Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

girl said and splashed again.
    “Significantly less cute after speaking,” somebody said, and Zoë and the little girl both looked around the statue in the middle of the fountain.
    A guy sat there, with his feet in the water, his tie loosened, his suit jacket off, and his pants rolled up over his long muscled legs. His fair hair flopped over his forehead, and Zoë stopped and blinked at the warmth in his blue, blue eyes.
    “Cute?” the little girl said.
    “Not so much,” the guy said and stuck out his tongue.
    The little girl giggled at him, sunny and beautiful again, and biology made a comeback. This was why Nature made kids darling, so women who were perfectly happy with their lives and their careers would suddenly throw everything over for weight gain and stretch marks and diapers and car pools and college tuition. The little girl transferred her smile to Zoë, and Zoë smiled back and looked over to see the guy starting to smile, too.
Like a family,
she thought. If I’d stayed married, this could be—
    No, it couldn’t. For one thing, she wouldn’t have had blond children, not with Nick. For another thing, she’d still be stuck in Tibbett.
    “Is she yours?” Zoë said to the guy, and he shook his head, just as a voice from behind them shrieked, “
Clarissa
!”
    The little girl scowled as a woman in a watermelon print shift came running to the edge of the fountain.
    “You get right out of there,” the woman scolded, her perfectly-plucked brows meeting in the middle of her slightly porcine face. She transferred her scold to Zoë: “What were you thinking, putting her in here?”
    “She crawled in on her own,” Zoë said. “We were talking her out.”
    “We?” The woman looked past Zoë to the tow-headed guy, now making faces at Clarissa. She sucked in her breath. “Clarissa, you are not allowed to talk to strange men. You come out of that water
immediately
.”
    Clarissa ignored her to splash Zoë again.
    “Okay, that’s it, kid.” Zoë scooped her up, holding Clarissa’s dripping little body away from her as she waded over to the edge. “Here,” she said, transferring the sodden weight to Clarissa’s mother, feeling nothing but satisfaction as the watermelons got wet.
    “Don’t you ever do that again,” Clarissa’s mother scolded, ignoring Zoë completely, and Clarissa stuck out her tongue at Zoë one final time and then began to kick and scream as her mother carried her away.
    See, that was why she didn’t want a baby. What if she had one like Clarissa?
    She watched the watermelons recede into the distance along with Clarissa’s screams. Of course, it would have been different if she’d been Clarissa’s mother. For one thing she wouldn’t have named her Clarissa. Bianca, that was a good name for a little girl. The basic Clarissa had probably been just fine, before the name and the awful mothering—
    I want a baby.
    This wasn’t the first time her mind and her body had parted company. There had been that day when she’d been jogging up a hill, and her mind had been chanting
keep running keep running keep running keep running,
and then she’d noticed that her body was walking. At some point, if your mind refused to pay attention to your body, your body just overruled your mind.
Think whatever you want,
it said.
I’m going over here
.
    This was clearly one of those times.
    She sat down on the edge of the fountain to think.
    “You all right?” the guy across the way said. He wasn’t wearing a suit coat, but otherwise he was pretty much one of the standard business males who populated Zoë’s life. His eyes dropped to her skirt, hiked up to mid-hip. “You have good legs.”
    “Thank you.” Zoë tugged her skirt down. “My husband Nick thinks so, too.”
    “That wasn’t a pass,” he said, patiently. “It was a comment. Like, ‘nice day, isn’t it?’”
    “Oh.” Zoë peered at him and realized he looked a little melancholy. “Are you all right?”
    “Me? Of course,