CHAPTER THREE

      HAVING ONE FOOT in the grave was not a laughing matter, though Reese Stephens tried to make it one.

      So, as the final thing on her bucket list she’d bought every joke book she could find on death, dying and other morbid things. It wasn’t helping, but it wasn’t hurting, either. At this point, that was as good as it was going to get for her.

      She added the joke books to the stack of sex manuals she’d purchased. Donating both to the same place might be a problem so Reese decided she’d just leave them all in a stack in the corner of her apartment.

      “You’re sure you want to get rid of these?” Todd, her neighbor, asked. He had a box of vinyl albums under one arm and a pink stuffed elephant under the other.

      Since Reese had bought the vinyls just the month before at a garage sale, it wouldn’t be a great sentimental loss. She could say that about everything in her apartment, though.

      Now that the watch was gone.

      Reese hadn’t intended to leave it with the cowboy, but it’d just felt right at the time, as if it were something he would appreciate.

      As for the elephant, she’d found it by the Dumpster and couldn’t stand the thought of it having the stuffing crushed out of it so Reese had given it a temporary home. Temporary was the norm for her, too, and she made a habit of not staying in one place for long.

      “Take them,” Reese assured Todd. “I won’t be able to bring anything with me to Cambodia.”

      Reese wasn’t sure why the lie about Cambodia had rolled so easily off her tongue, but it did now just as it had the first time she’d told it. So had the other lies needed to support that one because as she’d quickly learned one solo lie just led to more questions.

      Questions she didn’t want to answer.

      As the story now went, she was moving to Cambodia to do a reality show about jungle cooking. She wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone for at least a year, and after that, the producers of the show were sending her to Vietnam. It was surprising that everyone believed her. Of course, everyone wasn’t close to her. That was her fault.

      In my next life I need to make more friends. And not move every few months.

      But with mental memos like that came the depression. She wouldn’t cry. She’d already wasted too many tears on something she couldn’t change. Though if there was more time, she would have run to the store for some books on coping with grief.

      “Knock, knock,” someone called out from the open door. “Food pimp has arrived.” Jimena Martinelli wiggled her away around a departing Todd, ignoring both the elephant and the heated look Todd gave her.

      Jimena was the worst chef Reese had ever worked with, but she was also Reese’s only friend. In every way that counted, she was like a sister.

      The genetic product of an Irish-Mexican mother and Korean-Italian father, even in a blended city like San Antonio, Jimena stood out partly because she was stunning. Also partly because she drank like a fish, cursed like a sailor and ate like a pig. Her motto was If it’s not fun, don’t fucking do it, and she literally had those words tattooed on her back.

      Reese had first met her when they were sixteen, homeless and trying to scrape by. At various times they’d been roommates. Other times Jimena had stayed behind to be with a boyfriend or a job she particularly liked when Reese had felt those restless stirrings to move. But eventually Jimena had felt similar stirrings—or else had gotten dumped—and had caught up with Reese.

      Jimena was also the only person other than Reese’s doctor who knew her diagnosis. The sole reason Reese had told her was so there’d be someone to tie up any loose ends in case the last-ditch treatment failed.

      Which it almost certainly would.

      A 2 percent chance pretty much spelled failure.

      “I brought the good stuff,” Jimena announced. She breezed toward Reese and sat down on the floor beside her despite the fact Jimena was wearing shorts so tight that the movement alone could have given her an orgasm.

      Jimena didn’t ask what most people would have asked: How are you feeling? Nor did she give Reese any sad sympathetic looks. That was the reason Reese had told her. Jimena perhaps wanted to know, but asking Reese about her death diagnosis wasn’t fun, therefore it wasn’t something Jimena was going to do. And that was fine.

      Especially since Reese wasn’t sure how she felt, anyway.

      She’d been drinking too much, eating too much, and she’d had a headache since this whole ordeal had begun. Of course, she wasn’t sure how much was because of the tumor, which she’d named Myrtle, or if the overindulgence was playing into this. Reese suspected both.

      “Milk Duds,” Jimena said, taking out the first item from the bag. There were at least a dozen boxes of them. “Cheetos.” Three family-size bags. “Not that reduced-fat shit, either. These are orange and greasy.” She pulled out powdered doughnuts next. “Oh, and Diet Dr. Pepper. The store clerk said, ‘Why bother?’ when he saw it was diet, but I told him I try to cut calories here and there.”

      Reese wished that all those food items, either separately or collectively, would have turned her stomach. After all, she was a chef with supposedly refined tastes, but she was a shallow foodie.

      “I’ve already eaten so much my jeans are too tight,” Reese told her while she was opening the Milk Duds. “At this rate, I won’t be able to fit in my coffin.”

      Jimena started in on the Cheetos as if this were the most normal conversation in the world. “You said you wanted to be cremated, anyway.”

      “I might not fit into my urn,” Reese amended.

      “Then I’ll make sure you have two urns. Eat up. You can’t be miserable while eating junk food.”

      Well, you could be until the sugar high kicked in, but that would no doubt happen soon.

      “Making any more progress with the bucket list?” Jimena asked, taking the notepad that Reese had placed next to her.

      Number one was “give away stuff.”

      Now that the vinyls and elephant were gone, Reese could check that off. The only things left were the blow-up mattress she used for a bed, the books, her clothes, a box of baking soda in the fridge and a three-month-old tin of caramel popcorn that was now glued together from the humidity. She would toss it, of course, but Reese had wanted to look at the cute puppies on the tin a few more times.

      Oh, and there was the backpack.

      She’d named it Tootsie Roll because of the color and because it frequently contained some of the candies.

      Reese tipped her head to it, the only other item in the living room. “Everything in there goes to you,” she told Jimena.

      Jimena looked at the worn hiker’s backpack as if it might contain gold bullion. Then snakes. “You’re sure?” she asked.

      “Positive.”

      Jimena was taking care of her death wishes so it seemed only natural to give her the things Reese had carried with her from move to move. Most of the stuff in the backpack would just disappoint her friend, but there was a nice pair of Shun knives Jimena might like if she ever learned how to do food prep.

      “Number two,” Jimena read from the list. “‘Quit job.’ Well, we know that’s done after what you said to Chef Dante. I heard the part about you saying you wished someone would crush his balls with a rusty garlic press.”

      Yes, Reese had said that. And Dante had deserved it and worse. That was the first thing she’d checked