Free Linny's Sweet Dream List by Susan Schild

Roy Boy. At least you love me.”
    The fairy postman must have visited the trailer while she was gone. Linny glanced curiously at the flowers and mail sitting on her porch. Pulling a yellow envelope from under the doormat, she read her mother’s spidery scrawl. Thought you could use these.
    Inside was a paper clipped bundle. Linny smiled as she riffled through the coupons for dog food and chew treats. Kate must have told her about Roy. Her smile faded when she came to the last few—discounts for Slim Fast protein shakes, fat-free Melba toast rounds, and Fat Blast Off chocolate energy bars.
    Linny shook her head. She had stress eaten through the last few weeks, but it always irked her that her mother felt so free to comment on her weight; Dottie was no wood nymph herself.
    On the floor beside the door, two lushly blooming roses draped over the side of a glass jar. Tucked under the jar was a folded piece of purple paper.
    Linny sniffed the blooms. The roses smelled lovely. Opening the flyer, she read the note printed in a calligraphy font:

    A handwritten sticky note stuck to the flyer read, “You must be still catching your breath from the move, but please come! As you face your home, I live through the field on your left. M”
    She read it twice, intrigued. Dottie had told her a lot of professionals were moving to the sleepy, unincorporated town of Willow Hill to escape the hustle and bustle of Raleigh. Would the guests lean toward hot dogs and hamburgers, or Korean turkey burgers and cauliflower steaks?
    Re-folding the flyer, she tapped it against her knee. She was lonely out here in Podunk. Mingling with people and making new friends might be comforting. When Linny pictured running into old friends from Willow Hill, though, she fell down a deep well of self-doubt. Most of the people she’d known as a kid had moved away, but what if she ran into someone like Sarah Beth Baker? She’d heard Sarah Beth was a judge who’d married well, competed in marathons, and ran a summer camp for low-income kids. Her mother also told her that Randolph Henson, a nerdy boy whom Linny had spurned in high school, had morphed into a Ryan Reynolds look-alike, become a thoracic surgeon, and married Linny’s high school pal, the then-buck-toothed Mitzi.
    All her teachers had said she had had so much potential, but Linny sure had let them down—not to mention herself. Rubbing her eyes with her fingers, she thought about bringing old friends up-to-date. “I’m a serial widow with no children to show for all the marrying and I am now living in a falling down trailer right next door to my Mama.” Conversation would screech to a stop like at a rush hour crash on I-40. Sheesh. She shook her head. She was not ready for prime time.
    But still, without knowing why, she slipped the flyer under a magnet on the refrigerator.
    As Linny opened her laptop to check email, she felt a pang of guilt. For the past week, she’d not opened the texts from Diamond. Her nerves were so jangled from her frenzied move that she’d even let calls from the attorney’s office go to voice mail. Linny needed to stop dodging the woman, but she was afraid of what Diamond might tell her.
    Screwing up her courage, Linny made herself read Diamond’s texts. She saw nothing too alarming, but her last note asked her to call her on her cell. Taking a deep breath, she tapped in her number.
    The attorney trilled, “Hello-oh-ho, Linny.”
    Lord, she hoped that wasn’t her courtroom voice. “How are you, Diamond?”
    â€œHungover, but nothing a little Bloody Mary can’t fix.” Linny heard the slurping sound, and sighed inwardly. Hiring an attorney who drank in the morning didn’t seem like a good idea, but Diamond—the short-skirted, poufy-haired blonde with swoopy eye liner—had been Mary Catherine’s best pal from law school. More importantly, Mary Catherine called her “a brain