Mary’s in Greece, billing and cooing until late August, and I’m running the shop. I’m even getting fifty percent of any commissions. This is not bad. This is not nirvana, granted, but this is not bad. So lighten up, McBride. Brush your not-quite-diamond-white teeth, figure out what you’re going to wear, and get ready to dazzle your new big customer in...” she walked back into the bedroom, wrapped in a towel, “... precisely seven hours. Oh God, what do I do for the next seven hours?”