Free The Next Big Thing by Johanna Edwards Page A

brother.” I stared at her. “You’re completely drunk. I can’t believe I’m bothering to ask you for advice.”
    “No, no! I’m fine Kat, I’m perfectly fine.” I pulled the bottle of wine over toward my side of the table, tucking it safely out of Donna’s reach. “Good thing I’m driving,” I said.
    Donna smiled. “I do.”
    “I do?” I repeated.
    “I do think Nicholas J. Appleby sounds like something out of a Charles Dickens novel.”

             
     
    Chapter Six
     
    “My head is throbbing.” Donna rubbed her temple for emphasis.
    “Serves you right,” I scolded. “You only drank a ton of wine last night.” I poured her a cup of coffee. “Have this. It’ll make you feel better.”
    She took the cup from my hands and staggered back to her desk, making a face at me as she went. I trotted over to my cubicle and began compiling data on Mercer and Sons Funeral Home, but every time the phone rang, I jumped a mile. I was still hoping Zaidee would contact me. I tried to keep my calls short and simple, though twice I got stuck on the line; the first time talking to a client about a press release, the second time talking to my dad.
    “Hello, Katrina!” he yelled, nearly blasting my ear off. Ever since moving to Denver, my father has become a shouter over the telephone. The idea that I am still able to hear him loud and clear even though he is now a thousand miles away has never quite sunk in.
    “How’s my favorite daughter?” he boomed.
    “I’m doing well, how are you and Mom?”
    “Homesick,” he griped. “Your mom can’t stop talking about Memphis. Me, I just miss the barbecue.”
    “Well, Memphis misses you,” I said, feeling like a first-class dork.
    “Your mother was looking on the World Wide Web today,” he said.
    My father is the only person I know who still calls it the World Wide Web.
    “And she found a cyber savers flight from Denver to Memphis. You know what cyber savers is, Katrina?”
    “Yes, I do,” I said, eyeing the clock. Zaidee could be trying to get through to me right this second. We have call waiting, but I don’t trust it in a pinch.
    “They do special deals where you can take a weekend trip for next to nothing. We can go round-trip for ninety-nine dollars on Northwest Airlines. Sound good?”
    I blinked in surprise. “Dad, you’ve lost me.”
    I could hear my mother shouting in the background, taking him to task for not giving me the full details. “Right, right,” he said. “Your mom and I were thinking we’d like to take a weekend trip out to Memphis—Saturday to Tuesday. Are you free this weekend?”
    It seemed a cruel irony that everyone was plotting to show up on my doorstep this Saturday. I weighed my options. If I told him no, my mom would get on the phone and hit me with a major guilt trip. I am, after all, their only child. And they aren’t getting any younger. All they want to do is come and visit me. Couldn’t I spare three days out of my busy schedule? But if, on the other hand, I said yes, they’d inevitably want to stay at my place.
    A mental image flashed through my mind: my dad, decked out in a pair of tacky boxer shorts with flounders on them, swinging open my front door and welcoming Nick inside. “Always nice to meet Katrina’s boyfriend,” he’d say, slapping him on the back. “You talk kinda funny. Where are you from? Connecticut?”
    No, it couldn’t happen.
    “Gee, Dad, that sounds awesome, there’s just one problem.” I crossed my fingers behind my back, and prayed for forgiveness. “They’re fumigating my apartment this weekend,” I said, capitalizing on my conversation with Donna.
    “Fumigating? What’s the problem?”
    “Roaches.”
    “Roaches!” I heard my mother scream.
    She had picked up the extension. “Kat, you’ve got to go to a hotel. You can’t stay there while they spray those chemicals. I saw a special on Dateline the other day about a girl who died from staying home while her