The Great Escape (Wynette, Texas #7)(56)

“There’s the door! You want to leave? Go ahead! If you don’t care, neither do I.” The veins on Temple’s slim neck popped, and her perfectly glossed mouth formed a snarl. “Get on the boat and off the island. Let everybody see what a loser you are.”

The woman was openly crying now, but Temple continued to berate her. It was painful to watch. Even more painful to imagine what kind of desperation would drive someone to let herself be subjected to this kind of abuse.

The woman’s tears only fueled Temple’s scorn. “Boo hoo. This is what you’ve done all your life. Cry about your problems instead of fixing them. Go on! Get off the island! There are thousands of people waiting to take your place.”

“No!” the woman cried. “I can do it. I can do this.”

“Then do it!”

Temple hit the pause button as the woman began frantically pummeling a punching bag. Lucy didn’t believe self-loathing was the best form of motivation, but Temple thought differently. “Irene ran her first half marathon four months after we taped that episode,” she said proudly. “By the time I was done with her, she’d lost over a hundred pounds.”

Lucy wondered how many of those hundred pounds Irene had been able to keep off without Temple around to scream in her face.

“God, she looked amazing.” Temple turned off the television and stood, wincing slightly as she straightened. “The critics are always putting me down. They’ll compare me to trainers like Jillian Michaels—say she has a heart and I don’t. I have a heart. A big one. But you don’t help people by coddling them, and I’ll match my results against hers any day.” She jerked her head toward the stairs. “I’m going to do some upper body work. From the looks of those arms, you should join me.”

The face of the sobbing woman flashed through Lucy’s mind. “It’s not a good time for me.”

Temple’s lip curled. “There’s never a good time for you, is there, Lucy? You can always find a reason not to take care of yourself.”

“I take care of myself.” Maybe it was Temple’s intimidating glare, or it could have been the second chili dog, but she didn’t sound convincing. “I exercise,” she said in a firmer voice. “I don’t love to, but I do it.”

Temple crossed her arms over her chest like a prison warden. “What kind of exercise?”

“Push-ups. Some crunches. I walk a lot. Sometimes I run.”

“Sometimes doesn’t cut it.”

“In the winter, I go to the gym.” Three times a week, if she was lucky. More often twice. But hardly a week went by that she didn’t get there at least once.

Temple flicked her hand toward Lucy’s body as if it were spoiled meat. “Are you really satisfied with the results you’re getting?”

Lucy thought about it. “I sort of am.”

“You’re lying to yourself.”

“I don’t think so. Would I like to be a little firmer? What woman wouldn’t? But I keep at it. A little here, a little there. Do I obsess about it? Not really.”

“Every woman in this country obsesses about her body. You can’t live in our society without obsessing.”

It occurred to Lucy that she was so screwed up about so many other things—what she owed her family, what she owed herself, and how she was supposed to balance the two—that she didn’t have time for serious body-image issues. “I’m not into heavy workouts. I guess I have my own exercise philosophy. The ‘Good Enough’ approach.”

Temple looked as though Lucy had cockroaches crawling over her, and even though Lucy knew it was useless to explain, she gave it a try. “I believe exercise is important, but I’m not training for a triathlon, just for general fitness. And when I make exercise drudgery, I stop altogether.”

“You should force yourself.”

“I’m pretty happy being weak-willed.” Lucy considered suggesting that Temple might not be quite so miserable if she tried a little more of the “Good Enough” approach. The Evil Queen’s weight gain couldn’t be accidental, and the social worker inside Lucy wondered what had happened to make Temple lose that iron self-control.

But Temple couldn’t comprehend Lucy’s laid-back attitude, and Lucy took advantage of her temporary speechlessness to switch the subject. “I have a twelve-year-old friend who tends to pop up here uninvited.”

Temple’s eyes widened in alarm. “That can’t happen.”

“Without an electric fence surrounding the property, it’ll be hard to keep him out. I told him I have a girlfriend visiting, so if he shows up, he won’t think it’s strange that you’re here.”

“You don’t understand! No one can see me!”

“I doubt that he’s part of your fan base.”

“Panda!” Temple screeched. “Panda, get in here.”

Panda took all kinds of time wandering in.

Temple jabbed her hand at Lucy. “I can’t deal with this now. Take care of it!” She stormed out and pounded up the stairs two at a time.

Instead of addressing the subject at hand, Panda gazed around at the living room. “What happened to my furniture?”

“What furniture?”

“The furniture that used to be in here.”