Read Online Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?: True Stories and Confessions by Lisa Scottoline, Francesca Serritella - Free Book Online

been running hither and yon getting mango sorbet, Bud Light, Entenmann’s plain donuts, and mashed potatoes with gravy. I had a fight in Whole Foods over the last jar of pur é ed pears baby food, which was for my Mother Mary.
    You haven’t lived until you’ve bought baby food for your mother, depriving a nine-month-old.
    Take that, baby. Try the carrots, you selfish little thing.
    We are alternately happy and sad, getting along wonderfully or bickering. I don’t worry about this. In fact, I think it’s par for the course. If you’re not irritable at a time like this, you lack perspective.
    I never sweat the small stuff, but this is clearly not the small stuff. I’ve spent my life dismissing minor annoyances because they aren’t a matter of life and death, but this is a matter of life and death.
    Trust me, we’re sweating it.
    Yet we persevere, because we have no other choice and we’re lucky to have this one. We ask the hospice nurses how long we will have Mother Mary with us, and one nurse says something truly profound—that people die the way they lived.
    That’s good news with Mother Mary.
    She’s a fighter and she’s fighting. When the priest arrived to give her last rites, she sent him away.
    Actually what she said was, “Never!”
    So she is not going gentle.
    She cannot spell gentle.
    She even insists that I go on book tour, since I have a book out this week, and though I am torn, I will obey her. She doesn’t want me to act like the end is near, or it makes her feel as if it is, and I understand that, too. So in another irony, because she comes first, I’m going to listen to her and do my job.
    By the way, I showed her an advance copy of the new book that Daughter Francesca and I wrote, which is dedicated to her. She was thrilled to see it, and the book will be out in summer. I’m betting on her being with us then too.
    Because here’s the one thing I truly believe:
    Mother Mary will be with us forever.

 
    Fear of Flying
    By Lisa
    Lately, I’m grabbing men on airplanes.
    This could be the new match.com , for frequent flyers.
    Let me explain. I have a medical excuse.
    I seem to be developing a fear of flying.
    And I blame Liam Neeson.
    Because after seeing the movie Nonstop, as well as lots of other airplane crash movies, I can visualize all too well what happens when planes become lawn darts. It might be too much information, or too much imagination. Either way, all of a sudden, I’m nervous when I fly.
    I found this out this week, when I took a business trip to Florida from Philly, down one day and up the next, which describes the turbulence both ways.
    There had been bad rainstorms all over the country, and the plane ride south started off rocky and never got better. I popped flop sweat. I gripped the armrests. I gritted my teeth.
    But when I looked around at the other passengers, they were reading their books, ebooks, and newspapers and answering email. Oddly, they seemed not to realize that the world was about to end.
    The captain got on the speaker and said things like “random air pockets,” “being rerouted,” “keep your seat belts fastened,” but I was too stressed out to hear any of it, and all I can tell you is that it was the first flight I wouldn’t get up to go to the bathroom.
    I almost went in my seat.
    Then the plane dropped suddenly, and I instinctively reached over and clutched the arm of the man next to me.
    I say instinctively, but God knows if it’s instinctive.
    Maybe it’s instinctive for single women.
    Either way, he looked over and smiled, and I apologized.
    Then he said, “Don’t worry. We’re at thirty-five thousand feet.”
    Oy.
    I said, “That’s exactly what worries me.”
    He shook his head, patiently. “It shouldn’t. If anything goes wrong now, the pilot has thirty thousand feet to fix it. The only times to worry are at