Free Car Pool by Karin Kallmaker Page B

counter. A woman who looked just like the librarian at her junior high school was working there. She couldn’t just check out one book… could she? Maybe she should look for some others. But she wanted to rush right home and read this book. Hurriedly, she gathered a few mysteries she’d read a long time ago. She carefully hid the trade paperback among the other books and then waited in line at the counter. It’s the Gay Nineties, she told herself.
    When she reached the front of the line she handed the stack over and held her breath. A few moments later, the librarian handed the entire stack back with a mere “happy reading.” No significant eye contact, no disapproval.
    Gees, Andy, what did you expect? This is Berkeley, for God’s sake.
    She picked up a burger at Oscar’s on the way home, then spent the remainder of the day on the sofa. She devoured the book — she wanted more. It had been a while since she’d read any fiction for lesbians. She’d go back to the library after work on Tuesday. Heck, she could just run over to Boadecia’s Books. Just because she’d only gone there with Lois didn’t mean she couldn’t go by herself.
    Sunday was looking to be tedious, so Anthea knuckled down and cleaned. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the laundry room floor — something she hadn’t done in a year at least, and Lois’s running shoes had left black marks everywhere. She applied every ounce of pressure she
    could to the marks and realized she was scrubbing away Lois, not the black marks. Well, the black marks came off too, but every one of them was Lois. It had been too many months and Anthea finally felt as if she was free of needing Lois.
    If I had a daughter, Anthea thought, I’d give her one piece of advice: never date or sleep with anyone you meet in a support group, even after the support group is over. She’ll know too much about all your buttons. Lois, she knew, had pushed them all.
    She sat back and studied the floor. She could eat off it now. Her shoulders ached, but she was a woman with a mission.
    Anthea decided it was time for an extermination which required stamping every bit of Lois’s essence from every corner of the house for personal health and safety reasons. She’d spent nearly a half a year in a blue funk. No more moping! In addition to good old-fashioned dusting, scrubbing and vacuuming, she cleaned out the closets, organized the pots and pans, and threw away every piece of Tupperware that did not have a functional lid. She consolidated multiple cans of the same spices into one and then organized them alphabetically. Lois had said her spice rack was anal retentive and Anthea had believed her. Now she decided there was nothing wrong with organized spices, not when you cooked a lot. Her conscience reminded her that she hadn’t really cooked anything in six months.
    To her eyes, as she looked around, everything was shining and bright, almost as it had been after construction had finished. Her nose, which smelled more scents now that she smoked less, appreciated the aroma of furniture polish. She could think of the
    fire and starting over without a wrench of pain — that was thanks to the support group, just to be fair. A support group for lesbians who had lost everything in the fire had brought Lois into her life. When they had realized that Lois also worked for NOC-U, having dinner, then car pooling, then sleeping together, then living together — it had seemed like fate. Hah, Anthea thought.
    Nearly six months was long enough to recover from Lois. She’d gotten over the fire faster than that. She’d worked out the strongest of her mixed love-hate feelings about her parents in less than that. It was time to get over Lois. And, just because the house smelled so nice after she’d vacuumed the carpet freshener up, she decided she wouldn’t smoke in the house anymore. She’d only smoke outdoors. She’d been trying to quit since New Year’s … it was time to finish the