Odelia had chosen several Meg Ryan movies for the evening, all cute, lighthearted romances wherein relentlessly pretty people bumbled charmingly into happily ever afters. She was in the mood to live vicariously.
After the battering by shopping channel her brain had taken that afternoon she could hardly wait to retrieve her iPhone, but her body was also screaming for its kinks to be worked out, so exercising would have to take priority. Unhooking herself, she sighed with relief, slowly, languorously stretching her spine for the first time all day—then she stopped.
The doorknob was turning.
She caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and frantically dropped her torso back down, flopping to the mattress barely in time to avoid being caught. Her heart hammered in her chest as the door swung open and a stack of folded blankets and pillows preceded Melanie into the room.
Bewildered, she watched her sister-in-law drop this pile of bedding into the far corner, pull a blanket free and shake the folds from it.
"That's not necessary," she said. "I'm not a bit cold."
Melanie ignored her and spread the blanket on the floor, working clumsily because of the buddy-taping of the broken middle finger of her right hand to the ring finger beside it, immobilizing both. A second blanket soon followed, layered on top of the first.
"The toga configuration is holding, too," Odelia added. "No additions necessary."
Melanie picked up a pillow and fluffed it before tossing it to the top edge of the blankets.
"Soooo..." Odelia unfurled the question on her lips as slowly as Melanie did her final blanket, delaying the unwelcome answer she had a sickening feeling would follow it, "why are you... ummm... putting those there...?"
Silently, Melanie removed her bathrobe, folded it neatly and placed it on the floor. "Good night," she said. And then she flipped the light switch off and lay down on her makeshift bed, fabric rustling as she covered herself.
Odelia stared at the ceiling. The door had been left ajar, allowing light to bleed in from the hallway, but it was too dim for her to make out her old friend, the possible crack in the plaster, rendering the view even bleaker than usual. And clearly she had nothing more interesting to look forward to for the rest of the night.
Melanie lay still, a dark, blanket-covered collection of lumps that for some reason reminded Odelia of a giant scab, as if she had oozed out of a festering wound inflicted upon the floorboards. If the residue of Jackson's nosebleed remained, that was the general area it would occupy.
"So," Odelia's voice rang out in the gloom, "He kicked you out of bed, did he?"
There was no reply, but the rhythm of Melanie's breathing was not that of someone sleeping.
"I can't say I'm surprised. Congratulations on at least managing to remain inside the house. Not that I expect it to last."
The lumps remained stationary.
"Eventually he'll grow so desperate for money he'll decide he has no choice but to make a deal with me no matter what, don't you think? I do. And when that happens... ooh, boy... I wouldn't want to be you."
The breathing neither quickened nor slowed.
"Forcing him to choose between us when you don't have to isn't very smart, if you ask me."
The lumps shifted slightly.
"I sort of get it, at least I think I do. You think if you don't take control, you'll wind up being controlled... am I right? You're afraid you'll wind up in my position in the household: bottom rung. What I don't get, what's a total mystery to me, is why you believe such a pecking order has to exist in the first place. Why couldn't the three of us treat one another as equals? It would be so much easier! So much nicer. So much—"
YOU ARE READING
Tipping the Scales
ChickLitOdelia has spent most of her life so firmly under her brother's thumb that she might as well have been an insect trapped in a chunk of amber, but now, at long last, something is happening to her. Too bad it's not a nice, normal, something, like a '...
