Read Online What Doesn't Kill You by Virginia DeBerry - Free Book Online

butterflies, thank you very much. I have nice hands, like my mother’s, no need for overkill.
    So I’m cuticle deep in warm moisturizing cream, eyes closed and really looking forward to the hand massage, when I’m snatched out of my peaceful trance. “Mom, how come you’re not at work?” Uh-oh, snagged by my own daughter, sounding just like me. And I felt like I was playing hooky since I hadn’t bothered telling her I’d been kicked to the curb by my employer. Excuse me—former employer. I wasn’t too worried about her trying to catch up with me on the job. Everybody who knows me knows I do not like email. It’s for work, period. Don’t send me forty-two forwards of the same joke that wasn’t funny last week, because I will delete them. And I’ve got better things to do with my spare time than follow the blinking cursor, so I don’t have a computer at home. If you want to tell me something, call me—at home, not at work, which obviously doesn’t matter anymore. And don’t call on my cell phone because it’s probably not turned on. The charm of having my purse ring is highly overrated. And don’t get me started on the losers who aren’t content to annoy everyone around them with a chorus of “When the Saints Go Marching In” every time their phone rings. After that they have to share a detailed description of little Timmy’s first time going to the potty by himself or a blow-by-blow account of Jane’s divorce-court nightmare with everybody who’s in earshot.
    From the time Amber was little I told her jobs were for work, not for personal business. I mean, she could always call me when she needed to, but we never spent a whole lot of phone time. And once she got her own job she still followed that rule. We spoke in the evening, usually on her way home, because unlike me, her cell was always on. Or when she was trying to cook dinner for J.J., and she’d ask me how to tell when a steak is medium rare, or if you can substitute skim milk and butter for cream, bless her heart. They had come back from their honeymoon all glowy and drunk with love. How could I throw cold water on their wedded bliss with my rotten news? Life would do that soon enough.
    Besides, I wasn’t broke. No need for a news flash. Those people at Markson had sent me some kind of mail, but I tossed it in the fruit bowl with the pears I wasn’t eating. Whatever they had to say could wait until I was ready to hear it because the time for cranberry sauce and cornbread stuffing was right around the corner and I’d already been to the Trim-a-Tree shop at the mall to pick up a few things for Amber’s first Christmas on her own. Nobody changed jobs before the holiday bonus checks went out, and thinking about that was a booster shot to my pissed-offedness since they were going to get away without giving me one. Hell, my severance agreement—which sounded to me like they were planning to slice off my right arm, which isa lot like how it felt—was supposed to give me one week’s pay for every year I worked. Except the cheap fothermuckers only counted the years after Olivia incorporated. You know that’s just wrong. I was there before any of them. That should count for something. Anyway, I wasn’t about to let that nonsense ruin my holidays. I’d been working since I was nineteen, and I deserved time to enjoy my freedom while I had it. As a matter of fact, I went ahead and paid for the cruise I was planning to take with the Live Five in the spring. Diane and Marie would be celebrating one of those birthdays with a zero in it and I had no intention of missing the fun. I booked my own cabin, because this was not camp—I was not sharing a bunk. And I got one with a balcony because, why take a cruise if you can’t see the ocean? When I took a new job, they would just have to understand I had a prior commitment and needed that