Free Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) by Lisa Scottoline, Francesca Serritella

choose their fate.
    This mitigated my guilt, but I still hated having traps, period. Pip is unfazed by rodent activity but highly alert to peanut butter activity, so he was whining behind the baby gate I’d put up to bar him from the booby-trapped kitchen.
    I couldn’t just sit and wait. My apartment was clean, but I started cleaning anyway, and the more I cleaned, the more convinced I became that everything was dirty. Every place was a new place touched by mouse feet.
    My neighbor told me that mice hate the smell of Irish Spring soap, so I bought three bars, peeled them with my vegetable peeler, and sprinkled the soap shavings all over my bedroom, at the back of my drawers, around the laundry bin, in the corners of my closet.
    It smelled like a teenage boy exploded in my bedroom.
    Then a friend on Facebook told me that mice hate the smell of crushed mint, so I bought fresh mint and made a mint moat around my bed. Within hours, it had wilted and dried out, so it looked like I was composting on my bedroom floor.
    Then I read online that you must use 100 percent oil of peppermint. It said to apply it with a cotton ball. In retrospect, this direction probably indicated that I should use it sparingly, but I got carried away. When I was finished, my bedroom smelled like a candy-cane factory.
    God knows if it’s keeping the mice out, but at least my sinuses are clear.
    That night, I tried to go to sleep in my Irish peppermint wonderland, but at every tiny sound, my body would go rigid, my mind hyper-alert, waiting for proof of mice. So despite the October chill, I turned on my rattling air conditioner, shoved cotton in my ears, and pulled a pillow over my head. Finally, I fell asleep and dreamt of a handsome Irish lad working in Santa’s workshop.
    Later, I awoke to a clicking sound. I reached for my glasses on the nightstand and slowly raised them to my face.
    My worst nightmare was brought into focus:
    A mouse, chomping on my baseboard.
    It’s on.

Pilgrim’s Progress
    By Lisa
    There is such a thing as too much progress. The proof is what happened to me the other day at the airport.
    Before boarding, I make a quick trip to the ladies’ room. Every woman of a certain age knows what I’m talking about. Whether we need to or not, we’re going to the bathroom, just in case we need to in the foreseeable future, which is defined as the next fifteen minutes.
    I’m talking about the preemptive pee.
    This is similar to our equally adorable habit of carrying a water bottle everywhere, because it’s important to stay hydrated at all times. It goes without saying that the water bottle and the preemptive pee are related, but that’s not the point herein.
    The point is that the ladies’ bathroom is now fully automatic, which is a sure sign of progress. The world has gotten so damn smart that the toilet knows when to flush, the soap knows when to squirt, the water knows when to turn on, and the paper towel knows when to dispense.
    In theory.
    I go into the stall and do my thing, but when I get up, the toilet doesn’t flush. I sit up and down, twice, but it still doesn’t flush. I wiggle my tush in front of the sensor and nothing happens. Well, maybe the sensor covers its eyes or throws up, but the toilet still doesn’t flush and I’m done exercising for the day.
    I press the red button, then hit it with my hand. Still, nothing. You would think I’d give up, but I don’t want to be the woman emerging from the stall with an unflushed toilet. Guaranteed I’ll run into someone who either reads my books or, more likely, remembers me from French II in high school.
    Bonjour!
    And you know the first thing she’ll tell everybody at the next reunion.
    Scottoline is a pig.
    So I sit in the stall, wishing for a toilet handle that worked the old-fashioned, mechanical way. In other words, always.
    But no.
    Because now we can make toilets that flush automatically, so we do, proving that not every improvement improves anything.
    So I wait