by Lisa Plumley
Josie kept pacing. Why had she ever confided her dreams in them? During their last shopping-and-shows visit to Vegas, she and her mother and Jenna and Parker had all had one too many margaritas at her favorite Mexican food place. Josie had found herself describing, with tequila-fueled earnestness, her ambitions to open a dance school of her very own.
It’s what I’ve always wanted, she remembered herself saying. Solemnly. Wistfully.
Stupidly.
“There’s no way you can do this alone,” Jenna announced firmly. “We’ll help you.”
“No! I don’t—”
“Absolutely,” her mother agreed. “No arguments.”
And that was how, in the midst of running away from a family mandated church appearance, Josie found herself with a “date” for next Sunday—and two unlikely allies in her quest to take over Donovan’s Corner.
Chapter Ten
“I don’t need those,” Josie said, shaking her head at her sister. “Thanks, but I changed my mind. I’ve got it covered.”
“Don’t be silly. You don’t have it ‘covered,’” Jenna insisted. “Here.”
She shoved the bundle she’d been carrying at Josie, nearly burying her in a pile of sturdy cotton, sweet prints, and sensible shoes. Clothes. For Josie to borrow. She’d thought her sister had forgotten all about what she’d originally called her out to Blue Moon for. Apparently not.
“On the phone, you told me you wanted to borrow a few things,” Jenna said.
“On the phone, I told you to come alone.” Pointedly, Josie glanced toward the doorway of her upstairs bedroom, which they’d slipped away to following her father’s return with the donuts. From here, the sounds of family joviality—and TJ’s carefree laughter—could barely be heard. “A-l-o-n-e.”
Jenna scoffed. “You didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, I did!” Josie glanced at Luke, who’d followed them upstairs. “‘Come alone.’ It’s pretty uninterpretable.”
Stubbornly, Jenna remained silent.
Just as stubbornly, Josie stared her down.
Luke stepped between them—probably to make sure Josie didn’t karate-chop her sister. Or, more temptingly, give her an impromptu Mohawk. Anything to ease up Jenna’s insufferable Goody Two-shoes image.
“I’ll leave you two to your girlie stuff.” He set down the cardboard boxes he’d carried from Jenna’s SUV to Josie’s bedroom. “When your dad was getting the donuts, he spotted one of the Harleys I’m working on. He wants to check it out.”
Josie rolled her eyes. “Oh, God. Don’t tell me you and my father are going to bond, or something.”
Luke gave her a wink, just as though that weren’t a horrifying notion. He made his escape.
“One of your Harleys?” Jenna raced to the doorway. “Wait! Don’t show David!” she shouted after him. “Motorcycles are the terror of the highway!”
When she turned around, Josie was ready.
“I like motorcycles,” she announced.
“You would.”
Jenna moved farther into the bedroom Josie had adopted and refurbished earlier that week. She ran her hand over the antique bureau, the old-fashioned chenille bedspread, the oak cheval mirror. She frowned at Josie’s treasured stack of glossy celebrity gossip magazines on the nightstand. Josie didn’t care about fashion magazines, but she did like to keep up with current events.
“You like everything dangerous,” Jenna went on, following up on her motorcycle discussion. “Including….”
Wearing a knowing expression, she angled her head to the doorway. Including him.
“What, Luke?”
“Yes, Luke! He’s exactly the type you’d fall for.” Jenna glanced at Josie’s hand, as though remembering how Luke had clasped it in his downstairs—or expecting a diamond engagement ring to materialize on it. “In fact, you probably already have fallen for him.” She pursed her lips. “You’ve got that look.”
“What ‘look’?”
“The look. The ‘take me to bed, you big stud,’ look.”
Josie almost laughed. Said in her sister’s prim tone, that lusty command sounded like a request to burp the Tupperware. “You say that as if it would be a bad thing.”
“Guys like him are trouble,” Jenna persisted. “Didn’t you see those muscles? That attitude? Those tattoos?”
Josie couldn’t stand it. “I licked those tattoos.”
Her sister turned goggle-eyed. “You did not!”
She was right. She hadn’t. But it was still fun to get Jenna’s goat.
“No, you’re right. He licked my tattoos.”
Her sister’s jaw dropped. She scanned Josie’s figure, scandalized…but intrigued.
“Where are they?” she whispered.
“In your imagination. Sheesh! I don’t have tattoos. They’d look bad on stage.” Josie dropped the bundle of clothes on the bed. She frowned at them. “Did you borrow some of these from Mom?”
“No.” Huffily, Jenna crossed the room. “They’re mine. From my days as a working woman.”
“Working woman? You sold wall-to-wall shag at the DC Carpet Emporium.”
“We can’t all have glamorous careers.” Jenna raised her chin. “Anyway, those days are behind me now. David took me away from all that.”
Josie knew the story. David had come in the Emporium looking for carpet to replace some he’d accidentally soaked while replumbing a customer’s bathroom. Jenna had shown him a perfect match for the sample in his hand. Their fingers had touched while combing the pile. It had been love at first shag.
“And speaking of Mom,” Jenna went on doggedly, “for your information, I couldn’t come out here alone like you asked. Despite what you think, I didn’t bring everyone along just to aggravate you.”
Josie didn’t believe her. She remained silent, trying to contemplate actually wearing some of this stuff. Culottes? Knit shirts with cartoon ducks on them? Gabardine suits with calf-length skirts? The dowdiness alone would suffocate her.
Obviously, she wasn’t cut out for Goody Two-shoes duty.
“I was already meeting Mom and Dad at church,” Jenna explained in a super-patient tone she probably used while telling Hannah to wash behind her ears. “And Sunday is family day for me and David and the girls. What was I supposed to do, pull a Josie and ditch everyone?”
Ouch. Stung, Josie stared at the plaid camp shirt in her hand.
“I’m sorry,” her sister said quietly. “Force of habit. Usually you’re not around to hear it.”
Terrific. Josie had become a family slur. Pull a Josie. Sheesh. She could picture it now. Her mother: “Mow the lawn, Warren.” Her father: “Nah. I’m going to pull a Josie today.”
Double ouch. Trying not to think about it, Josie concentrated on folding the camp shirt. Fold. Crease. Fold.
Jenna moved a little closer. “It’s just…you know,” she said, sounding contrite, “you hurt Mom and Dad’s feelings by coming home and then not visiting them.”
Josie nudged aside an Army green square-heeled pump. “Yeah, Dad looked really broken up about it.”
“You didn’t exactly help matters. Did you seriously have to swear in front of him?”
“Damned straight, I did.”
Jenna issued a long-suffering sigh. “You never change. Still chafing at the rules. Still refusing to be pinned down. Still going your own way, no matter what.”
At that reminder of the family lore, Josie gave a rueful shake of her head. According to their mother, as a child Jenna had been happy to play placidly in her infant seat or stay obediently in the yard. But nothing had been able to contain little Josie. She’d kicked down baby gates. Squirmed out of her stroller. Dashed away, whooping with laughter, whenever her mother had tried to confine her to a shopping cart’s child seat.
“Playing it safe is overrated,” she said.
“Well, that might be true in your world. But you’ll need to do a little playing it safe if you want to succeed with your dance school in this world,” Jenna le
ctured, obviously having realized her contribution to the plan. She glanced at Josie’s outfit, her lips pursed in disapproval. “So long as you keep going around town like a sexed-up Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island—”
“Hey! If I’m anybody, I’m Ginger. The movie star.”
“—nobody’s going to take you seriously.”
Glumly, Josie kicked her rainbow wedgie at the bedpost. She knew Jenna was right. Sort of. Why else would she have asked to borrow part of her sister’s so-called wardrobe? But faced with the reality of tidy prints, button-up shirts, and actual tweed, she was having second thoughts.
Maybe she didn’t need them. Maybe she could make a good impression—and launch her dance school—without them.
“I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to ‘sensible,’” she said. “Turtlenecks give me a rash.”
Jenna snickered. “They do not.”
“I like my clothes!” Josie protested. “What I wear has nothing to do with how well I dance. Or how well I can teach other people to dance. I’ve had a lot of training.”
“You’ve had a lot of pole dancing.”
“What?”
“That’s what Dad’s friend, Howie, told him,” Jenna explained matter-of-factly, folding more clothes. “He said he and his buddies saw you in Vegas doing some sleazy all-nude revue.”
“What? All-nude?”
Jenna nodded. “Dad was devastated. He hated the thought that his friends and neighbors had seen ‘his little girl’ naked.”
“They never!”
With a shrug that said the truth was irrelevant when contradicted by juicy gossip, Jenna went on. “Word got around town pretty quickly. You know Donovan’s Corner. By nightfall, people were saying you gave Howie a lap dance.”
Josie was speechless. The thought of dancing within twenty feet of Howie Maynard’s sweaty beer gut—for the dubious prize of twenty bucks tucked in a G-string—snapped her out of it pretty quickly.
“I’ve never given a lap dance in my life!” she sputtered. “I’m a dancer. A trained, professional lead dancer in a respectable show.”
Jenna held up a pair of hideous tapered-leg baggy pants with a tapestry print. She nodded in approval, oblivious that that print would make even the cutest tush look like a lumpy frat house sofa.
“I know that,” she said blithely. “But no one else does. When you didn’t come back, people kind of assumed the stripper story was true. They all thought you were ashamed to show your face in town.”
Astonished, Josie gaped at her. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It left her feeling heartsick. Queasy. And really, really mad. No wonder people here had given her the cold shoulder!
Luanne, the people at Frank’s Diner, the utility company employees, Miss Copies 2 Go, everyone she’d run into since coming back to Donovan’s Corner—they all believed she was some kind of sleazy refugee from a made-for-TV movie: When She Was Bad. Everyone except Luke and TJ, both newcomers to town.
Why hadn’t anyone told her this before? A stripper. No, a pole dancer! Sheesh. No wonder her own father had…. No. He should have known her better. He should have given her the benefit of the doubt. She was his daughter.
“Dad should have trusted me.” Remembering his snide “stripper” comment downstairs, Josie snatched blindly at the pile of accessories. “He should have asked me for the truth.”
“You know Dad’s not a talker.”
“No.” Bitterly, Josie crushed a bundle of enormous black vinyl purses to her chest. She could’ve stashed a Thanksgiving turkey in one of those puppies. “Just a listener.”
“Either way, it’s water under the bridge now,” Jenna said. Busily, she sorted the clothes in two stacks—categorizing them, as near as Josie could tell, into the ugly stack and the dreary stack. “If you want to make your dance school succeed, you’ve got a lot of lost ground to make up for. A lot of people to convince you’ve changed.”
“I haven’t changed,” Josie protested. “I don’t want to change and I don’t need to. Because I was never the person they thought I was.”
“That’s irrelevant. You’ve got to deal with people’s perceptions and then change them. Period.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jenna’s wholesomer-than-thou attitude was really starting to irk her. “Did they teach you that in carpet salesperson school? Or was it on Sesame Street last week? Tell me, Jenna. Because I’ve been too busy lap dancing to keep up on current theories.”
“Don’t take this out on me. And don’t shoot the messenger. Somebody had to tell you.”
“‘Somebody’? Somebody? Come on, Jenna. That ‘somebody’ was you—and you thought it was a good idea to wait years to share this little tidbit? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“You never came home before.”
Josie snorted. “So now it’s my fault?”
Her sister sighed. “Believe it or not, Josie, you’re not the only one who has problems.” She fussed with the flower-patterned suit in her hands, then added it to one of the piles. Wearily, she glanced up. The light caught the dark circles under her eyes. “Can we just get on with the clothes, please?”
Taken aback, Josie stared. What was Jenna talking about? Problems? She’d never known her sister to have problems—or to be anything less than sweet, grounded, and annoyingly in sync with their parents. The fact that she seemed less and less those things as the moments ticked past was unnerving.
“What’s the matter?” Josie asked.
“Nothing. Here.” Jenna plucked the flowered suit from the bed and handed it over. “Try this on.”
“I’m serious. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing. Go on. I’ll turn my back so you can change.”
“Jenna—” Frustrated, Josie tossed down the suit her sister had given her. She stared at Jenna’s ramrod-straight back. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know you were having problems.”
“Clothes,” Jenna sang out.
Grrr. Josie hated it when her sister goaded her in melody. “I already have a suit.”
“Let’s see it, then. Put it on.” Keeping her back to Josie—probably to guard their combined virtues—Jenna gazed out the window overlooking Blue Moon’s front lawn and driveway. She hugged herself. “Tell me when you’re ready, and I’ll look.”
Josie didn’t have much choice. She grabbed the one thing closest to a suit she’d packed and wriggled into it. She was fiddling with the waist closure on the skirt when Jenna spoke again.
“The problem is…. Oh, it’s hard to explain. And I know this is going to sound selfish.” She waved her arm as though warding off the very idea. “But it’s just that…when Mom and Dad are busy worrying about you, talking about you, wondering about you…where does that leave me?”
Josie didn’t know. “In the clear? Enshrined as the perfect daughter?”
“Nowhere, that’s where!” Jenna’s voice cracked. “No matter what I do, it’s never enough. No matter how much I do right, all that matters is what you do wrong. Now that you’re back, I don’t stand a chance.”
“Of course you do.” God, she was serious. Josie couldn’t believe it. “You’ve got the trump card, remember? Grandkids!”
Jenna snorted.
Okay. Joking wasn’t working. Honestly perplexed, Josie moved closer. “What do you mean, ‘never enough’? It’s always enough when it comes to you, and you know it. You’re Mom and Dad’s favorite. We’ve both known that for a long time. We just…don’t talk about it.”
Jenna remained silent.
“Come on, Jenna. Don’t clam up now.”
Josie fastened her skirt and smoothed out the hem. She glanced up, waiting for her sister’s inevitable agreement…but somehow the world shifted. Jenna only stood there, determinedly watching a blue jay nest in a nearby pine tree. She gave no sign of feeling anything but as overlooked as Josie often did.
Could it be true? Could Jenna really feel as though she was never enough?
“If Mom and Dad don’t see how fantastic you a
re, that’s their loss,” Josie said. “Honestly. Forget about it.”
Jenna sniffed. “Wow. Things are really simple in your world, aren’t they? Must be nice to—” She turned, stopped, took in Josie’s outfit. Her eyes narrowed.
A twirl. “What do you think?”
Josie waited as her skirt settled just above her knees, as her prim suit jacket fluttered closed at the waist. The suit belonged to one of her roommates, Sheila, who danced at Bally’s. Josie had thought it was one of her own outfits when she’d packed it.
It was coming in handy now, though. If she wasn’t mistaken, Jenna approved. Her sister tapped her finger against her lips, walking closer. She bent her head and examined the fit, the fabric, the length of the skirt.
“That won’t work,” she announced.
“Why not? The skirt is modest, the jacket covers me, the top underneath isn’t see-through or shiny or—”
Jenna grabbed a handful of fabric at the waist. She tugged. The whole suit fell away, baring a bodysuit underneath.
“It’s a breakaway suit!” she cried, tossing it on the bed in disgust. “Do you think I was born yesterday?”
Actually, yes. Or at least the day before yesterday.
Josie hadn’t thought Jenna even knew such a thing as a breakaway suit existed. In Donovan’s Corner, even the bachelorette-party entertainment stripped down to a pair of gym shorts and tube socks. And a party hat.
With dignity, Josie examined the suit. “At least it’s not tweed. I still think it would work.”
“Sure. Barring a strong wind.”
“I don’t seriously expect anybody to yank off my clothes.”
Jenna aimed a meaningful look toward the window—where the sounds of Luke’s Harley being revved could be heard. She folded her arms over her chest. “I do.”
Josie grinned. “And that would be bad…why, again?”
“Laugh all you want, but I’m serious,” Jenna said. “If you think you can stay here in this house with him, sleep with him”—this last was said in a scandalized whisper—“and not fall in love with him, you’re delusional.”
“Luke lives in the carriage house, not here.” And I only wish we’d slept together. “I’m not ‘in love’ with him.”