'Hurry up. I'm losing it. I need salt. I need grease. I need something crunchy in my mouth. I'm running a fever here.'
Cindy was sitting on Carol's front porch when we drove up.
'She won't let me in,' Cindy said. 'I know she's in there. I can hear her pacing.'
I rapped on the front door. 'Carol, open the door. It's Stephanie.'
'Have you got food?'
I crinkled a bag of Cheez Doodles so she could hear it through the door. 'Lula and I stopped on the way over and bought Doodles to get you through the court session.'
Carol cracked the door. 'Let me see.'
I shoved the Cheez Doodles at her. She grabbed the bag from me, ripped it open, and shoved a handful of doodles into her mouth.
'Oh yeah,' she said, sounding a lot like Lowanda doing phone sex. 'I feel better already.'
1 thought you were over the doodle craving,' Lula said.
'I'm not good with stress,' Carol said. 'It's a glandular thing.'
It's a mental thing,' Lula said. 'You're a nut.'
We all followed Carol upstairs to her bedroom.
'I did my hair, and I put on my makeup, and then I went to get dressed, and I just sort of had a brain fart,' Carol said.
We stood at the doorway and surveyed the disaster area. It looked like her closet exploded, and then her room was ransacked by monkeys.
'Guess you couldn't decide what to wear,' Lula said, stepping over the clothes carnage that littered the floor.
'Nothing fits!' Carol wailed.
'Would have been good if you'd discovered that yesterday,' Lula said. 'You ever think of preparing ahead?'
I was picking through the crumpled piles of clothes on the floor, looking for slacks with elastic waistbands, bulky tops, scarves that matched. 'Help me out here,' I said. 'Let's start with the slacks.
Black would be good. Everything goes with black.'
'Yeah, and it don't show the cellulite lumps,' Lula said. 'Black is real slimming.'
Ten minutes later we had Carol squashed into black slacks. The button was open at the waist but you couldn't see it under the hip-length dark blue cotton shirt.
'Good thing you got this nice big roomy shirt,' Lula said to Carol.
Carol looked down at it. 'It's a nightgown.'
'Do you have any roomy shirts that aren't nightgowns?' I asked her.
'They all have doodle stains on them,' she said. 'It's hard to get those orange smudges out of stuff
'You know what I think?' I said. I think this outfit looks good. No one will know you're wearing a nightgown. It looks just like a shirt.
And the color is good for you.'
'Yeah,' Lula and Cindy said. The color is good.'
'Okay,' I said, 'we're ready to go.'