Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3) (3 page)

I turned away from my reflection to face her. “Thanks, Sash. I’m sorry I kept you away from whatever you and Stu had planned today.”

Sasha’s hair cascaded over her face as she bent her head to closely examine my shoes.

“No big deal,” she said faintly.

I frowned. Something about her tone was odd. “Everything’s okay with you two, isn’t it?” Although I’d come to admit the two made a bizarrely excellent (if sex-crazed) couple, since they’d gotten together I lived in constant low-grade terror of what would happen if they ever broke up. My brother and my best friend were the two people closest to me in the world—halves of my heart. I couldn’t imagine being divided between them.

“No, we’re good. The two of us are just fine.”

Something niggled at me in the way she said it, but she had raised her face up to meet my gaze, and her expression was placid.

“You realize you’ve been Breakup Doctoring me all day long,” I said instead.

She grinned and gave me a wink. “Where do you think I learned it?”

“So…you think I should call him now? While I look like this?”

“I think”—Sasha took me by the shoulders and turned me to face my reflection, meeting my eyes in the mirror as she stood beside me—“that you can look like this anytime you want to. If you’d just put a little effort into it once in a while.” I stepped on her toe with one of my platforms, and she smacked my arm, then squeezed it. “And that you should call him whenever you feel ready to face him and get the answers you deserve.”

I nodded, wrapping an arm around her waist and giving her a one-armed hug. “Thanks, pal,” I whispered, my throat tight. “I will.”

One side of Sasha’s mouth lifted in a sadistic smile. “But take your time. First you should make that bastard squirm and let him see what it’s like to live in limbo for a while.”

three

Mental unrest was no excuse for missing Sunday-night dinner at my parents’ house. Actually, there
was
no excuse short of death, so although I suggested that Sasha hang out and we’d drive over together later, she left shortly after I removed all my new finery.

“Stu and I have some stuff to get done today,” she said, retrieving her Brahmin bag from my entry table.

“Oh—well, why don’t I come help?”

“No, no,” she said quickly. “This isn’t fun stuff.”

“I don’t mind,” I said, grabbing my own purse. “You spent your whole day firefighting my problems; let me at least return the favor.”

But she tugged my purse out of my hands and set it gently back on my hall table. “Brook, really—it’s couple stuff, okay?”

“Oh.” I knew my expression must register the crestfallen feeling in my stomach, though I tried to fight it. Every now and then these little reminders that Stu and Sasha now had a special relationship that no longer included me still stung, but I shoved a smile onto my face and gave an exaggerated eye roll. “I get it. It’s sexytime, right? You’ve only done it twice so far today?” Sasha loved grossing me out with tales of her and my brother’s busy, acrobatic sex life, but I’d started beating her to the punch.

She gave a thin smile. “Something like that.”

Again uneasiness slithered through my belly. But she was out the door before I could ask, waving over her shoulder and saying she’d see me at my folks’ house in a few hours.

I was a few minutes late—a cardinal sin, according to my punctilious mom. She was tearing lettuce into a colander when I came into the kitchen.

“Hey, Ma. What can I do?”

She didn’t pause in her ripping. “Well, I needed some help with the salad, but I went ahead and did it since you and Stu weren’t here.”

No mention of Sasha being late too. She could never do wrong in my mom’s eyes.

I didn’t react to the small poke, though. Mom and I had been forging a much healthier relationship lately—sometimes I even actually felt we were getting close—and part of the reason was that I had learned to be less oversensitive to minor provocations. Mom was who she was.

“Sorry. I just lost track of the time. Can I finish it up for you?”

Mollified, she shook her head. “That’s okay—but setting the table would be a help.”

“You got it.”

While I laid out placemats, cloth napkins, and silverware in the adjacent dining room, I asked about her latest production at the Neapolitan Theatre, where she’d regularly been performing since returning to her lifelong love of acting about a year ago. Predictably, her face lit up, and the conversation flowed.

“We open this show March twenty-fourth,” she said, “so make sure you keep the night free. I’d like you and your brother and Sasha to come to the cast party afterward.”

My breath hitched. “And what about Dad?” I said lightly. This time last year Mom had unexpectedly walked out on him—on our family, as far as us kids were concerned at the time—from some long-suppressed desire she’d had to be on her own. After the run of her first show she’d come back, but only for half the week, the rest of the time living in theater housing in Naples. Since then she and Dad seemed solid, but lately I’d noticed that on her returns to the family home she no longer carried a suitcase, and I was scared to think she might be gradually moving out on us for good.

“Of course your father,” Mom said. “Don’t be dense.”

I breathed out. “Okay. Sounds great.” And that reminded me—I went out to the front hall where I’d left my purse on the purse shelf (yes, such a thing existed in Mom’s house, along with the key bowl, the coat hooks, and the shoe caddy) and retrieved the little figurine I’d found in a local boutique: a magnificent bird in orange-tinted glass, with widespread wings and a long graceful neck.

“I got you something, Ma,” I said, coming back into the kitchen. She looked up from chopping carrots and I held the figurine up into the light from the overhead fixture so she could see its warm glow. “It’s a phoenix. Because you brought your theater career back from the ashes, and you’re spreading your wings onstage.”

Mom froze mid-chop, staring fiercely at the little glass figure.

“Because you’re doing
Glass Menagerie
,” I explained into her silence. “You know…how Amanda has the glass animal collection…?” I felt stupid standing there holding it up for her, like a little kid with a straight-A report card desperate for Mommy’s approval.

Finally Mom nodded, blinking. “I know. Yes. Brook, that’s…” She put the knife down and carefully wiped her hands on a towel, then reached for the figurine. Her fingers ran over its smooth neck, across its wings, rubbing the tiny intricate feathers indented into the glass. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured after a moment, and when she looked up I was stunned to see a soft, tender expression on her face.

“Thank you.” She reached up with the hand not clutching the bird and briefly touched my chin, then leaned in to plant a quick peck on my cheek.

From Mom, that was the equivalent of a sloppy, sobbing hug. I reached up and gave her arm a quick squeeze. “It was my pleasure, Mom. I’m proud of you.”

It was such an unusual moment of connection, I almost blurted out what was still preying on me: that I’d seen Michael. One of my mom’s palliative “oh, honeys” would go a long way toward healing the wound his appearance had picked the scab off of. But things were getting uncomfortably mushy for the Ogden household, so I volunteered to go to the garage fridge for the drinks and let Dad know dinner was imminent.

I found him in his usual state: bent over a woodworking project, safety goggles over his eyes outlined by flecks of wood chips and sawdust clinging to his skin. When he heard the door shut behind me he looked up from the long, thin piece of wood he was turning and switched off his lathe.

“Doll!” he cried, a smile stretching his face. With the goggles on and his sweat-sheened scalp shining from beneath thinning hair, he looked like nothing so much as a Minion.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said, going over to him. “What are you working on?”

“Oh, a rocking chair. What do you think?” He held up a perfectly rounded spindle, gesturing with it to a line of them carefully aligned on a towel on his workbench.

“They’re beautiful. I love the darker wood.” I didn’t say what popped to my mind:
Why are you making another rocking chair when you never sit in the ones you have?
My father was always making something in his shop, and nine times out of ten it was something for Mom. But years ago he’d labored for months over two perfect, intricately wrought wooden rocking chairs and presented them to her at Christmas, bubbling with excitement as he told her they were for the two of them to sit and relax and enjoy the life they’d created together.

For all that he adored my mom more than anything on earth, even I knew she wasn’t the sit-and-rock type, and my heart had clenched as I awaited her popping of his balloon.

To my surprise my plainspoken mother had pulled her punch that time, exclaiming over the workmanship, the beauty of the chairs, and my father’s thoughtfulness. She’d had him carry them immediately to their front porch, where she’d settled into one and insisted he join her in the other. While we kids watched, they rocked for a few moments, sharing the kind of smile I remembered feeling uncomfortable over as a child, and slowly my anxiety trickled away. Dad knew her best after all.

But that was the last time Mom had ever sat in them, to my knowledge. They still resided on the porch, but as décor more than anything else. I don’t think any of us ever even really saw them anymore, like old familiar wallpaper.

I ran my fingers over the perfectly smooth length of the spindle my dad held, and tried to find a kind way to prepare him—I couldn’t imagine Mom would be able to summon up another gracious reception of something so off-the-mark for her. “I think Mom’s pretty happy with the ones you made her last time, Daddy. I don’t know if she’d want to replace them.”

My father pushed the goggles to his forehead, sending wisps of hair up over them in crazy directions, enjoyment sparking in his eyes.

“Sometimes people don’t really know what they need until you give it to them, sweetheart.”

“Okay, Daddy.” There was no deterring him once he’d started a project.

“Dinner ready?” he asked.

“Almost. Stu and Sasha aren’t here yet. I came out to grab drinks.” If it was tempting to tell Mom about Michael, it was almost impossible not to blurt it out to my dad. He’d always been my listening ear, the one who let me talk things out with no judgment, no commentary at all really, just a receptive, loving sounding board for me to figure out my own feelings about something. But Mom was sun of his universe, Dad her happily orbiting moon. Even if I could trust him not to say anything about it, I didn’t want to burden him with keeping something from her.

“I’ll get cleaned up, sweetheart. Let your mom know.” He took off the goggles and the lab coat he wore to protect his clothing and headed back to the utility sink he’d installed years ago in the garage to keep from mussing “your mom’s nice clean floors.”

By the time I came back through the foyer with my arms full of bottles and cans, Sasha was sitting on the hall bench, bent over her shoes.

“Hey,” I said. I heard my brother in the kitchen talking to Mom. “You’re lucky you’re you—I bet Stu’s getting an earful right now for being late.”

“Yeah.” She didn’t look up from slowly untying her other shoe, glacially prying it off.

“I didn’t call Michael yet,” I said sotto voce. “I’m going to let him dangle—as long as I can, anyway. I have a feeling curiosity’s going to get the better of me before I—” Sasha finally eked her shoes off and raised her head, and I stopped cold. She looked…absent, her eyes faraway, and her face was so pale her makeup looked like splotches of color on her skin.

“Sash! What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. “Nothing,” she murmured.

“Don’t give me that. What’s the matter?”

“Shh!” she hissed, making a sharp chopping gesture with her hand. “It’s fine. Let it go.” She shoved to her feet and propelled herself past me, disappearing into the kitchen. When I followed, I found her leaning on the counter looking unconcerned, Stu ribbing Mom about something she’d said, one arm around her, and his usual easy grin on his face.

“What up, suck-up,” he said when he caught sight of me. “I see you did our job to get on Mom’s good side.” He pointed his chin toward the table I’d set earlier.

“Someone had to, since you were
late
,” I retorted automatically, but the tension in my belly refused to uncoil—even when Stu pulled me in for his usual greeting noogies.

We all filed noisily into the dining room, and as we passed the dishes and served ourselves, Mom went around the table in her customary grilling of each of us on our weeks.

Sasha was her normal self when it was her turn, chirping out something about the paper and some story she was working on. Mom smiled and nodded, always a rapt audience for my best friend, while Stu and Dad dug obliviously into the spaghetti and meatballs.

But despite her perky delivery, my best friend’s eyes remained unsettlingly blank and dead-looking—and yet somehow I was the only one who seemed to notice.

After dinner we three kids washed the dishes, per tradition, while Mom put away the leftovers and wiped every surface to clinical sterility. Dad, who used to wander back out to his workshop after family dinner, or sit outside on their screened lanai beside the pool and read the paper, was clearly trying to change his habits. But he wound up instead lurking like a beneficent ghost around the kitchen, uselessly prodding at tasks he didn’t quite know how to finish, like gathering the placemats, only to stand holding them in confusion, not knowing where they went.

I tried throughout the rest of the evening to corral Sasha alone, but I finally gave up. It wasn’t going to happen while we were held snug to the bosom of my family. But when she and Stu made motions to leave, I grabbed my purse and was right behind them. Mom and Dad walked us to the door to say good night, and while Dad followed his usual fierce hug around my waist with ones for Stu and Sasha, my mom surprised me by leaning in to give one to me.

“Good night, honey,” she said, pulling away. “Thank you for the phoenix. I love it.”

I felt something unfurl in my chest. “I’m glad, Mom. You’re welcome.” She patted my shoulder then shut the door behind us.

I wanted to snag Sasha outside before she got into the car for at least a two-second exchange that would tell me something about her state of mind, but she stuck to Stu as if she’d been glued there. He let her in on the passenger side of his Jeep and shut her door. With the car turned off she couldn’t even lower the window; it was like trying to have a private, intimate conversation with a bank teller at the drive-through.

Frustrated, I blurted to Stu as he walked around the car, “You guys okay? Everything all right?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Eh. Asking Stu emotion questions was like asking a chimp about chess. “Just asking. We didn’t get to talk much tonight.”

Stu looked at me as if I’d turned into a vacuum cleaner. “We talked all night long.”

I sighed. “Night, Stuvie.” Sasha was staring straight ahead out the windshield; she looked confusedly over at me when I knuckled the window. “Night, Sash. I’ll call you,” I said, making stupid phone fingers before I caught myself.

She just waved with a pallid smile as Stu backed them out of the driveway and his headlights faded down my parents’ street.