Read By the light of the moon for Free Online

to
the audience as her latest beau and as the only one she had ever
dated who neither embarrassed her in public nor tried to make her
feel inadequate about one aspect or another of her anatomy.
Perching on a stool beside him, she discussed modern romance, and
Fred made the perfect straight man. He gave new meaning to the term deadpan reaction , and the audience loved him.
    'Don't worry,' Jilly said. 'I won't put you in goofy-looking
pots or insult your dignity in any way.'
    Whether cactus or sedum, no other succulent plant could have
radiated trust more powerfully than did Fred.
    With her significant other having been fed and watered and made
to feel appreciated, Jilly slung her purse over her shoulder,
grabbed the empty plastic ice bucket, and left the room to get ice
and to feed quarters to the nearest soda-vending machine. Lately,
she'd been in the grip of a root-beer jones. Although she preferred
diet soda, she would drink regular when that was the only form of
root beer that she could find: two bottles, sometimes three a
night. If she had no choice but the fully sugared variety, then she
would eat nothing but dry toast for breakfast, to compensate for
the indulgence.
    Fat asses plagued the women in her family, by which she wasn't
referring to the men they married. Her mother, her mother's
sisters, and her cousins all had fetchingly tight buns when they
were in their teens, or even in their twenties, but sooner rather
than later, each of them looked as if she had shoved a pair of
pumpkins down the back of her pants. They rarely gained weight in
the thighs or the stomach, only in the gluteus maximus, medius, and
minimus, resulting in what her mother jokingly referred to as the
gluteus muchomega . This curse was not passed down from
generation to generation on the Jackson side of the family, but on
the Armstrong side – the maternal side – along with
male-pattern baldness and a sense of humor.
    Only Aunt Gloria, now forty-eight, had escaped being afflicted
with the Armstrong ass past thirty. Sometimes Gloria attributed her
enduringly lean posterior to the fact that she had made a novena to
the Blessed Virgin three times each year since the age of nine,
when she'd first become aware that sudden colossal butt expansion
might lie in her future; at other times, she thought that maybe a
periodic flirtation with bulimia had something to do with the fact
that she could still sit on a bicycle seat without requiring the
services of a proctologist to dismount.
    Jilly, too, was a believer, but she'd never made a novena in the
hope of petitioning for a merciful exemption from gluteus
muchomega. Her reticence in this matter arose not because she
doubted that such a petition would be effective, but only because
she was incapable of raising the issue of her butt in a spiritual
conversation with the Holy Mother.
    She had practiced bulimia for two miserable days, when she was
thirteen, before deciding that daily volitional vomiting was worse
than living two thirds of your life in stretchable ski pants, with
a quiet fear of narrow doorways. Now she pinned all her hopes on
dry toast for breakfast and wizardly advances in plastic
surgery.
    The ice and vending machines were in an alcove off the covered
walkway that served her room, no more than fifty feet from her
door. A faint breeze, coming off the desert, was too hot to cool
the night and so dry that she half expected her lips to parch and
split with an audible crackle; hissing faintly, this current of air
seemed to serpentine along the covered passage as if it, too, were
searching for something with which to wet its scaly lips.
    En route, Jilly encountered a rumpled, kindly-looking man who,
apparently returning from the automated oasis, had just purchased a
can of Coke and three bags of peanuts. His eyes were the faded blue
of a Sonoran or a Mojave sky in August, when even Heaven can't hold
its color against the intense bleaching light, but he wasn't native
to the region, for his round