The Husband Diet (A Romantic Comedy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

air and sigh, “I can smell your gay friend’s cheap perfume.”
    Not even the fact that Paul was a respected freelance costume designer who travelled the world for his living (and whose butt had never seen a desk chair) could sway Ira.
    “Sunshine,” Paul said, cupping my clenched jaw with his free hand and bringing me back to reality as we reached my front door without my realizing, “instead of having these visions of murder, why don’t you just leave him already?”
    Why, he kept asking. For two excellent reasons. One was twelve years old and the other eight.
    “I can’t. He’s my husband.”
    “What, you don’t think you could live without him? Please tell me that not even you are that masochistic?” Paul begged.
    Ira’s revelation of his lack of desire for me certainly put things into perspective. I was living with a man who didn’t find me attractive. How far were we from the end? Were we really at Stage Four?
    * * *
    After dinner, Paul sat down with Maddy (did I mention I loved him and would marry him in a heartbeat?) and did their usual thing: drawing clothes for her paper dolls. At eight years old, she was becoming alarmingly similar to my mother, who was a fashion victim and the emptiest head on the planet if you didn’t count Maddy’s paper dolls.
    She was so confident, so pretty. Please, God. Make her as intelligent and grounded as she is pretty, and not an airhead like Marcy or my sister Judy. Make her be a good wife and mother if that is what she wants, and spend time with them. Make her be successful and happy with anything she wants to do.
    And, please, let Warren be a patient man, and be kind to his children and wife, even if she won’t be a raging beauty. Let him understand the beauty inside people.
    I sat on a kitchen stool with a glass of wine, observing my mini, three-dollar-each succulent cacti plants, perfectly aligned like little soldiers on the kitchen window sill, their thorns sticking out proudly as if to say, “Look at us—we don’t need Erica’s TLC! We can survive without water!” And, boy, could they. I’d forget to water them for weeks, and they’d be there for me, resistant, alive and beautiful, with even little purple or pink flowers sticking out from the top, no matter how much I neglected them. I wished my poor kids knew the same survival techniques, but I guess I was asking too much. Hell, I wish I knew them. Look at me! I can survive without sex with my husband! What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!
    Maybe one day I’d have the time to plant a beautiful rosebush right by the front door, so every time I came home I’d be greeted by beauty. Roses, the symbol of love. I sighed. Life wasn’t perfect, and if I had no sex life, there were also other things I still had to master, like, for instance, being a housewife. I was trying with all my heart. In any case, I always had Plan B—envisioning the day my fantasies of killing my husband would become reality. God, sometimes life was a pain in the ass.

Chapter 4:
    Mother Marcy?
    M arcy threw her hands up in the air. “Ira told me you’re still refusing surgery. Really, Erica, it’s the least you could do to save your marriage.”
    I glared at my mother sitting in her size four YSL number opposite me at lunch at The Farthington Hotel, where I worked. She never came to see me, so I’d figured it must be something important; i.e. her next shopping spree in Europe.
    Marcy had never really been a hands-on mother, and in particular with me. Sometimes it seemed she simply tolerated my existence, from my birth all the way up until... well, now. But at the same time she doted upon her only son, Vince, and shared a fashion fever with my sister Judy, with whom she still can be seen today storming the designer shops in the city center.
    Marcy doesn’t want to be called Mom by any of us and her seven grandchildren have to call her Marcy as well. She can’t stand the sight of elderly people because she’s terrified of