I Want Candy by Susan Donovan

off, no men in the apartment. Also, no late-night phone calls. No alcohol. No smoking. You’ll have to sleep here.” Jacinta pointed at the cream and white floral tufted-back sofa. “And two weeks is the absolute maximum you can stay. It’s in the tenant association contract—only immediate family can spend the night and only for a total of fourteen days per year.”
    Candy nodded, dropping her overnight case on the plush carpet of Jacinta’s sitting room. From what she’d gleaned in the last hour—at the lunch table and from her mother’s ongoing commentary—this place had more official and unofficial rules than a federal prison.
    “And I’ll expect you to busy yourself on Monday and Friday evenings. That’s when I play bridge. And you’ll need to find somewhere to go every Tuesday and Saturday evening from between seven and ten, so that I can have my privacy.”
    Candy stared, then blinked.
    “I entertain, you know.”
    No doubt.
    Candy had seen evidence of that at lunch, when it became clear she’d landed in some kind of wrinkle in the space-time continuum where the plot lines for the movies Cocoon and Mean Girls had merged, where the cattiness far surpassed anything she’d experienced as a Tri Delta pledge at Florida State, and where the laws of supply and demand had gone haywire when it came to the most precious commodity of all at Cherokee Pines— men .
    She’d counted seven male residents in the dining room during lunch, each surrounded by a dedicated harem of females. The coveted seat Jacinta had feared would be snatched up was at the left elbow of Hugo Stevens, cock of the walk. He was a retired plumbing contractor who still had all his own hair, sported a pencil-thin mustache, and was partial to ascots. Candy had watched, impressed, as Jacinta managed to bat her eyes at Hugo while simultaneously beating off the competition with vaguely threatening hand gestures and snide remarks.
    So, sure. Candy would find something—anything—to do while Jacinta “entertained” Hugo on Saturday nights. Maybe she’d take up bowling.
    “Anything else I should know?” she asked her mother.
    “I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting, but we’ll cover it as we go along.”
    There was a knock at the open door to Jacinta’s apartment, and Gerrall poked his head in. He was carrying a box that Candy had intended to fetch from the lobby.
    “You didn’t have to do that,” she told him, reaching out to take the cardboard container from his hands.
    Gerrall laughed. “Oh, yeah I did. Mr. Miller was freaking because it was sitting on the floor near the entrance. He said it looked unteamly or something.”
    “Unseemly?”
    “That was it.”
    “But I was coming right back for it,” Candy said.
    Gerrall actually smiled at her. “Miller can be a little stiff sometimes. Just try to ignore him.”
    “God knows we all do,” Jacinta said.
    Candy laughed as she put the box down by her suitcase. She’d already decided to leave the rest of her stuff in the car, since she was getting sick of packing and unpacking. Besides, she already doubted she’d last a whole fourteen days at the Senior Citizen Sing-Sing. It wasn’t intentional, but she let go with a loud sigh as she plopped down on the sofa.
    “Here. I snuck this out of the kitchen for you.”
    Gerrall reached down over her shoulder and gave Candy an up-close view of a piece of greasy chocolate cake wrapped in a napkin. Gerrall must have been carrying it around in his pants pocket, since it looked flattened.
    “Oh!” she said, accepting the gift, trying not to make a face. “How nice of you!”
    She’d attempted to eat a piece of this cake at lunch, and it had tasted like Styrofoam frosted with peanut-butter-flavored wallpaper paste, and she’d decided that no one—no matter how catty they were—deserved desserts that bad. In fact, the entire lunch had been lousy.
    Candy put the brakes on her racing thoughts, very nearly laughing at herself.