Read Online I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places by Lisa Scottoline - Free Book Online Page B

I dated a European: “Can he take you out in those tight pants?”
    When I dated a quiet guy: “Does he talk?”
    When I dated a short guy: “Pick on someone your own size!”
    But despite my doorman’s expertise in snap judgment, he’s surprisingly perceptive when it comes to the heavy stuff. When my last long-term relationship started to sour, he noticed it almost before I did.
    â€œYou all right? You don’t seem happy. Make sure he makes you happy.”
    The morning after we broke up, when my eyes were puffy from crying, he glanced at me and shook his head. “Say the word, Princess, I’ll kick his ass.”
    It made me laugh.
    Because whether I agree with him all the time or not, it’s nice to know that someone has your back.
    My mom and my doorman are best buds, because she gets the warm, funny version of him that I see every day, and they’re both no-nonsense when it comes to keeping me safe. So I often relay his one-liners to her over the phone.
    When she came to visit shortly after my breakup, she had a private chat with him.
    â€œYou know,” my mom said, leaning over the front desk, “I didn’t think that last boyfriend was right for her, either.”
    She told me he replied only, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t comment on the personal lives of our tenants.”

 
    Got Limes?
    Lisa
    You may have seen the news story that one of the major big-box stores has applied for a liquor license, which would allow consumption-on-premises.
    In other words, you could drink while you shop.
    Yay!
    Happy days are here again!
    Reportedly, the store is doing this because it’s expanding its grocery and food items, but I don’t care why.
    Bottom’s up!
    I already love shopping in big-box stores.
    Why?
    Everything is BIG!
    If you need to buy laundry detergent, the smallest bottle is 187 ounces.
    And that’s concentrated, so it’s the equivalent of an entire ocean of laundry detergent.
    That’s why I buy All laundry detergent.
    Because it’s ALL.
    In fact, you will die before you run out of laundry detergent, and you can bequeath it to your children. So after you have given your all, you can give them your All.
    If you buy a can of coffee, it will be shrink-wrapped with forty-seven hundred other cans of coffee. You’ll have more caffeine than you’ll ever need and you can share some with your neighbors, so your entire block will be highly productive.
    Or start a war.
    I also buy multicolored gummy vitamins in a big-box store, and I now have 32,029,348 vitamins. If I took them all, I would gain a superpower.
    Or grow a third breast covered with rainbows.
    Which might be the same thing.
    But you get the idea, the bottom line in big-box stores is that everything is big, plentiful, excessive, and way out of proportion.
    Ain’t it great?
    The shopping carts are humongous, too, perfectly in scale with the massive stores, so that between the immensity of the space, the gargantuan shopping carts, and the over-the-top quantity of each item, when you step inside the store, you’re a Lilliputian stepped into Brobdingnag, which is the land where the giants lived in Gulliver’s Travels .
    You probably knew that.
    But I had to look it up.
    Impressed?
    Anyway it’s a good analogy, because that’s pretty much exactly how I feel when I’m pushing around one of those big carts, and like you, I go into the big-box store for one item and leave with several hundred.
    In fact, I have been known to leave the store with two full carts, which shows you that Lilliputians love to shop.
    Now that big-box stores will allow you to drink while you shop, I’m imagining myself walking those glistening, extrawide aisles behind my cart-as-big-as-a-house, a Lilliputian sipping Lambrusco.
    I don’t have that many inhibitions to start with, and for me, liquor only makes things worse.
    Or better.
    I buy too much in the