Free Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter

was the last thing she barked into my machine.
    That was the last thing I intended to do.
    For the past three years, I’d managed to avoid Aunt Mo when I was back in Minnesota, by planning my visits around her annual Winnebago pilgrimage to the birthplace of Senator Joe McCarthy. But this was trickier. She was on my turf.
    Very quickly, I devised my strategy. Avoid Aunt Maureen at all costs. If I absolutely had to see her, do it near the end of her visit, in the company of complete strangers, to minimize the risk of psychological trauma.
    The odd thing was, I had been thinking I could use a little more contact with Christianity so I could get a refresher course in forgiveness and tolerance and things of that nature. As the old warning goes, be careful what you pray for, you might just get it. What I got was a whole lot of Christianity, in the form of Aunt Maureen, who wasn’t a real fun or forgiving sort of Christian.
    I suddenly felt extremely pessimistic. It certainly did seem as though the planets were aligning against me. Kanengiser, Aunt Mo, Jerry Spurdle, Detective Bigger … but then I told myself, these are not the jackbooted forces of the cosmos converging on my house to kick the shit out of me. These are challenges, tests that separate the women from the girls.
    â€œHell, we gotta look on the bright side,” I said to Louise Bryant, who, after eating enough to choke a bear, had climbed into my lap so I could massage her into a state of bliss no human could possibly achieve.
    â€œThe bright side,” I whispered again to her, stroking her velvety gray ears.
    Sure, I had alienated several segments of the funeral-services industry while working on the death series. Shit happens.
    Yes, I had been divorced in an ugly, humiliating, and highly publicized split from my husband, followed by an abortive six-month sexual frenzy with a younger man who had since gone to our Moscow bureau. But while I hadn’t yet figured out what went wrong in my marriage—I was still searching through the wreckage for the black box—I was out there dating, at least, back up on the horse as they say. But I wasn’t having sex yet, so I guess I was riding sidesaddle.
    Financially, I was in okay shape. Louise Bryant didn’t like her work much, but she had a career in cat food endorsement and was bringing in a tidy sum that kept her in catnip and had allowed me a couple of great vacations in the last year. (Trivia note: Louise Bryant gets ten times more fan mail than I do. The cat food company employs one whole person just to answer her fan mail.)
    All I had to do was ride out the reshuffle, and I could get back on track with the Master Plan, which was: (a) escape Jerry Spurdle/Special Reports, and (b) get back to general news and real stories.
    Aunt Mo? Well, if I was vigilant, I could avoid her.
    Kanengiser? Nothing I could do for him, poor schmuck. As the Serenity Prayer said, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” So I tried to forget about him, turning on the television and flicking through the channels— a documentary about Polish motocross drivers, a show about Hindi film, stand-up comedy—settling on the Channel 3 news. I caught the end of it, a story about a couple in Co-op City who had adopted three brothers orphaned by a car accident. I was about to turn to the Channel 7 news when I saw a promo for the tabloid show Backstreet Affair. They were on the Kanengiser story.
    â€œKinky gynecologist’s ex-wife speaks,” said the bellowing and emotive announcer.
    Backstreet Affair paid people to talk, and in exchange for a healthy check, the doctor’s second ex-wife was only too willing to go on camera in Miami and say Kanengiser was into all sorts of weird stuff. I took it the divorce had not been amicable.
    â€œHerm loved porn. The man was a sex fiend. He wanted me to watch porn with him, and he wanted to do things he saw in the movies. Once, he