Lisa Scottoline - Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog - The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman

It might take a new bribe. I haven’t tried the Gourmet Gold Filet Mignon Flavor with Real Seafood & Shrimp. That’s even better than the food at my last wedding.

No matter, I’ll never give up on Vivi.

Even a bad girl needs love.

There’s a lot of talk lately about the big mysteries of life. By that phrase, people seem to mean how the Earth began or other questions that only public television can answer.

Honestly, I’m more interested in the small mysteries of life. The mysteries that stump us day-to-day. The mysteries we need to figure out to make our lives better.

Like magazine renewals.

I’m a big fan of magazines. Actually I’m a big fan of reading anything, including cereal boxes, which is why I knew the word “riboflavin” at an early age. But when I grew up, I loved magazines like Seventeen. The day they publish a magazine called Fifty-Two, I’m in.

I subscribe to a bunch of magazines; People, Us Weekly, Time, The New Yorker, House & Garden, Vogue, Publishers Weekly, and Cosmopolitan. Cosmo is for my daughter. I’m no longer qualified to teach her about sex, since I forget.

To stay on point, I love all these magazines, and because I love them so much, I try to avoid the dreaded Interruption in Service. In my broke days, I had one of those with the electric company, and it was no fun at all. I prefer to keep my magazines up and running, with their current flowing smoothly.

But the mystery is that I can never figure out when to renew, mainly because the magazines send me so many renewal forms, almost as soon as my subscription has begun. Time magazine sends renewal forms even before you get your first issue of Time, or maybe whenever you use the word time, or even if you wonder what time it is. You read their magazine, but they read your mind.

There’s simply no other explanation for their speed. If I ever have a heart attack, give my nitro to Time magazine.

And the subscription rates are a mystery, too. All the forms offer special rates. Some have a special rate if you subscribe for two or more years, others if you want to buy a gift subscription, and still others if you like the color blue. I get the distinct impression that special rates aren’t all that special in magazineland.

As Gilbert & Sullivan say, If everybody’s somebody, then nobody’s anybody.

And then there are the offers for a professional rate, which I’m offered all the time. The magazines seem to think that I’m a professional, and as flattered as I am, I have to wonder. How do they know what I do and whether I’m professional at it? Plus, what type of professional do you have to be to get a professional rate for Cosmo?

Don’t answer.

For a while, I thought I was onto their game, and so I ignored the snowglobe of renewal offers. I figured I would renew when I sensed my subscription was about to expire. Wait them out. Play renewal chicken.

But I lost.

I got so used to ignoring renewal forms, I must’ve ignored the wrong 300 of them, because now I have an Interruption in Service in both People and Time magazines. I don’t know about you, but I need People magazine. I pounce on it the moment it comes in and gobble it right up. I also need Time magazine, so I can put it on my coffee table and impress people.

Ironically, People doesn’t impress people.

So I renewed People and Time, and determined not to ignore any more renewal forms. I figured they must know better than I do when my subscription expires. So I responded to the various offers for special professionals like me, but I still messed up. Now I get two copies of Us Weekly every week, which is four times as much Lindsay Lohan as I can take. (Although I do love Us Weekly’s feature, They’re Just Like Us, which shows celebrities on their continuous vacations, proving conclusively that They’re Not Like Us At All.)

On top of my double dose of Us Weekly, somehow I started getting Rolling Stone, to which I never subscribed. I have no idea how this happened. I like Rolling Stone, though I have no business getting it. I stopped rolling a long time ago. Nowadays, I’m happy just to sit and stay. I’m more a rock than a stone, these days.

But it’s a mystery why Rolling Stone started coming to me. I’m guessing that my magazines know a renewal rookie when they see one and they passed the word.

It’s a mystery of life, to me. I’m a mystery writer, and even I’m stumped.

Maybe I need to be a mystery of life writer.

Mother Mary has gone back to Miami, and I miss her snowy white hair, her homemade meatballs, and her lab coat. And there’s one other thing I miss.

Her back scratcher.

Yes, you read it right. She has a back scratcher, which she brought to my house with her. Of course, like any smart-alecky daughter, I gave her a lot of grief when I saw it, as she was unpacking.

“Who travels with a back scratcher?” I asked.

“Who doesn’t?” she answered, because, as you may remember, Mother Mary always answers a question with a question.

So I let it go. Mother has had a back scratcher for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure if this is an age thing or a Mary Scottoline thing. I don’t know anyone else who owns a back scratcher, much less who won’t leave home without one. The back scratcher she had when I was little was of pink plastic, with a tiny hand at the end. It looked like a baby arm.

Borderline creepy.

Her new back scratcher was even odder. A foot long, made from a weird piece of teak or other endangered wood, and at the end where the baby hand would be was a bend shaped like an L, with long fingers carved half-heartedly into the bottom. Misused, it could put out an eye.

“They let you take this through security?” I asked her.

“Why wouldn’t they?” she answered. She slid the back scratcher from my hand, crossed to the dresser, and put it with the neatly folded shirts in her dresser drawer. Mother always uses the dresser drawers, no matter how short her visit, and even in a hotel. When she met me in Boston, she stayed in the hotel one night, and still she unpacked her neatly folded clothes and placed them carefully in the dresser. I didn’t ask her why, because I knew she would answer:

“What’s the difference to you?”

The other thing of note about Mother Mary is her suitcase. She always travels with a red canvas duffel, which she got free as part of a promotion for Marlboro cigarettes. She used it for almost ten years, until one of the pleather handles fell off and the Marlboro red took on a carcinogenic hue.

I hate the Marlboro duffel, and on her last trip, I finally persuaded her to let me replace it. This is a nice way of saying that we fought about it all the way to the airport, so that I had exhausted her by the time we reached the Brookstone in Terminal B, where I saw my opening and didn’t hesitate. I bought her a new black bag with wheels, then sat down on the floor of the store and transferred all of her clothes, including the back scratcher, into the new bag. Still she wouldn’t let me throw the Marlboro bag away, but insisted that we pack it inside the Brookstone bag.