Penelope in Retrograde by Brooke Abrams EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Brooke Abrams
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Divorce Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
If it wasn’t for the Smut Coven, I wouldn’t be here right now.
For reference, here is the San Diego airport on one of the busiest travel
days of the year: the day before Thanksgiving. It’s hell. Actually, it’s more
like the place you stop on your way to hell. Purgatory? Limbo? The DMV?
I’m more spiritual than religious, so the exact term escapes me. I do,
however, know that as loud and crowded as this airport is, it is not hell. Hell
is where I’m going next.
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Hell is my parents’ home on Thanksgiving.
For the past ten years, I’ve successfully avoided the place, like a
master criminal always managing to stay one step ahead of the law. I set
reminders one month, two weeks, and three days before all major holidays
to ensure that I’m never without a conflict. I always have a deadline I can’t
get out of, a cold I can’t get over, or a household emergency that can’t be
ignored. If necessary, I have all three. I keep meticulous notes on my
excuses so they never repeat, thus ensuring that a separate conflict
connected to my pretend conflict doesn’t arise. Being the misfit of the
family takes a lot of planning.
“Penelope, are you sure you don’t want me to send your father to pick
you up?” My mother, Silvia Banks, lowers her voice through the phone. “I
don’t like the idea of you trying to hail a taxi after dark. It’s not safe. All the
cabbies know you’re unarmed thanks to the TSA. You might as well hold
up a giant sign that says Kidnap me.”
Ladies and gentlemen, my mother.
“First, I live in San Francisco, not South Dakota. I can take care of
myself.” I strain under the weight of my luggage as I hoist it over my
shoulder, trying my best to avoid jostling Ozzie, my elderly Pomeranian, in
his rolling carrier. “Second, I don’t think anyone’s hailed a cab from the
airport in the last ten years. And third, I’m never armed. Not unless you
count hand sanitizer as a lethal weapon, which it kind of is, I guess, if you
forced someone to drink it. At the very least, you could probably blind
someone with it.”
“Penelope, I know you think your father and I are old fashioned, but
crime isn’t the sort of thing that goes out of style.”
I do think my parents are old fashioned. In fact, I’m willing to bet that
the greater part of people born after 1970 would find my parents old
fashioned. In their defense, they are old. They’re both in their late seventies
and so ridiculously prim and proper, they make Martha Stewart seem edgy.
To be clear, I’m talking pre–Snoop Dogg Martha. They like their bedsheets
to have hospital corners, their drinks to have coasters, and their daughters to
have nice reliable jobs with health benefits. They’d also prefer their
thirtysomething-year-old daughters to be married and stay married, though
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