In the time that it had taken for Harper to get off of her chair and lumber towards the side door, anyone else might have given up and thought that nobody was home. Thankfully, Hannah Johnson had become fully aware of the fact that it took her best (and only) friend in Daven's Port a little extra time to get around the house.
"Hannah!" Harper was absolutely breathless by the time that she had answered the door in her bathrobe, compounding her reasons to feel embarrassed by such an event, "What are you—"
Harper snapped her plump sausage fingers immediately, catching herself in her own fallacy. She had completely forgotten that she was going to take the Texan mother of two shopping downtown.
"Shopping." Harper said with a nod, "I forgot."
"Shopping." Hannah piqued a brown eyebrow, "You forgot—we were supposed to meet like an hour ago, Harper!"
"I'm sorry, I overslept!" Harper put on her best apology face as she ushered the hippy housewife inside, "Please come in, I-I'm kind of a hot mess right now..."
"It's alright, Harper—I really just wanted to make sure that you were okay..."
In the time that it had been since Hannah and her family had moved from Texas to North Carolina, she and Harper had become fast friends. Mostly, it was due to the fact that their daughters, Dakota and Piper, had become even faster friends. But once they had been introduced, the two women had practically been inseparable. It had helped that Hannah didn't know anyone else, and that Harper had been more than willing to try whatever Texas recipes that Hannah had brought with her in the move. It hadn't taken much more than a few biscuits and calling something called "tritip" for Harper to decide that she could take to Hannah just as quickly as Piper had taken to her daughter, Dakota...
But, then, that just went right back to the fact that Harper was far too food-motivated, didn't it?
"Let me... let me get changed..." Harper hefted one pillowy leg over the other as she kneed herself in the underbelly, "It's not even noon, we can... we can..."
Harper fell short of breath just moving herself around the house these days. Christ, she was out of shape. And getting so winded in front of her friend, how embarassing!
"Sure! I haven't had lunch yet—we can grab something while we're out!"
Harper's full stomach gurgled in pavlovian response to yet more food. How could she have still been hungry? She wasn't, surely. That was just her being a greedy guts, excited by the thought of yet more food to stuff into her fat face. No wonder she had gotten so big...
But then again, it would have been rude to say no after making poor Hannah wait like two hours just for them to go shopping.
"Sure!" Harper shouted down the hallway, "I know a few places that won't be too busy..."
"You always know a few places..." Hannah hollered back as she casually perused the emptied donut box and came up disappointed, "Not that I'm complaining anyway..."
It wasn't always commented on, because Harper literally weighed almost twice as much as her Texan house mom friend, but her influence on Hannah's diet had been atrocious. Before leaving, before the stress of moving into a new city in a new state so that her husband could continue to climb the ladder at DynaCorp, Hannah Johnson had been the svelte envy of the neighborhood moms. And after two kids! But once she had started palling around with Harper, who almost always seemed to have some recommendations, she had steadily crept up in size until she had only just recently cracked two hundred pounds. After a year of living in Daven's Port, Hannah Johnson was now a positively plump two hundred and twenty pounds—just twenty pounds shy of matching Piper in size.
But if Hannah had ever blamed Harper for her weight gain, she'd never said anything. Harper sometimes did, but that was because she was used to thinking that she made people fat by being a bad influence. The truth was that Hannah was just a stressed housewife who had found a friend in not only Harper, but also in food to help cope with a stressful move—which made her far more like Harper than the busty, black-haired beluga would have liked to admit.
As she waddled out into the living room, now dressed in a loose and flowy top with high-waisted jeans that allowed her belly to pour forward into a hammock of acid-wash denim, Harper's tight black curls billowed out like the rest of her. Out of her bathrobe, she was quite the sight—despite her weight, Harper could still turn a few heads within the right crowd.
"Are you ready?" Hannah asked, her cheeks dimpling in a smile, "I'll drive."
"Thank God..." Harper huffed as she hauled herself towards the side door, "Driving stresses me out..."
Too many drive-thrus to avoid...
"So—where to?"
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