Free Crash Diet by Jill McCorkle

probably be sitting in the living room of that condo with those long legs stretched out on the coffee table and he’d be wearing nothing but some bathing trunks, letting the kitchen burn down, while he drew up a plan of how I could slip a little money every now and then. Embezzle is the word and I’d put my body on the street before I ever did that. I’ve got Larrette to think of but would he have ever thought of Larrette as something other than a Frisbee fetcher? No, no way. “I am not a dog,” I told him when he’d say, “Honey, can you reach that Frisbee?” and that Frisbee about a hundred feet from where I was sitting. “If I had a rubber arm,” I’d say.
    I’d like for somebody to run my business. It isn’t that I’m not into liberation. God knows, you can just look at me and know that I am; you can know by my credit cards in my wallet, Visa, Ivey’s, and Texaco. But still, it would be so nice to have somebody run my business, somebody who would say, “Now, honey, look here. You just thought you threw out your W-2 and here it is right under this stack of Christmas cards that you forgot to open.” Take Earl Taylor, for example.
    “I’d rather not,” Eleanore always says when I say that. Eleanore is a teacher’s aide in the elementary school and that has slowed her thoughts down some, though she’s real good with Larrette. She was the first one to get Larrette to say kitty and to learn to meow.
    Eleanore goes with a man who already has a wife, so she can’t really talk much. She only gets to see him every now and then at the Ramada Inn in Apex. She thinks he’s going to leave that wife that drives a mini-van and heads up Easter Seals every year, and those two babies and that house that looks like a little fairy cottage out in a nice part of town for her. She likes for me to get in my car and drive her by that house late at night and she’ll say things like, “Yep, TV’s on. I knew he’d be watching TV. I know that man like the back of my hand. He’s sitting up late watching the TV so he doesn’t have to get in the bed with her .” Eleanore doesn’t know any better. She’s two years older than me, thirty-one, but she doesn’t know a bit better.She hasn’t had life’s lessons taught to her like I did staying in Fuquay with Larry Cross. I shouldn’t encourage that. I shouldn’t even drive her past that house for her to fill her head with stories, but sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes we say we’re going to disguise ourselves in case a cop should pull us over right there in front of that house, so I put on some sunglasses and tie a scarf to my head and I must admit that I like to do that because it makes me feel like I look a little like Susan Hayward and so I say things like “I Want to Live!” or “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain!” or “Let’s ride on ‘Back Street’!” and Eleanore will take it in her head that if she wears a gingham shirt and sunglasses that she looks like Doris Day and she will say, “Lover Come Back!” and “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?” We have some fun times, me and Eleanore, and we always have, but then I have to get serious.
    “Eleanore, you might as well look elsewhere,” I say, and she rolls those big blue eyes that are common among us Dummers (her mama was a Dummer) like I might be a little breeze whistling past her ear. You can’t tell her.
    “I don’t know what you see in Earl Taylor,” she says. “Earl Taylor is a little nerd.” I can see where she gets that. I can. To somebody who doesn’t know Earl Taylor like I know him, he might look that way because of the way his hair is so thin and weak-looking and those glasses that he has to wear. But Earl is smart and that’s how he looks. He looks like somebody that can handle figures and money. Now, he doesn’t make a bed slope way off to one side orcreak and groan like Larry Cross did, and he doesn’t make me creak and groan like Larry Cross did. As a matter of fact, Earl