Read Best to Laugh: A Novel for Free Online

shrubbery. “Don’t jump out at people like that.”
    “I wasn’t jumping out. I was just taking a little air—is that a crime?” She turned toward me, the scorn in her voice matching the scorn on her face. “So, I see it didn’t take you long to impress our Mr. Stickley.”
    “Beg your pardon?” I asked.
    Ed sighed. “She thinks we’re on a date, Candy.”
    “Well, you’re together and you’re holding a bottle of wine,” said Maeve. “Isn’t that a reasonable assumption?”
    There was a little catch in her plaintive voice, and I found myself inviting her to join Ed and me.
    “Oh, all right,” said Maeve gruffly while Ed proffered me a smile whose vinegar content could have pickled an entire peck of peppers.

6
    O UR HOST’S APARTMENT WAS A SURPRISE.
    “Goll-eee,” said Maeve, imitating the actor who played Gomer Pyle on the old TV sitcom. “These are some fancy digs.”
    “Thanks,” said Ed. “Want a tour?”
    We oohed and ahhed over the fact his bedroom not only looked like an adult slept in it—there were no orange crates serving as nightstands, no mattresses on the floor—but that it seemed restful, as if thought had gone into its design and decoration. His bathroom had the same octagonal white tile as the one in my apartment did, but his towels matched and hung from the rod as if folded by a maid. It was his office, though, that most excited me.
    “Look at this library!” I said of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering three walls.
    “I wish I had a two-bedroom,” said Maeve, plopping on a leather chair with wheels. “It’d give me space for a weight room.”
    “You’ve sure got a lot of stuff about the Kennedy assassinations,” I said, my finger running along the spines of more than a dozen books. “And look at all these CIA titles!”
    Maeve swiveled in the office chair and squinted.
    “ Who’s Really in Charge? ” she read. “ Our Shadow Government in Nicaragua. Secret Presidents—More Powerful Than Our Elected Ones. What the hell, Ed, are you some kind of conspiracy nut?”
    “If you consider wanting to know the truth nutty, then I guess I am.”
    “ Mrs. Dalloway, A Bell for Adano, Leaves of Grass, ” I read aloud, moving on to his expansive fiction and poetry section. “Well, at least you’re not completely nuts.”
    “No, not completely,” said Ed. “Now let’s go open up that wine—unless you’d like to psychoanalyze the reasons I may or may not have The Joy of Sex on hand.”
    “Do you?” asked Maeve brightly. “Have it, I mean? Because if you do, I’d love to borrow it.”
    I N E D’S LIVING room, Maeve plunked her big sculpted self down on a sleek suede couch and crossed her big manicured feet on top of the coffee table.
    “I had no idea substitute teaching was so lucrative,” she said.
    “Hey, you mind?” asked Ed, nodding toward those big feet and when, with a long aggrieved sigh, Maeve removed them, he put in their place a tray holding the bottle of wine and three glasses.
    The bodybuilder’s spiel on the unhealthy aspects of alcohol was interrupted when Ed said, “Fine. It’s just more for Candy and me.”
    “Oh all right,” said Maeve. “But just one glass.”
    “And substitute teaching is criminally underpaid,” said Ed, steering back onto the conversational road. “Everything in this room was paid for with my game show winnings.”
    Maeve took a big gulp of wine. “Oh yeah, I forgot you’re a big television star.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    Ignoring Ed, she turned to me. “And you. Are you Japanese or Chinese or—” she drummed her kneecaps—“Americanese?”
    “Geez, Maeve,” said Ed.
    “Just asking!”
    “I’m a quarter-Finnish,” I said, with nursery-school-teacher sweetness. “A quarter-Norwegian and half-Korean.”
    “And I thought I had an identity crisis!”
    “Maeve, really,” said Ed, “what is your problem?”
    “Who said I had a prob—”
    The weightlifter was unable to finish her