Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! Read Online Free PDF Page A

sprinkle like grass seed.
    Marty wore his green crocheted beanie. He stuffed samples inside and plunked it on his head. He refused to give out those samples.
    “I want them under my beanie, Mom.” He looked like an acorn, a fast loud running nut. He took three books at a time, and ran from house to house along his side of the street. Louie took the other side. I couldn’t keep up with them. I saw Marty drop behind a gnarly pepper tree and thought, “what the heck is he doing?” I held the straps of my backpack tight and ran to find him. The demonstration bottles slapped my back in time to my steps. I peered over an Aloe hedge, saw him stooped down, rubbing a sample packette on his shorts.
    “Hey, why are you doing that?” The ground was damp and gritty. Maybe the sample fell into the dirt. He turned his head up to me and looked with big brown innocent eyes. One of his hat samples poked out over one ear, and I pushed it back under his cap.
    “Oh this sample fell in the bird poop. I’m wiping it off. Don’t worry mom, this happened last week and it was alright.”
    Argh!
    I watched him fly down the street again, tossing paper against cobble-stoned drive, and shrugged my shoulders. I guess a little bird poop never hurt anyone.
    I called Shanna on my cell phone and chatted while I finished my rounds. I told her about my call from Catholic Charities and I asked her to come over for margaritas and comfort.
    “C’mon over tonight, please? I need to cry it out, Shanna. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. I don’t know what to do. What would you do?”
    Shanna held her breath. I could hear her intake a lungful of air, keep it pressed into her chest as she thought. Marty and Louie wrestled each other to the ground on some strange pristine lawn, leapfrogged across it, then skirted a chained Pitbull at the next house.
    “I don’t know what I’d do. Probably nothing. I would leave it be. She has an adoptive mom and dad somewhere. That’s her family now. Maybe you could send her an anonymous letter telling her a little about your life and her half-siblings. Or not. It’s up to you. But yeah, I’ll come over. I have something that’ll take your mind off it.”
    As long as I’ve known Shanna she wanted no man, wanted no person to share her bed. Her dog and bike were her base comforts. Me too, some days. But something changed a few weeks past. I didn’t know what, exactly, only knew my friend grew restless, distant. She joined one of those online match-making websites and pestered me for help in writing her a catchy profile.
    “Make it sound smart, Birdie.” Shanna dragged a kitchen chair to my computer and looked over my shoulder as I typed. “Make sure you say I’m cute.”
    “Geeze, man, since when do you care about being cute? I thought we were the anti-cute twins? Remember that? You keep this up, I’ll have to get another sidekick.” I sighed as loud as I could, pretended to be upset, looked critically at Shanna’s grout-stained t-shirt and dog-hair-crusted leggings. “Um. I’m going to have to give you an Avon makeover if you want to be classified as cute. Besides, we’re both pushing 40. Really, we should be aiming for Luscious or Bewitching. Not Cute.”
    My hands hesitated over the keyboard. What the hell is cute, anyway? I caught a glimpse of myself in the glare of the monitor. Short fly-away brown hair, green oval eyes, a nose just shy of enormous. Regular. We’re both regular , I thought, regular and salty, forgotten, like the kelp tides, like the sage in the canyon hills, regular like any woman alone, unmatched. I felt the tug of the snap at the waist of my pants. Regular and chubby. I started to type.
    I did the best I could, stuck in adjectives like “independent” and “self-motivated” and “decisive.” I described her love for animals and environment, added lots of noise about her puritanical work ethic and a sprinkle of physical buzzwords like “red-headed” and