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Jordan said, pointing at the house
and referring to the ongoing house renovations.
    "Where
would the fun be in that?" Edison said.  "Isn’t putting in elbow
grease and sweat and hours upon hours of work worth having something of your
very own, something special and worthwhile, something to give your life
meaning?"
    Jordan
got out of the car.  "Are we talking about the house or the doctor?"
    "You
tell me."  Edison shut her car door and headed for the porch.

Blue Amy
     
    Jordan
sat cross-legged on the floor in her drawing studio, in the middle of plastic
tarps, paint buckets and half-painted walls, drinking Pinot Gris out of a
coffee mug and contemplating her own conversion.  There were three distinct
stages of her conversion.
    Before
she fell out the window:  
Jordan did not believe in true love.  She did not believe in romance and happily-ever-afters. 
She thought all that malarkey about love was brainwashing doled out by men to
keep women barefoot and pregnant.  It was so ingrained in the female mind that
even lesbians had contracted it like it was a pandemic flu.
    During
the fall:   The
moment she slipped, the exact moment she reached for something to grab hold of
and there was nothing there and she realized she was hurtling toward earth and
imminent death, Jordan thought of how she was dying too young.  She thought of
all the things she hadn't done yet.  She hadn't traveled to New Zealand. She
hadn't been to the top of the Empire State building.  She hadn't written the
novel that would be her seminal masterpiece.  She hadn't experienced true
love.  That was her last thought and it was the clencher.  True love.  She was
going to die a virgin, metaphorically speaking, of the heart.
    After
the fall:  Jordan
saw Amy in the emergency room.  Maybe it was too many endorphins caused by the
fear coursing through her veins, maybe it was the loss of blood, maybe it was
the full moon, maybe it was the chili peppers she ate for dinner last night,
but whatever it was, Jordan was now pretty damn sure she was in love.
    She
shook her head, gulped her wine, and reminded herself sternly that she did not
believe in true love.  She did, however, believe in a second glass of wine. 
She lifted the bottle from between her legs and sloshed more into her cup.
    She
looked at the half-painted walls and wondered when Edison would ever get around
to finishing them.  It seemed like the whole house was always only halfway
done.  Edison had steadily worked on projects but was always sidetracked by her
brainchildren – the inventions that she was forever tinkering with.  As a
result, the new dishwasher sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, the guest
room toilet was in the hallway, sheets of drywall were stacked in the living
room and not a single wall in the whole place was fully painted.
    Jordan
decided to be proactive.  She jimmied open a can of paint with a screwdriver,
stirred the paint, grabbed a brush, and dipped it into the blue paint.   It was cerulean blue and her favorite color.  Edison
stored most of the paint up here in her studio so that when it came time to
paint a room she’d know where, in the mess of remodeling, she had stored the
paint.
    Jordan
slapped the paint on the wall with one hand and sipped her wine with the
other.  Well, she tried to sip her wine.  She couldn't hold the mug in her left
hand because of the stitches and bandages.  And pain.  She located a roll of
duct tape, which wasn't too hard because Edison bought the stuff by the case
and left it lying all over the house.  Using her teeth, her knees and her good
right hand, Jordan taped the mug of wine to her left hand.  She gave it a trial
run by raising it to her lips and drinking.  It worked beautifully.  Jordan
thought that Edison should invent something like this - a paint holder that had
a sippy cup attached to it.  She could market it to the depressed artist.  And
weren’t all artists depressed?
    Jordan
picked up the brush and