Free 2 Double Dip by Gretchen Archer Page B

wreck. The whole place was an obstacle course of furniture clusters and box towers packed by the 777 Movers. The first box I opened contained these things: a dish towel, three screwdrivers, an empty shampoo bottle, a television remote, a lone lawyer shoe of Bradley’s, hardback books, a potato smasher I’d never seen before, and his-and-hers clothes. All of it beneath an emerald green water-balloon bra that had been splayed across the top. Very funny.
    My living quarters have always included an assortment of hand-me-downs and mix-and-match Ralph Lauren florals, overstuffed everything, and homey touches, like quilts and antiques scattered here and there. I’ve always been surrounded by, and not so much by choice as by birthright, more than a few ruffley things, almost all monogrammed. Bradley’s spaces, before us, were traditionally more mahogany, glass, and stainless-steel, with a general color theme of chocolate. There was no middle ground between dark contemporary and cabbage-rose yard sale that we could come up with. So, with both of us snowed under at work all the time, we hired a decorator. She’d used the words “soft palette” often, which, I could see now, translated to “stark-raving white like the pure-driven snow.” Had we signed off on all of this?
    The condo itself was the stuff of decorator magazines—travertine floors, granite, inlaid mosaics, built-in this and thats, a screened and shuttered terrace (no view of the ocean) on one side, an open liana (view of the ocean) on the other, and even a butler’s pantry. A butler, we did not have. We did, however, have two guest rooms, a total of four powder-your-nose rooms, and the master bedroom was a master piece. It was large enough to hold four beds, had his-and-hers closets and dressing-rooms separated by a showplace of a marbley bath, and it all spilled into a step-down den-entertainment-office corner with a full Gulf view.
    We chose it for two reasons: the private elevator, and Bradley picked it up for a song on the courthouse steps at a short-sell auction after the owner (surprise, surprise) gambled away his oil-rig business. I don’t pretend to know what all that involved. We loved it empty, paid no more for it than a starter home, and signed on each of the four hundred lines the nice lady told us to. There weren’t many condos in Biloxi, certainly not many new and spiffy choices (think post-Katrina), and everything else we’d looked at had neighbors I couldn’t be neighbors with and stay anonymous at the same time. There were Bellissimo department heads up and down the beach, and I cared very little about sneaking in and out of my own home so no one would make me.
    I fell onto the circular sofa, a hundred-thousand marshmallows, and felt like I was getting it dirty. It would take my sister, who was a wizard in the taste-style-transformation department, to make this space livable.
    Digging into a second box total strangers had packed willy-nilly, I found a fleece blanket that smelled comfortingly like our old place. I found a pillow in the fifth box I opened, along with a tea kettle (I’ve never had a cup of tea in my life, and I’d bet the same was true of Bradley Cole) and a lampshade. Making my way to the masterpiece, I heard an unfamiliar trilling sound. It was my purse. Digging, I located the source: the burn phone. Mr. Microphone was calling me. Or should I say Mr. Maffini. To get to the noise, I’d passed an unfamiliar bulky drug-store bag. Handwritten on the front were the words Housewarming Gift! in Fantasy’s handwriting. Inside, a home-pregnancy test.
    I didn’t take Mr. Microphone’s call for a number of reasons, the main one being I opened the door to the dark masterpiece bedroom and was assaulted by an odor so horrific the only thing it could be was a big dead body and I was too tired to deal with a big dead body. I backed out, pulled the door to, and slept on the marshmallow sofa with the fleece blanket that smelled like