Free Yours, Mine, and Ours by MaryJanice Davidson

the explanation was sitting on my kitchen table. I always got all the gory details of Shiro’s assault shenanigans; if I occasionally woke up with a black eye or a cast, she at least kept me in the loop. Puffy skin around one eye hardly rated as an injury.
    Ah, the old saying: a day without a trip to the ER is a day without sunshine. Ha!
    Okay.
    Okay, then. Shiro had been driving our body for several hours. It could have been so much worse. (It had been so much worse.)
    Curious, I checked the fridge. I usually did that when I knew I should be hungry but was really, really full instead. There was a sizable doggy bag on the first shelf. The Oceanaire Seafood Room. Only the best place in the Twin Cities to get fresh seafood. Jeepers Louise, we couldn’t afford that on our salary! Ah … but I knew who could.
    Shiro had sure been busy, which I expected. But what was this? Everything was expected, except the trip to a wonderful expensive restaurant. She must have gone with someone; she’d never go alone. In fact, most of her meals were at sushi bars or bolted over our kitchen sink.
    Okay! Shiro had kept my date with Patrick. I would rather have gone myself, but if I couldn’t, I hoped Shiro had had a good time driving my body. Sometimes I hated having to share it. But sometimes, I was glad when another piece of me could have a little nondestructive fun.
    Bemused, I went back to bed.

 
     
    chapter twenty-six
     
    In the morning I sat down in a Perkins to have breakfast with my best friend, Cathie Flannery. She’d gotten there first, which was unusual. What she was doing wasn’t.
    “Agh, what are you doing? Stop it.” I flopped down into the bench across from her. “Leave that stuff alone.”
    “Back off, triple threat.” Cathie suffered from OCD, among other things. In the five minutes or so before I’d arrived, she had alphabetized everything on the table, then laid it all in a straight line (still alphabetized, remember). F is for fork. S is for salt; it’s also for Splenda, which was right next to it. And, at the end of the line, W is for water glass.
    “Give me that. I was thirsty all the way over.” I liberated the water glass from the line of OCD tyranny and gulped noisily. Shiro must have had a lot of plum wine last night—I’d woken up wanting to drink the world.
    My friend had bright red hair and freckles (not a huge shock for someone named Flannery), was teeny—she barely came up to my chin—and whip slender. And she had the vitality of a dozen people. This is a terrible thing to say about a best friend, but I sometimes found hanging around with her to be exhausting. I’m not even going to say how Shiro felt about it.
    We’d met, years ago, at the MIMH (Minneapolis Institute of Mental Health). She was there because she was a disturbingly enthusiastic cutter. Her folks thought it was a suicide attempt. Unfortunately, they were old school: ignore anything that could lead to years of therapy. Don’t talk about it. And get rid of the problem. And deny, deny, deny.
    So they’d institutionalized her. And when we got to talking after a T-group session, we found we were really interested in what the other went through. She was amazed that I lived at MIMH. And more so when I told her I’d been conceived there, too. And I was amazed that “normal” parents could do that to their own child.
    Anyway, we’d liked each other straightaway. Neither of us was in any position to judge the other, so the only other options were to ignore each other, be friends, or be enemies. We liked the middle choice, and went with it.
    Now, years later, I was dating her brother and she was the only family I could remember. Given what my mom did to my dad
    (look out look out look out look out PLEASE DADDY LOOK OUT)
    that was a sizable blessing.
    I greeted the waitress, who looked at the odd table arrangement but had no comment (one of the many reasons we liked it here) and ordered the usual: pancakes with extra butter and