Josie Day Is Coming Home (18 page)

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 lectured, 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?”