Life Is A Beach: Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling. Pamela Browning

something revealing. She’d—yeah. She’d make a fool of herself. Again.

      “Five o’clock. Right. Thanks, Ms.—O’Connor, is it?”

      She scooped one of her cards out of the jumble on her desk. “Karma O’Connor. Like on the sign out front.”

      He looked at the card, looked at her. “Nice name, Karma. What does it mean?”

      “Destiny,” she said, staring him straight in the eye, and despite her reservations, in that moment she was certain that she had found hers.

      AFTER SLADE HAD LEFT HER OFFICE, Karma immediately dashed across the street to the Blue Moon, where she rented a tiny three-room pad.

      The Blue Moon was exactly the kind of place Karma would have chosen to live even if it hadn’t been right across the street from Rent-a-Yenta. The building had seen its heyday in the late 1940s. It was painted pale pink, the doors and windows were outlined in aqua, and a lavender-blue stripe circled the top of the building. A blue bas-relief half moon hung over the door. Karma had heard the place variously described as “an iced pastry,” and “a Wurlitzer jukebox done in pastels.” After the heavy dark brick of her apartment block in Connecticut, she loved it.

      Goldy, manager, desk clerk, custodian and security officer all rolled into one, sat inside the doorway behind a counter. She glanced up from her knitting with rapid-blinking brown eyes. Her short spiky hair gleamed in the sunlight from the nearby window; it was an energetic shade of copper this week. In the background a radio blared some sixties girl group singing, “Today I Met the Man I’m Going to Marry.”

      Was the song an omen? Maybe. Karma believed in omens.

      “Hi, Goldy, anything new?”

      “I read the tarot cards for you today. Something big’s coming up. Something major.” Her voice was tiny, like a little girl’s.

      “Like being able to pay my office rent?” Slade Braddock’s registration fee made that a sure thing.

      “Hmm. Could be bigger than that.” Goldy set aside her knitting and adjusted the voluminous folds of one of the huge flower-print muumuus she liked to wear.

      “Nothing’s bigger than paying the rent.”

      “I thought since you gave up the five-room office suite, you’d be okay.”

      “Only if I bring in more business. Things fell apart fast when Aunt Sophie was sick. She may have left me her business, but I’ve got to revive it. After quitting a market research job, being laid off from Psychtronics Magazine and getting fired from The Bickerstiff Corporation, it’s a welcome opportunity.”

      “Maybe you should have your chakras read, get some direction. I have time late this afternoon.” Goldy’s shtick was anything New Age, and she never let anyone forget it.

      “Can’t. I’m busy.”

      “Well, there you go. Business must be picking up,” Goldy said with an air of idle speculation, which was how Karma knew that Goldy, from her vantage point by the window, had seen Slade Braddock.

      “I have a new client,” Karma said reluctantly.

      “Is he anyone that Jennifer might be interested in?” Jennifer was Goldy’s niece, and she’d signed up with Rent-a-Yenta the first week after Karma had taken over. Jennifer was hard to place because she had no real interests other than herself. Her favorite pastime seemed to be playing “Boxers or Briefs” while guy-watching with her best friend Mandi on Collins Avenue, and Karma privately thought that her brain was so empty that she ought to wear a Rooms for Rent sign on her forehead.

      Karma managed a casual shrug. She couldn’t see Slade Braddock with Jennifer. Or maybe she didn’t want to.

      “Well, how about Mandi?” Goldy asked.

      Karma had experienced some success in placing Mandi, who also lived in this apartment house, but most guys backed off after they realized that artfully streaked hair, acrylic fingernails, and weekly massages did not come without a steep price.

      “Could be,” said Karma noncommittally. She turned to go.

      “Oh, by the way, Geofredo’s probably in your apartment right now. He’s respraying the whole third floor.”

      Karma stopped and frowned. “I told you I didn’t want that exterminator guy coming into my place. You know I don’t believe in killing anything.”

      Goldy spared her a meaningful look. “You told me you had a family of roaches living under your refrigerator.”

      The roaches were palmetto bugs, enormous and all too prevalent in the state of Florida. These were big brown insects the size of hummingbirds, and they also flew. For palmetto bugs and spiders, which creeped her out bigtime, Karma was able to relax her standards slightly as long as she didn’t have to do the killing.

      Goldy said, “You tell Geofredo to check the supply room on your floor for spiders.”

      “Will do.”

      Karma started up the stairs to the third floor; there was no elevator in the building. She figured the stairs were good exercise, which she needed now that she was going to be sitting behind a desk every day. Not that she had done much sitting so far, since the chair was usually piled high with papers. Most of the hours she had put in at the Rent-a-Yenta office had been spent painting and cleaning, with an occasional client thrown in for good measure.

      Speaking of clients, Goldy’s niece Jennifer was skipping toward her down the stairs, probably on her way home from visiting Mandi. Jennifer’s hair was long, straight, and bouncy. She wore a tight cutoff Planet Hollywood shirt with low-slung white capri pants that showed off her silver navel tassel.

      “Hi, Karma,” she said, stopping before they passed. “Hey, are those real?”

      “Are what—?” Karma began before she realized that Jennifer was unabashedly staring at her breasts.

      Karma shook her head as if to clear it. Was she supposed to answer such a question?

      “I don’t mean the boobs, silly. If they were fake, you’d have chosen bigger ones. No, I mean the nipples.”

      “What?” Back in Connecticut, where Karma came from, people didn’t ask such personal questions.

      “Oh, well, I guess they must be. Forget I asked—I was only wondering if your nipples were fake because I’m going to buy some if I can figure out where to get them, and I thought you could tell me.”

      “Sheesh, Jennifer, what are you talking about?” Karma had thought, erroneously it appeared, that she had outgrown being freaked by the wacko characters in Miami Beach.

      Jennifer tossed her head so that her hair gave off the overpowering scent of mango-coconut shampoo. “Nipples, silly, you can buy fake ones to stick on. My own are kind of puny, and the idea of all these guys I’m going to meet through Rent-a-Yenta has been making me think. Do I want a steady boyfriend? Yes! Do I want to use every means at my disposal to attract one? Yes! Guys love huge nipples, Karma, believe me. It’s a major drawing point. Point, that’s funny!” She laughed uproariously.

      Karma made herself keep a straight face. “I can’t help you, sorry. But if I were you, I’d try that place advertised on the big billboard near the airport—The Booby Trap ‘n Boutique.” The billboard featured an overendowed winking woman wearing nothing but a large pink feather.

      “Oooh! Good idea! Thanks, Karma.” With that, Jennifer resumed her skipping down the stairs, and Karma readjusted her blouse so that it didn’t cling.

      The exterminator, Geofredo, was backing into her apartment with his bug-spray equipment as she arrived. Karma considered if maybe this was the man she was going to marry, like in the song. She also considered readjusting her blouse so that it did cling, but she quickly gave up the idea until she knew more about him.

      As he went around her apartment spraying and smiling