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

in the stall until the ladies’ room is empty, then I slink out and make a beeline for the sink. These days, I wash my hands after the preemptive pee, now that there’s something called H1N1, which is a virus disguised as a computer password.
    I wave my hands under the automatic soap dispenser.
    No soap.
    I wave my hand under the dispenser again, but still no soap. I go to the second, third, and fourth dispensers, waving my hands back and forth, then up and down, then around and around. Still no soap, even after the hokey pokey.
    Okay, fine, I figure I’ll do without the soap and just rinse my hands. So I wave my hands under the faucet at the fourth sink, but no water.
    You know where this is going.
    I try the third and second faucets, moving back down the line of sinks, and I end up at the first faucet, where a tiny jet of water splashes into my hand. We used to have faucets that you twisted on and off, using an anachronistic device called a knob, but those worked too well and got replaced by progress.
    Even so, the water I finally got isn’t enough to fill a thimble and I’m committed to hand rinsing, so I wave my hands under the faucet, but my water ration has expired. I use the water from my water bottle.
    Yay!
    Then I wave my dripping hands in front of the automatic dispenser to get a paper towel.
    No towels.
    I go to the second and third dispensers, but still no towels. I engage in some creative profanity and remember with a stab of longing the ancient dispenser for paper towels, which had no sensors, moving parts, or computer chips. You would see the edge of the towel and simply pull it free.
    It was all in the wrist.
    But those dispensers have gone the way of typewriters.
    Which is what we had before laptops that crash.

You Can’t Touch This
    By Lisa
    Here’s what happened to me, last weekend. I’d just finished the draft of my next book, which left me with nothing to do and a residual feeling that I should still be productive. I’d been working on the same book for a year, and even so, wasn’t ready for it to end, even after I’d typed:
    The End.
    Please tell me this happens to you, no matter what you do. That once you’ve been working full-tilt, it’s hard to bring it to an abrupt halt. It’s not that those of us similarly afflicted are Type A, because we’re too nice for that. I prefer to think of us as adorable cartoon characters like Wile E. Coyote, who keep running in the air after there’s no more cliff.
    Meep meep!
    Either way, when I finally finished working, I noticed some scuffmarks on the walls of my entrance hall and I couldn’t forget them. I kept looking at them, and though I wanted to relax, sitting down in my favorite chair to read a book, the scuffmarks stayed in the back of my mind. I remember when the back of my mind used to be occupied by men, but in recent years, they’ve have been replaced by carbohydrates.
    And, now, scuffmarks.
    Five scuffmarks in all, covering the wall in the entrance hall, and God knows how they got there. They bugged me, though I’d never noticed them before. It struck me that scuffmarks shouldn’t be the first thing people see when they walk into my house, even though nobody is walking into my house.
    And under the scuffmarks, I noticed a line of paw prints. You don’t have to be a mystery writer to know how they got there. Little Tony, my Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who thinks he’s Little Tony Soprano, protects me by resting his dirty mitts on the wall and barking at the window. And whenever I leave the house, Peach, my other Cavalier, body-slams the door.
    Plus I detected a generalized griminess around the baseboards that I couldn’t ignore. That would be from Ruby The Crazy Corgi, who rolls against the wall like a hotdog on a rotisserie.
    I should have been picking up the nice thick book I’d wanted to read. It was going to be my reward for the nice thick book I’d just written.
    That, and lots of carbohydrates.
    But no, instead I went to the