Here's where the story ends...or begins

The buzzing noises of insects, and neighbors mowing their lawns, filled the evening air with a sense of familiarity; these weren't the sounds Grace would typically hear in the city, these were the sounds of the suburbs. Of course, the slight "clinking" noise of house keys being thrown into medium-sized Pyrex bowls and neighbors preparing for the monthly spouse-swap was not meant to be overheard by any of the non-participating spouses, silence was the preferred norm- ice storms rarely are ushered in with much clatter. Only later, when the reverberations from husbands and wives wanton actions broke families apart, were the bombastic explosions heard. Grace had just assumed the noise was from her ice cubes melting in her glass of Diet Dr. Pepper; it's easy to mistake the two when you don't know to be listening for a difference.

Grace finally made her way to the front door porch to fetch the evening paper, a not-long-for-this-world tradition, that she clung to dearly. Grace just didn't get the Internet and Facebook and Twitter; she was from the generation (okay, she pretended she was) of ink and paper; she enjoyed her Scrabble played on a board, not online, she only did the crosswords printed in the papers, and scandals could only be enjoyed (and properly gossiped about) if they were screamed across the front page. She knew of Perez Hilton, but figured she was a "Red Roof Inn" type of gal and wouldn't support "that" family, or "their" type of news, anyways.

Plopping herself down into her overstuffed, and slightly ragged, but still most comfortable arm chair, Grace tucked her left leg (which was the less preferred of the two, but considering the right ankle was still slightly swollen from "the incident", doing it the other way around wasn't an option) under herself and began her evening ritual of reading the paper. Unfolding the paper onto her lap, "The Vatican Revisits Sin" read the paper's headline. "Well, great, and just in the nick of time," Grace thought, "what will they have to say about Eliot Spitzer (client #9) and the mess he's gotten himself into?" She doubted that dying poodles pink to create awareness for breast cancer month, or power-washing a tantrum-throwing two years old, would have gained the attention of the Holy See and thus not make the new list of sins, but she was hoping that at least...