she were the last, Emma having headed down the stairs as he was drying his hands.
“You were great today,” she said, her glance unexpectedly shy.
“You were, too.” He barely hesitated. “Kathleen implied that you were single. Is there any chance I could take you out to dinner sometime?”
She looked surprised. “Me?” Then she flushed. “I mean, I didn’t realize…” Finally she took a deep breath. “I thought maybe… But I’m not that…”
“Yeah, you are.” He let her see his appreciation as he admired the effect of pink staining her cheeks. “And I am.”
“Oh.” She gnawed on her lip, without any apparent awareness of how tempting that was. “Then, um… Yes.” She squared her shoulders and gave a little nod. “Yes, I’d like to have dinner with you.”
His triumph was disproportionate to the occasion, but his tone was easy. “Good. How about Monday night?”
“I can’t be out late,” she warned, “but…sure.”
He handed her the towel. “Then, what say we go have dinner now, in the romantic setting of my sister’s kitchen?”
CHAPTER THREE
JO STRETCHED and flipped shut her textbook, then the binder she’d had open beside it on the long, folding table she used to work. Her laptop was unopened, her printer silent. She didn’t need it for her cataloging class.
She had never been interested in cataloging, already knew her Dewey decimal numbers well enough to walk to almost any subject on the shelf in a public library, and had no interest in working in an academic library, which meant she’d forget the Library of Congress classifications as soon as the semester ended and she passed the final. But the course was required, so she was taking it.
She didn’t mind that it was time to change for her date with Ryan. Casual, he’d said, maybe pizza, but she had been grouting tile earlier, so she was dressed appropriately in a frayed sweatshirt and jeans.
Jo had worked a good ten hours Sunday, surprised that her best helper had turned out to be Helen. Helen was the one who’d told her what she knew about Ryan’s divorce.
At ten last night Jo’d said, “Gosh, you look tired. I’d like to finish around the tub, but if you want to go to bed…”
Weariness showing in dark circles under her eyes, Helen looked up and said simply, “Why? I can’t sleep anyway.”
“Oh. I didn’t know. You never said…”
Helen concentrated on splitting a tile in half and handed one piece to Jo. “The doctor thinks I should take sleeping pills, but they make me groggy. Besides, I don’t want to get addicted.”
No wonder she seemed dazed half the time! Jo realized in shock. Lack of sleep would do that to you.
Tentatively, she asked, “Do you miss your husband—Ben—the most at bedtime?”
Head bent, Helen shrugged. “No, it isn’t that. We hadn’t slept together in a long time. He had cancer, you know. It was…slow.” She gave a sound that might have been a laugh, as if the one small word was so utterly inadequate she could almost find humor in it. “It’s just that, when I go to bed, my mind starts to race. Don’t you find that?”
Jo nodded. “If I’m worried about something, or trying to make a decision, I can’t sleep either.”
“I think about Ben, or how scarred Ginny is by all this, or how I’ll manage financially—” She broke off with a small, choked sound.
Jo sneaked a look at her averted face. She never quite knew what to say in situations like this. Other women seemed to have a knack she didn’t. Her inclination was to fix problems, to offer practical advice, to charge ahead. In some ways, she had become aware, she had more in common with men than other women.
“Sometimes,” Helen continued drearily, “I’m not thinking at all. I just lie there, so tired. I think I’ve forgotten how to sleep.”
“But you must sleep!” Jo exclaimed. “Some, at least.”
“Oh, eventually. A few hours a night.” She scored a tile. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go on about it. It’s just that I’d rather have something useful to do anyway.”
Jo was actually a little irked at Kathleen, who after all did own the house and would be the only one of them to truly profit from their remodeling. She’d worked, of course, but off and on, with a distracted air. She and Emma had had another fight Sunday morning, one that had left Kathleen looking…older. She had to be thirty-five or thirty-six, but was such a beautiful woman Jo had never noticed lines on her face before. Sunday they had been there.
Even so, she didn’t have to be so eager to let Jo be in charge.
“I’m so glad you know what you’re doing!” she’d exclaimed several times, always right before vanishing for an hour or more.
It was especially irritating given that Jo didn’t know what she was doing, not in the sense of actually having done it before. She’d picked out a do-it-yourself book at Home Depot and was following the directions. Any competent person could have done the same. Helen had quietly taken over cutting tiles to fit, and she’d never done it before, either.
Kathleen, Jo was beginning to think, was a little bit of a princess.
Now Jo changed to a pair of chinos and a scarlet tank top with a matching three-quarter-sleeve sweater over it. She brushed her hair—what else could she do to it?—and added a pair of gold hoop earrings and a thin gold chain with tiny garnet beads. Inspecting herself in the mirror, she decided the result was…fine. She was the same old Jo, just cleaned up. What you saw was what you got. Her makeup was basic, eyeliner, a touch of mascara, lipstick.
Besides she refused to get very excited about this date, after learning that Ryan had two kids. She didn’t know any more about them except that they lived with his ex-wife. She hadn’t wanted to sound too curious, so Jo hadn’t asked about them. But if the kids were at his place half the time and he was constantly juggling dates because he had them, she wasn’t interested.
At a knock on her door, she said, “Come in.”
Emma opened it and slipped in. Closing the door behind her, she inspected Jo critically. “You look really nice.”
“Thanks.”
“Your stomach is so-o flat.” She came to stand beside Jo and look into the mirror, too. “Oh, yuck. I’m so fat.”
With shock, Jo said, “What?”
Their side-by-side images horrified her. The contrast was painful even though she had always been wiry. Emma was pale, her cheeks sunken, her hair dull, her limbs like sticks, while Jo felt almost obscenely healthy in comparison, with high color, shiny thick hair and noticeable muscles and curves despite her narrow hips.
“Look.” The teenager splayed her hands on her abdomen, covering the bony jut of her pelvis. “My stomach pooches.” She turned from side to side, making faces. “I’m eating too much. I know
