"Were fuzzy slippers involved?" Shane asked, wary.

"No, not this time." Bette let her head rest against the porch. "But there was just something about the outfit that spoke to me. Told me how much she needs me back to fix her."

Shane surveyed the pile of Chinese food cartons and beer bottles strewn about the porch. "And you’re sure that’s what she wanted."

Bette battered her doe-like eyes with a softness that Bambi would envy. "And why wouldn’t she? I am, after all, me."

"Which is kind of like me," Jenny interjected. "Except older, and living next door, and successful," Jenny pouted, "and stuff."

"How about you, Shane?"

"Me? I’m not like you." She looked back and forth between the two women. "Either of you."

Bette gave a smile, the kind of smile that she often gave to Shane, to Shane. "No, I mean, how are things for you."

Shane shrugged. "Same ol’."

"So, two women today?"

Shane smiled in spite of herself. "Well, one I passed on, because it was a strip club."

One corner of Bette’s mouth wrenched into a grin. "Don’t tell me you don’t think women should take advantage of other women."

"Nah, that’s the kind of thing women say shortly before they’re stuffing twenties into a g-string of the woman giving them the lapdance." Shane reviewed, quickly, what she’d just said, wondering if it was possibly too much, and took a drink, deciding it was too much work to actually worry about what one had just said.

"And the other?" Bette prodded.

"Went to visit her grandma."

Jenny looked almost prepared to engage in the conversation. "You went out with a grandmother?"

"No." Shane gave Jenny an incredulous laugh. "Then again, if granny’s hot" she mused aloud.

Bette shook her head. "I don’t think I want to hear this."

Jenny stared intently at the dark-colored glass of the beer bottle, wondering if she could see her reflection within, although seated on the porch, outside, in the dark. "I want to hear this."

Shane took a deep breath. "There’s nothing to hear."

"If you say so," said Bette, giving yet another of the looks that she often gave to Shane in Shane’s direction.

"Nothing," repeated Shane. Clear, definite, unequivocal.

It remained quiet as each woman took another drink of beer.

A quiet lasted nanoseconds, until Jenny could no longer bear it. "It’s almost like we exist in a story by JDS."

Bette stood and motioned with at Shane towards the back of the house as she took off, quietly opening the front door.

"Written by JD," Jenny continued, lost in her own Jennyness.

Shane grabbed the beer and followed Jenny. She made no pretext of being quiet. It didn’t matter.

"As told to J." Jenny smiled, pleased at her cleverness. "As if any of this is autobiographical," she though, out loud, through spoken words.

Yet another night. On a front porch, and, for sanity’s sake, poolside, in West Hollywood. And all was as it should be. Sort of.

(the end)