Asking for Trouble (5 page)

“And I’m thirty,” Mira added. “I’ll be thirty-one by the
time the babies are born. We figured if we wanted to space them a few years
apart, it was time to start. And we thought it might take a while, once we
started trying. But it turned out that it happened the first month.” She smiled
at Gabe, her color mounting a bit higher, and he smiled right back at her.

“Just another example of Mira’s efficiency,” he said with a
grin for his brother. “And don’t tell me Desiree doesn’t have a full time line mapped
out for the two of you, because I won’t believe you. Or that Dad agreed to
marry you without some major premarital counseling, including who’s cleaning
the bathroom and how many kids you both want and whether you keep your money in
a joint account, because I know he didn’t. I’ll bet you got it from Rev.
Wilder, too, just like we did.”

Alec laughed. “Could be. On both counts.”

“But wait a minute,” Alyssa protested, still stuck on Topic
A. “I thought twins only ran in families on the female side. I thought I was
the only one more likely to have them.”

“Fraternal twins, that’s true,” Gabe said.

“Oh.” Susie’s hands were clasped in front of her chest, and
she looked like she’d just got the best Christmas present ever. “Are you saying
. . .”

“One placenta,” Gabe said. “Identical twins.”

“Identical twins,” she breathed. “Oh, that’s . . . Girls or
boys?”

“They think boys,” Gabe said. “We won’t know for sure for
another month or so, but it’s looking like they’ve got the equipment.” And he
looked even more smug.

That made her parents laugh at each other again. “I am
definitely
coming to help,” Susie said.
“You just try to keep me away.”

And that was all very lovely. All very heartwarming. And depressing
as hell. Everybody so wonderfully successful, everybody so happily partnered.
Everybody except Alyssa, unemployed and single, sleeping alone in her childhood
bedroom on Christmas Eve with not a single good prospect on the horizon,
boyfriend-wise, job-wise,
anything
-wise.
And this year, she was thirty.

It was time to start.
Pretty
hard to start all by yourself. Well, she thought as she scraped plates and loaded
the dishwasher, at least she’d get to be an aunt. She tried to feel good about
that. It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy for Mira and Gabe, because she was. But
it was so hard not to be jealous.

 
“Don’t save that,”
she told Joe as he began to put the leftover spaghetti noodles into a plastic
container, working deliberately, the way he always did. Which made her want to
grab the container from him and show him how to do it
fast,
like a normal person.

“Why not?”

“They don’t taste good warmed up. The texture’s all wrong. It’s
better to use fresh ones.”

“But if you save them, you don’t have to cook fresh ones.
And they’ll have sauce on them. You won’t really be able to tell,” he said, sounding
perfectly calm, perfectly reasonable.

Mira had a husband who used his turn signal just so she’d
feel safe. And Alyssa couldn’t even get her way about the
noodles,
because Joe didn’t think her opinion counted for anything,
and he didn’t care if she was happy. The tears came to her eyes even as she
recognized the childishness of the thought, and she shoved the last plates into
the dishwasher, then threw the dish brush with a little extra force into the
sudsy water she’d been running into the left-hand side of the divided sink, hard
enough so foam and water splashed out and splattered onto her sweater, soaking
it to the skin over her stomach.

She jumped, pulled at the wet fabric and swore in helpless
frustration, the worst word she ever said, which was pretty bad, and saw his
head jerk up at it. Because she didn’t usually swear in front of him, but why
shouldn’t she? Why the hell not?

He didn’t say anything, just handed her the plastic
container. “Toss them, if you want. Makes no difference to me.”

She snatched it from his hand and stuffed the noodles
savagely down the disposal, feeling like she was going to either scream or cry.
“Why won’t you ever
fight
with me?”

“Do you want to fight?” He looked startled again.

She realized how stupid she sounded. She blew out a breath, flipped
the switch for the disposal, and gave the noodles a couple pushes to help them
down.

Joe grabbed her wrist hard, pulled her hand out of the sink.
“Get your hand out of there!” He reached around her, turned the motor off. “You
never
put your fingers that close to
something that sharp. Use a spoon! Use the brush!”

 
“I wasn’t going
to cut them!” she flared back. “I was being careful. I’m not going to stick my
hand down the hole. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“No. I think that was careless,” he said, back under control
again. Of course he was. “I think you need to think before you act, so you
don’t get hurt.”

She opened her mouth to defend herself, but couldn’t think
of anything good to say. She’d said she wanted him to fight with her, and he’d
yelled at her. She’d got her wish. She picked up the dishcloth and turned away
from him, began to wipe down the stove. Saw him, out of the corner of her eye,
starting to scrub serving dishes with her abused dish brush.

“I’m grouchy,” she admitted after a minute. “Too much family
time. I did a run this morning, but it wasn’t enough, I guess. Want to go for a
walk with me when we’re done with this? Look at the Christmas lights?”

He kept washing, and she wondered mutinously why Joe always
took so long to
answer.
How long did
it take to answer a simple question like that?

“I brought some work,” he said at last.

“On Christmas Eve?” She felt the lump forming in her throat,
the prick of tears. He couldn’t even stand to take a walk with her?

Luckily, Rae came through the swinging door into the kitchen
then. “Hey, Alyssa. You guys need any help?”

Alyssa began wiping off counters. “About done,” she said.
Then added impulsively, “Want to go for a walk with me?”

“Sure,” Rae said. “OK if Alec comes too?”

“Fine,” Alyssa muttered. Couples again.

“I’ll come too,” Joe said.

She stared at him. “I thought you didn’t want to go.”

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “I said I brought work. I’ll
do the work after the walk.”

You just didn’t want
to go with
me, she didn’t say, and swallowed against the sudden desolation
of it. Tomorrow morning, in church, she’d count her blessings. But not tonight.
Tonight she was going to feel sorry for herself. Because Joe still didn’t like
her, not really. He just put up with her, as part of the family. Alec’s silly, careless,
troublesome little sister.

He’d been so hot, that first Christmas. When she’d first
seen him looking at her, his face set and still, rough-hewn even then, seeming
to have been carved, not too expertly, out of slabs of rock. Cheekbones, brow
ridges, jawline, chin, all so strongly drawn, so uncompromising. His light brown
hair cut short, the pale blue eyes intense, so compelling that she’d found it
hard to look away.

He had eyes like an animal, she’d thought in a flight of
fancy, lying in bed that night and remembering the way he’d looked at her, savoring
the image of him. Not a lion or a tiger. A wolf, maybe. A blue-eyed wolf, intent,
watching. She shivered at the thought of it, not even quite sure how to put a name
to the feelings that were making her hot enough to kick off the covers, shift
restlessly in bed, shove the pillow between her legs.

And it got worse the next day. When she saw him in his boots
and black leather jacket, it turned her insides to liquid, started delicious tingles
down low in her belly. He was taller than her father, six-three at least, even
taller with the boots on. As broad across the shoulders as her dad, too, as
broad as Gabe, though there was a rawboned look to him. He was all thick muscle
and heavy bone, nothing soft about him, not one bit a boy. So much a man. So
much older than her brothers, especially when he turned that level gaze on her.

She’d done her best that week to make him like her as much
as she liked him, to penetrate his wall of reserve. She’d teased him, the way
that usually made boys smile, made them laugh, made them hang around her locker
to talk to her. And when she’d got Joe to smile, a quirk of the lips, a warming
of the eyes, she’d felt a rush of triumph that had proved short-lived, because
after that, she could feel him drawing back as if he didn’t want to be close to
her, didn’t even want to look at her. And the more she tried, the more she
seemed to drive him away. She’d concluded at last, a little hurt, a little
angry, that he just didn’t like her. Or, worse, that he could tell she had a
crush on him, and it embarrassed him, and he was trying to discourage her.

There had been one bright spot, the morning of the day when
he and Alec had left to go back to school. She’d been lying on her stomach on
the couch, watching cartoons on TV, because she was bored and there was nothing
to do, and he came into the room with something bunched in his hand, then stopped
halfway in, seeming to hesitate.

She sat up, grabbed for the remote and hastily turned the TV
off so she wouldn’t look immature. She wished she’d been watching something
educational, or reading a book, or doing homework, even though school was out.
Studying. Wearing glasses, maybe. Looking serious, like him. He probably liked
serious girls.

He was still standing there, so she shoved her hair back
behind her ear and smiled at him, hoping she still had some lip gloss on. She’d
put it on along with some mascara this morning, as she had every morning during
this vacation, but that had been before breakfast. She should have checked
again.

“I have this,” he said, frowning at her the way he always
did and hefting the thing in one big hand. “An Eielson T-shirt. The Air Force
base,” he explained. “In Alaska. And I thought . . .” He cleared his throat.
“It seemed like you like T-shirts.”

“I do,” she said, still smiling encouragingly. “I love
them.” She was wearing her Huskies Football T-shirt right now, the one Gabe had
brought her from Washington.

“My sister sent this to me,” he said. “For Christmas. But
she didn’t know I’d grown, I guess, and it’s too small. So I thought . . . I
mean, just if you want it. I don’t want to throw it away.”

He held it out, and she jumped up from the couch and took it
from him, held it up in front of her. A simple dark-blue T-shirt, the base’s
name emblazoned on the front.

“It’ll be too big, I know,” he said hastily. “And it’s a
man’s. So maybe not.”

“No,” she said. “It’s perfect. I’ll wear it to bed. I love
it.”

He looked even more stone-faced, not even pleased, just gave
her a little nod. “OK, then.” And then he turned around and left the room, and
an hour later, left with Alec.

She’d worn his shirt to bed every night for months, and
thought about him, and dreamed about him. Her first tentative sexual fantasies
had been about Joe. Vague and romantic, with kissing heavily featured, and him
telling her how crazy he was about her, how he couldn’t get her out of his
head.

But when she’d seen him next, almost a year later, when Alec
had brought him home for Thanksgiving, he’d been more grown up, more remote
than ever. And nothing had changed. Fifteen years later, and he was still
spending his Christmas vacations gazing unsmilingly at her as if he were
measuring her, and she wasn’t measuring up.

Well, she was tired of it. Fifteen years was long enough to want
a man who’d never want her back. She was going to get over Joe Hartman. This
was the last Christmas she was going to spend fantasizing about him. She was
done.

Joe opened his eyes the next morning and looked up at the old-fashioned,
popcorn-textured white ceiling. Alec’s room, Christmas morning.

Which started with church, because it always started with
church.

That first year, he’d tried to decline. “I’ll stay here, if
that’s OK,” he said when the subject came up over Christmas Eve dinner. “I
could do the breakfast dishes, any other kind of chores you have.” He knew how
to make himself useful. That tended to make you more welcome, too.

“If you stay in this house,” Mrs. Kincaid said, “you’re
coming to church. You don’t have to believe. You don’t have to participate. But
you have to come.”

“I don’t . . .” he began, then stopped. “I didn’t bring
church clothes.” He didn’t
have
church
clothes. He had jeans, and he had T-shirts. He had his boots, and he had a pair
of well-used tennis shoes. None of which would be right. He hadn’t been in too
many churches, but he knew that much.

Mrs. Kincaid paused in the act of dishing more meat sauce
onto Gabe’s plate to look Joe over, a speculative gleam in her eye.

“Oh, no,” Alec groaned. “Now you’ve given her a project.”

She handed Gabe his plate, flapped the back of her hand at
her elder son. “Hush up. And it doesn’t matter what you wear, Joe. That’s the
point of church. It’s what’s on the inside that counts, isn’t it, Dave?”

“More honored in the breach than the observance,” her
husband said, “but that’s meant to be the idea.”

“But if you’d be more comfortable,” Mrs. Kincaid said,
“we’ll find one of Dave’s shirts for you to wear, because you’re about his
height. That’s the only way we’ll get sleeves that’ll fit you.” She pushed her
chair back and started to get up.

“Hang on, now, honey,” Mr. Kincaid said, putting a hand on
her arm. They sat together at one end of the table, not opposite each other
like you’d expect in a TV sitcom family. “You can get Joe set up after dinner,
but don’t you think you should finish eating first?”

She laughed, sat down again, and picked up her fork. “I get
impulsive,” she told Joe. “But as soon as we’re done here, we’ll find you a
shirt. And don’t worry about the jeans,” she went on, forestalling his next,
clearly futile objection. “Jeans are fine. You’ll be sitting down anyway.
Nobody will see.”

And that had been that. He’d done the breakfast dishes, all
right, but after that, he’d gone to church, and he’d been going ever since,
when he stayed with them. And doing the dishes, too. With Alyssa, which he
could have done without. Being alone with her made him nervous, but Mrs.
Kincaid had been clear on that, too.

“I’d be some kind of hostess if I invited you and then made
you do all my housework for me, wouldn’t I?” she’d said with a laugh the first
time he’d offered. “But you can help Alyssa.”

So that had become Joe’s chore on Kincaid holidays, which
had given him the idea for the present he’d thought up for Susie this year,
which he was pretty proud of. When it was his turn to distribute his gifts on this
fifteenth Christmas afternoon, he handed her a long white envelope, then sat
back and watched a little nervously while she opened it.

“I know you’ve always said you didn’t need it,” he said as
she unfolded a certificate for a year’s worth of weekly housekeeping service,
“but I needed to give it, to both of you. To say—” He shrugged. “To say
thanks.”

It had occurred to him over that busy wedding weekend a
month earlier, watching her move from one set of endless tasks to another, that
the reason she’d always declined Alec’s offers of a housekeeper wasn’t that she
enjoyed housework, because who did? In a flash of insight that had left him
astonished that he hadn’t figured it out sooner, he’d realized that she hadn’t
wanted to embarrass Dave by accepting something from her son that her husband
couldn’t provide, that she didn’t want him to think that the life he’d given
her wasn’t good enough. But if it came from Joe instead, he thought—he
hoped—that it would be different.

“It’s not even that much work anymore,” Susie said. “Not
with just Dave and me.”

“Seems to me that everybody should get to retire sometime,”
Joe said. “And the lady I found to do it, she’s a single mom. She needs the
work.”

That did the trick, just as he’d planned. “Well,” she said,
putting the certificate carefully back into her envelope, “I’d better not say
no, then, had I?” She got up, came over and bent to give him a kiss on the
cheek. “I think I should just say thank you, sweetheart. That was very
thoughtful of you. Very sweet.”

He could feel a lump forming in his throat, to his horror. Luckily,
Dixie came to his rescue.

“I said you’d be a catch,” she pronounced, “and dang if I
wasn’t right, wouldn’t you say, Desiree? Don’t you think some girl’s going to
get mighty lucky one of these days?”

“Rae’s not going to agree with you,” Joe said, the
vulnerable moment past. “She doesn’t think I’m good with women.”

“Hmm. Maybe slow to warm up,” Rae said. “You’re all right
once you get there.” She smiled at her business partner. “I’ve got no
complaints these days.”

“And I think you’re just fine,”
Susie said. She reached to adjust the shoulder of the gray sweater she’d
knitted him, along with the ones she’d made for her sons. “I messed up on this
seam. You need to give it back to me later today, and I’ll redo it.”

She’d always given him clothes,
ever since that first year. He hadn’t expected anything, had felt awkward
enough sitting around the Christmas tree with the family, still in his borrowed
shirt. But when Susie had handed out her presents, two squashy packages had
landed in his lap.

“Because you need a Tall size.
Those things you have are too short,” Susie had explained when he’d ripped the
tissue paper open to reveal a pair of new Hanes T-shirts, one each in navy blue
and gray. He’d have felt embarrassed about that, like a charity case,
especially when he’d opened his other package and found three pairs of socks,
except that she’d just given her sons the same things.

“Just be glad she didn’t give you
underwear,” Alec said with a grin. “It’s been known to happen. Nothing like
wearing boxers picked out by your mother.”

“If women didn’t buy underwear for
men,” Susie retorted, “half the men in America would wear them until they
couldn’t tell which ones were the leg holes. I have to sneak in and throw out
Dave’s old things while he’s not looking.”

“Because they’re not comfortable until
they’re broken in,” Dave protested. “And who’s going to see them? A little hole
or two never hurt anything.”

“I see them,” Susie answered. “I’m
not having my husband walk around with holes in his socks, looking like he has
a wife who doesn’t care enough about him to notice. And you can just live with
it.”

She was still giving Joe shirts.
This year, she’d upgraded to sweaters, though Susie wasn’t a very good knitter,
he thought privately. The shoulders
were
pretty
funky. But he’d put on his new gray sweater with pleasure all the same, because
she’d made it for him.

Alec and Rae’s presents were the last, at Alec’s insistence.
He’d started with gifts for his father, his brother, and Joe. Joe got an atomic
clock with a weather station, which he appreciated. You always needed to know
the weather. Alec gave regular things, practical things, the same kinds of
things Joe gave him.

Christmas presents for men seemed kind of stupid to him
anyway. If he or Alec needed something, why not just go ahead and buy it, and
know they were getting exactly what they wanted? What was the point of buying
the other guy something, having to guess what he might like—because there
wasn’t anything Alec actually needed that Joe could buy him, or vice versa—and
wrapping it up in pretty paper?

But the Kincaids always gave presents, so Joe did it too.
He’d done a wool stadium blanket in the green-and-red Kincaid tartan for both
Alec and Gabe this year, which he’d thought had been all right. A blanket was
useful, at least. That was his idea of a present.

He’d veered a bit from the norm with Dave’s gift, though: Sacramento
Kings season tickets. They had a lousy record, but Dave was loyal, and he’d
been pleased, Joe could tell. So Joe had been happy he’d had the thought.

 
Women were
different, of course. Women liked presents, and it had always seemed to Joe
that the more useless the present was, the better they liked it. Well, they liked
to feel special, and he had no problem with that.

Sure enough, it was the women’s turn for Alec’s gifts now,
and Alyssa and Mira were exclaiming as they opened their gifts, lifted the lids
of identical flat black velvet boxes, and each drew out a pendant hung from a gold
chain. They weren’t identical, but they were the same basic idea: one single, large,
lustrous pearl, nestled in a curving disc of gold that looked like some sort of
shell, or a leaf. Something delicate and pretty, anyway.

“Thank you,” Mira breathed. “It’s so beautiful.” She held it
up for Gabe to see, and he turned a rueful gaze on his brother.

“Rae said it would be all right to give your wife jewelry,”
Alec said, clearly reading his twin’s mind. “Don’t blame me. I asked her. I
checked.”

“Are you kidding?” Mira said happily. “I’m not giving this back.
Oh, he means it might hurt your feelings.” She turned to Gabe with a bit of a
stricken look, but Joe noticed that she was clutching her necklace pretty
tightly all the same.

“Never mind.” Gabe was already taking it from her, fastening
the clasp behind her neck, and her hand went up to stroke the smooth surfaces
as if she couldn’t help herself. “You just consider it a fringe benefit of
being married to me. We’ll leave it at that.”

“Oh, guys. Wow.” Alyssa had her own necklace on. She jumped
up and went to the big mirror over the cabinet next to the front door to check
out her reflection. “It’s gorgeous, and I can wear it with anything. Where did
you find them, Rae?”

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “I had nothing to do with it. That
was your brother all the way. That’s from Tahiti, via Paris. He didn’t even
show me until after he’d done it, after he’d come back from his mysterious
errand. I thought maybe he was buying me a pony, but,” she sighed, “turns out
not.”

“Mmm,” Alec said, smiling at her. “I may have got you
something too. We’ll get to that. But meanwhile . . . I’ve got a couple more
things under here.” He crouched beside the tree, fished out two slightly larger
flat packages wrapped in shimmering paper that had an opalescent quality all
its own. He handed one to his mother, one to Rae’s grandmother. “A variation on
the theme.”

Both women made a fuss, of course, the same fuss they’d made
over everything they’d received that day. Women couldn’t just open a present
and look at it and say thanks. They had to make a whole production out of it.

“What beautiful paper, isn’t it, Dixie?” Susie slid a
fingernail under the tape, folded the wrapping paper and set it aside
carefully.

“It sure is,” Dixie agreed. “That’s fancy.”

“If I’d known you were going to be so easily pleased,” Alec
complained, “I’d just have given you the box. Come on, open them.”

They were already there. “Oh, my,” Susie said helplessly.
“Oh, my. Alec.”

Two simple, perfect strands of pearls, their luster core-deep,
were held up by two sets of hands, turned in the light.

“Honey,” Dixie said to Rae, fumbling with the clasp until
Alec came over and opened it, settled the strand around her wrinkled neck, and
fastened it for her, “I think you caught yourself a live one.”

“I think I did,” Rae laughed.

“The ladies at church aren’t going to know what hit them,”
Dixie said happily, reaching for her reading glasses in her purse, then lifting
the necklace to take a better look. “These are real pearls, aren’t they?”

“That’s what the man said,” Alec told her with a smile. “Got
to decorate my favorite ladies.”

“Sibling wars won yet again, by a mile,” Alyssa sighed. “I’d
complain that you cheated, Alec, but you might take my necklace away.”

“Oh, honey,” her mother hastened to assure her, “I loved
your present too. I don’t need anything more at all to be happy today. You all
know that. I have everything a woman could want.”

“And now your mother’s crying,” Dave said in resignation. He
put an arm around his wife, but he was looking misty-eyed too, Joe noticed. It
wasn’t the first time he’d seen Dave Kincaid cry, either. He didn’t actually
sob, not that Joe had seen, but he definitely teared up from time to time, and
it didn’t even seem to bother him.

“Got one more here. You want your present now?” Alec asked
his wife. “Or later, when we’re alone?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Alyssa said. “After all this,
you think we’re going to miss out on the chance to watch her open it? I can
only imagine what it is. Probably Queen Elizabeth’s spare tiara or something.”

“She wouldn’t sell it to me. I had to go for something
else.” Alec handed the package to Rae, and this one wasn’t small at all.

“Alec,” she complained. “I gave you a
scarf.”

“And I love my scarf,” he assured her. “It’s a great scarf.”

“I have a really bad feeling,” she said, her fingers poised
to open the package, “that this isn’t a scarf.”

“Open
it,”
Alyssa said.

“Save that pretty paper,” Susie urged, and Alec dropped his
head into his hands and groaned.

“Mom,” he said. “I’ll buy you a package of special paper.
I’ll buy you
two
packages of special
paper. Desiree does not have to save the paper.”

But Rae hadn’t even heard, it was clear. She had the box
open, and was sitting staring at what was inside.

“Let’s see,” Dixie urged.

Still wordless, she turned the deep blue velvet case around and
held it up. And Joe could see why she hadn’t said anything.