Read The Glass Is Always Greener for Free Online Page A

this world coming to,” I said. “My beloved shop is in the hands of a man who hates antiques. But I shouldn’t worry because his best buddy—who goes by the name of Booger—is there to help him.”
    “Well, when you put it that way,” Wynnell said.
    “If you’ll excuse me, ladies,” I said, “I’m going to the bar.”
    “Ooh, goody,” C.J. said.
    “ Alone ,” I said.
    The clock was stopped for Mama the day Daddy was killed by a kamikaze gull with a brain tumor the size of a walnut. June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson were Mama’s role models, and to this day my dear little mama, who stands just five feet tall in her nylons, vacuums the house wearing high-heeled pumps and a single strand of pearls. Of course she wears a good deal more than that as well, including a cone-shaped bra built using hurricane-proof construction methods and a full circle skirt shirtdress with a matching belt cinched so tight it appears to bisect her waist. Beneath that skirt (holding it out to at least a forty-five-degree angle) is a crinoline so heavily starched that the carbohydrates in it could feed Paris Hilton for a year.
    When I returned to the room I found five of these crinolines lined up, standing upright on my bed. Mama, on the other hand, was curled up under a blanket on the sofa in the sitting room of my suite. Believe me, her sweet dreams soured rather quickly upon my arrival.
    “Mama!” I had to shake her as hard as a paint mixer just to get her to open her eyes. “You didn’t take a pill, did you?”
    She sat up groggily, pulling the blanket over her bust. The modesty move was so unnecessary given the fact that she wears the twin cones to bed under her nightgown. After all, Deborah Kerr wouldn’t be caught braless. What if her lover—Deborah’s, not Mama’s—were to come pounding on the hotel door, demanding to take her into his strong, business suit–clad arms . . .
    “Mama, I’m talking to you. Did you take a sleeping pill?”
    “No, dear. It’s just that I didn’t get much sleep last night, what with all the worrying I had to do about you.”
    “ Had to do? No one’s forcing you to worry, Mama!”
    “It’s a mother’s job, dear; it comes with the territory. Don’t you worry about Charlie and Susan?”
    “Well, of course I do, but that’s different; they’re only in their twenties.”
    “It never ends, Abby. The problem is that there isn’t anything you can say to anybody before they—well, you know, do it—that will truly make them understand this. That parenthood is forever.”
    “I thought that only applied to Jewish mothers.”
    “Who knows? Maybe so—but remind me to discuss that further with you tomorrow.”
    “ What? ”
    “Abby, I’m really awfully tired. Can’t we just go to sleep?”
    “Where, Mama? The bed has been taken over by a company of crinolines. I know that if I were to set them on the floor there would be all heck to pay.”
    “Well, dear,” said Mama becoming suddenly, and suspiciously, wide-awake, “this couch opens into a full-queen size bed. We could stand the crinolines on this and I could sleep with you on the king.”
    I sighed. “Okay, Mama. But no spooning. Last time those cones dug a hole in my back that took two weeks to plump out again.”
    “Deal,” Mama said happily.
    When I’m with her, Mama makes me drive. C.J. and Wynnell drove separately. That said, we had breakfast at the Flying Biscuit in the Stonecrest Shopping Center. The biscuits there are the size of small pillows, and I’d forgotten just how much food my compatriots could put away in a single meal. Even more surprised at their combined intake was the somewhat distraught manager of that fine establishment. Understandably, she was trying to urge us along.
    I shared her frame of mind. “So,” I said, “we best be getting this show on the road. We have a lot of sleuthing ahead of us.”
    “More biscuits, please,” Mama said nonchalantly. Given that my minimadre has a waist that