Dating da Vinci Read Online Free PDF Page A

liked him. If they hadn't, I would've handed him his walking papers, gorgeous or not. I'd nearly backed out of letting da Vinci stay in the studio when we entered and I found Joel's things exactly where I'd left them, where he'd left them, and I wished for a sign from Joel that I wasn't making a huge mistake, that he was fine with using his space for rent, but the guilt chewed at me like a puppy on a shoe. Unlike some Grievers who claim to “feel” their loved ones with them everywhere they go, I couldn't feel Joel. All I felt was anger, sadness, loneliness. Besides, I didn't believe in signs, did I?I believed in words. Even if a brisk breeze suddenly whirled through the room knocking his pencil cup off the desk, I'd demand it in writing. A note from the beyond. Still.
    Choking back tears, I had moved Joel's coffee cup to the cupboard, left the sketch of the hospital he'd been working on on his drafting table, and asked that da Vinci try to leave everything as is. He seemed to understand, though immigrants often nod their heads when they have no idea what's being said.
    “I see you're bright and shining as usual,” Barbara said upon entering, in a sing-song voice that was really meant as a put-down of my attire and lack of spit and polish. Pre-Joel's death, I would've gotten a “why-can't-you-be-more-like-your-sister” speech. My dear sister, who, after she found her husband keeping a mistress on the side, lost forty pounds and in two years became the “go-to girl” for fitness in the Lone Star State. After she was nice and rich and famous, she dumped her husband and now dated with incredible ease. I actually preferred her when she was fat.
    Now my mom took it relatively easy on me, too busy worrying about me to nag. I had to remind myself that she made her daily invasion into my personal life because she cared. She couldn't imagine a life without my father and she had loved Joel nearly as much I had. As a result, she took my little family on like a fulltime job—keeping up on everything from the latest parenting advice to what's cool with boys so she could somehow make up for what my kids were missing without their father. Of course, we knew this wouldn't work, but when Joel died she and my father did turn into Super Grandparents, taking the kids on quarterly vacations and spending more quality time with them than they ever did with my sister and me growing up. With them and Judith and her new banker husband Bob, my kids got plenty of attention, though I still worried every day it wasn't enough because it wasn't from their father.
    Barbara handed me a stack of magazines—she hated to be wasteful and throw them away—and I cringed. I don't believe in signs. Anh does. My evangelical mothers do, of course. God is trying to tell you something , they would say to me. If this was true, what did it mean that Monica Blevins was on the cover of Austin Monthly ? I preferred to believe it was just a coincidence; as for the cover, well, she was like Anh, a mover and a shaker. Movers and shakers often get photographed for covers of magazine. It had nothing at all to do with my desire to confront her about Joel.
    I placed Better Homes and Gardens on top of her picture and sat the stack next to the chair on top of the stack from last week. My mother really should know better. The stack would eventually cause its own avalanche and my boys would step on them, using them as roller skates on the carpet, and eventually my mother would pick them up and throw them in the trash without my ever having read them, which is what she should've done in the first place.
    Barbara clicked on my sister's show, Get Up and Move It, Texas!, her statewide fitness show that I TiVoed, vowing to work out to it later in the day (unlike her, I wasn't a morning person), but I never got around to it, morning, noon or night. My mother, who watched the show faithfully every morning while sipping her coffee, liked to come over and watch my sister again while