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lead.
    The word is … “klept.”
    Now, there is no reason I should let her get away with this. Well, there’s one. She gets really aggressive when I put up any resistance at all.
    “Klept?” I say very gently. “I’m not sure that’s a word, Laurie dear.”
    “Of course it’s a word. Klept. It’s what kleptomaniacs do.”
    “A kleptomaniac
steals
, sweetheart,” I say.
    Laurie sits up a little straighter, poised and ready to pounce. “No, the run-of-the-mill losers that you represent
steal
. The real sickos
klept
.”
    I look around for the dictionary that we keep in the box with the game. It’s nowhere to be found.
    “Do you know where the dictionary is, my little honeybunch?” I ask.
    “I looked for it before, but it’s gone,” she says, a razor-sharp edge in her voice. “I guess somebody must have klepted it.”
    The game rapidly heads downhill after that. I start to make moves too quickly, she slows down even more, and she beats me by sixty-seven points.
    That’s the bad news. The good news is it means we can go to bed, and bed with Laurie is much better than Scrabble with Laurie. Bed with Laurie is better than Scrabble with anybody. Though I’m speaking from a rather limited database, I think it’s very likely that bed with Laurie is better than bed with anybody.
    I wake up at six-thirty in the morning and turn on the television to the local news. Laurie is still sleeping, but the sound doesn’t wake her. The sound of an enormous asteroid hitting Hackensack wouldn’t wake her.
    There is almost nothing of consequence on the local news. It’s traffic, weather, boring banter, light features, and then back to the traffic and weather. Today is no exception. It’s raining, so they have the poor weather-man out on a street corner, giving his report from under an umbrella. He’s predicting that it’s going to rain. All that money spent on meteorology school obviously paid off.
    Laurie wakes up at seven and says something that sends a bolt of agony through me. “Weren’t you going to the gym this morning?”
    I’ve gained a few pounds lately and noticed a slight gut. Even worse, Laurie has noticed it. I announced that I was going to start going to a gym, and she made no effort to talk me out of it. Today was to be the first day. I had genuinely forgotten about it, though I would certainly have faked forgetting about it if I thought I could get away with it.
    I get up, walk Tara, then throw some things in a bag, and go. I’m not yet a member of a gym myself, so for this initial foray into future fitness, I’ve chosen to be a guest of Vince Sanders. If I can’t keep up with Vince, I’m going to stop off at the embalmer on the way home and turn myself in.
    Vince is the city desk editor of the
Bergen Record
; it was a young reporter working for him that Willie Miller was accused of murdering. He helped me on that case, and we’ve become pretty friendly since. Vince is the single largest consumer of jelly donuts in New Jersey, with the gut to prove it.
    I’m ten minutes late getting to the gym; it would have been longer if not for the fact that there’s valet parking. Vince is a little grouchy about my late arrival.
    “You here to work out or you here to be late?” he snarls.
    It’s not the most coherent of questions, so I just shrug my apology, and he flashes his guest pass and gets me in. The place is a spectacular modern facility, with state-of-the-art exercise machines, a fashionable workout clothing boutique, a fancy hair salon, and a restaurant/snack bar area that could host a debutante ball.
    It’s the restaurant that’s our first stop. Vince orders a large fruit smoothie, banana nut muffin, and fruit salad. I get an orange juice, and by the time I’m finished drinking it, he’s already eaten his tray clean. He orders a raisin scone and another smoothie and takes it with him as we head for our workout.
    “Where are we going?” I ask.
    “The treadmills. Best workout you can