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you call me this early on a Saturday, I will attach you to a twenty-foot bungee cord and push you from a nineteen-foot overpass.”
    Frank groaned again and put his pillow over his eyes.
    “You’re hungover!” she scolded loudly. I moved the receiver a good six inches from my ear while she prattled incessantly about how ashamed my mother would have been had she lived to see me behaving like this. (I am convinced that Barbara, given a choice between dropping a neutron bomb and invoking my mother’s memory, would still find the latter a more potent weapon.)
    Frank groaned louder and rolled onto his stomach. I reached down and unplugged the phone, wondering as I fell back to sleep how long it would take Barbara to realize all her bitching was failing to do more than sear some phone lines.
    Sometime around noon, as I lay watching him, Frank pulled the pillow off his head. “I don’t know how you do that without suffocating,” I said.
    He managed a smile. “I’m going to tell your sister that we are moving to the Himalayas and can’t be reached by phone.”
    “Sooner or later she’ll see my byline in the
Express
and know she can start calling again.”
    “You’ll have to make up a pen name.” The smile broadened to a grin. “How about—”
    “Never mind. I can tell from the look on your face that it doesn’t belong in a family newspaper.”
    “What did Barbara want?”
    “I don’t know. I unplugged her.”
    He laughed and pulled me close. “Let’s stay in bed all day.”
    “Are you kidding? I just got my cast off. I want to get some exercise.”
    “Who said you won’t be getting exercise?”
    There was a loud banging at the front door. I heard my name being screeched by a fishwife. The bedroom is at the back of the house, but we could hear her “I know you’re in there!” quite plainly.
    “Barbara says I won’t be getting exercise.”
    Frank groaned for the fourth time that morning and reached for his jeans. I hurriedly got into a bathrobe, amused briefly by the realization that I could now do something like pull on a bathrobe and run to the front door.
    “Hell’s bells, Barbara,” I called out as I made my way down the hallway, “keep your pantyhose on!”
    I opened the door and she shot into the house like she had been launched from a catapult.
    “Of all the despicable tricks! I can’t believe you were so rude! I had hoped Frank would teach you a few manners but I can see…”
    What she could see just then was Frank, coming down the hallway as he buttoned a shirt. It stopped her mid-tirade.
    “Good afternoon, Barbara,” he said.
    She took in his bare feet and sleep-tousled hair and began to stammer. “Fr-Fr-Frank. I… I only saw Irene’s car. I didn’t know you were home.”
    “My car is at Banyon’s. We took a cab home last night because your sister and I forgot to draw straws for designated driver. We were celebrating the removal of her cast and splint.”
    “Oh.” She looked more than a little disconcerted.
    “Were you yelling at me on the phone all this time?” I asked.
    That brought back some of her ire, but Frank’s chuckle cooled it right back down into embarrassment. “Never mind,” she said.
    “Come on in and make yourself comfortable,” Frank said. “I’ll make some coffee.”
    Barbara looked down at my hand and, seeing the puffiness around my thumb and forefinger, said, “It still looks funny.”
    “Thank you.” I walked back to the kitchen, leaving her to follow or stand there.
    She chose to follow and soon the pleasant aroma of coffee allowed me to become a little more human.
    “Anything I can do to help?” she asked.
    “Not a thing,” Frank said, getting some cups and saucers.
    “I’d be happy to help,” she tried again.
    “Just relax and enjoy yourself,” Frank said easily.
    As I watched her take a seat at the kitchen table, I mused to myself that Barbara had probably never in her life “relaxed and enjoyed herself.” She’s bird-nervous by