Windfall (6 page)

Jonathan hadn't dropped by since I'd returned to Florida, but with the kinds of powers he possessed, he hardly needed to. He was probably back in his house, watching me through his big plate-glass picture window and sipping magically imported beer.

Probably watching me right now.

I rolled over on my back, flipped the bird at the ceiling.

“Hope you enjoyed the show,” I said. “No encores.”

No reaction. Which was no doubt for the best.

I fell asleep with the bottle beside me, to the steady, pounding whisper of the surf down on the beach.

 

I catapulted out of bed two hours later to a banging on the apartment door. I was halfway to the door before I realized I was stark naked. Back to the bedroom to throw on a floor-length silk robe, belted in front, and jam my feet into slippers.

“Coming!” I yelled, and hustled back as the knocking continued to thunder. I started to rip the door open, then hesitated and used the peephole.

It took me about ten seconds—long, full ones—to realize who I was looking at, because she didn't look like herself at all.

Oh. My.
God.

I unlocked the dead bolt and flung the door wide. “Sarah?”

My sister was standing there. My sister from California, my married, nonmagical sister who, the last time I'd seen her, had been wearing the best of Rodeo Drive and sporting a designer haircut with fabulous highlights. Sarah had been one of those annoying girls who'd spent all her time scheming to catch a rich man, and . . . amazingly . . . had actually
done
it. I hadn't expected her to be happy, but I had expected her to hang on to her French millionaire husband with both hands and emotional superglue.

Lots had obviously changed. Sarah was wearing baggy, wrinkled khaki shorts and an oversized Sunshine State T-shirt; the haircut had grown into an unkempt shag, and the remaining, faded highlights looked cheap as tinsel. No makeup. And no socks with her battered running shoes.

“Let me in,” she said. She sounded tired. With no will of my own I stepped back, and she came in, dragging a suitcase behind her.

The suitcase—battered, ugly, and bargain-basement—gave me a bad, bad feeling.

“I thought you were in LA,” I said slowly. The door was still open, and I reluctantly shut and locked it. There went my last chance for a decent escape. I tried for a pleasant interpretation. “Missed me, huh?”

She plumped down on my secondhand couch in an uncoordinated sprawl, staring down at her limp hands, which hadn't seen a manicure in weeks. My sister was a good-looking woman—walnut brown hair, blue eyes, fine, soft skin she'd worked hard to keep supple—but just now she looked her age. Wrinkles. My God. Sarah had
wrinkles
. And she hadn't been to a plastic surgeon and Botoxed them out of existence?
Who are you and what have you done with my evil sibling?

“Chrêtien left me,” she said. “He left me for a
personal trainer!
”

I felt behind me, found a chair, and sank into it, staring at her.

“He divorced me,” she said. Her already-tense voice was rising like a flood tide. “And he enforced the prenup. Jo, he took the
Jag!
”

That came out as a true, raw wail of grief.

My sister—who'd always made me look like a piker when it came to composure, style, and taking care of herself—blubbered like a little girl. I jumped up and found some Kleenex, which she promptly used with enthusiasm, and fetched a trash can from the bathroom to catch the soggy remains. I was
not
picking those up.

Finally, she was blotched, swollen, red-nosed, and done crying—for a while—and gave me the rest of the tired, familiar story. Chrêtien and personal trainer Heather (Heather? Really?), meeting every Tuesday for a
really
intense private session. Sarah getting suspicious because his workout clothes never seemed overly worked out. Hiring a private eye to follow them. Dirty pictures. Screaming confrontation. Chrêtien invoking the dire terms of the prenup, which had taken her house, her car, her bank account, and left her with her
second
car, an old Chrysler she'd let the maid use for errands.

And no place to live.

My once-rich sister was homeless.

And she was sitting on my couch with a suitcase, blubbering, looking at me with pleading, swollen eyes.

I silently returned the look, remembering all those childhood grievances. Sarah, yanking my hair when Mom wasn't looking. Sarah, telling all my friends and enemies about my crush on Jimmy Paglisi. Sarah, stealing my first steady boyfriend out from under my nose. We weren't close. We'd never been close. For one thing, we weren't anything like the same. Sarah had been a professional woman . . . emphasis on the woman, not the professional. She'd set out to snare herself a millionaire, which she'd done, and to live the life she'd always wanted, and damn whoever had to suffer to get her there. She'd signed the prenup because, at the time, she'd thought she had Chrêtien completely beguiled and could get him to tear it up with enough honeyed compliments and blow jobs.

I could have told her—hell, I
had
told her—that Chrêtien was way too French for that to work.

Sarah was stranded on my couch: sniffling, humiliated, practically penniless. No marketable skills to speak of. No friends, because the kinds of country club friends Sarah had made all her life didn't stick around after the platinum American Express got revoked.

She had nobody else. Nowhere to go.

There was nothing else I could say but, “Don't worry. You can stay with me.”

Later, I would remember that and pound my head against the wall. It was the flickering warning light on a road where the bridge was out and, like an idiot, I just kept on driving.

Right into the storm.

 

I set about getting Sarah settled in my tiny spare room. She'd been weeping with gratitude right up until I heaved her suitcase onto the twin bed, but she stopped when she took a look around.

“Yes?” I asked sweetly, because I could see the words
Where's the rest of it?
on the tip of her tongue.

She swallowed them—it must have choked her—and forced a trembling smile. “It's great. Thanks.”

“You're welcome.” I looked around, seeing it through her eyes. Her utility closet in California hadn't been this small, I was certain. The furniture wasn't exactly
au courant
—a rickety '50s nightstand in grubby off-white French Provincial with a cockeyed drawer, a campus castoff bed too hard and lumpy for even college students. A scarred, ugly dresser of no particular pedigree, with missing drawer pulls and a cracked mirror, salvaged out of a Dumpster with the help of two semipro football players.

A real do-it-yourself nightmare.

I sighed. “Sorry about this. I had to move when—”

“—when we thought you were dead,” she said. “By the time they'd tracked me down to give me the news, your friends already knew you were all right and let me know, thank God, or I'd have just gone crazy.”

Which gave me a little bit of a warm, sisterly glow, until she continued.

“After all, I'd just found out about Chrêtien and Heather. I swear, if I'd had one more thing to think about, I don't think even the therapy would have helped.”

I stopped feeling bad about the furniture. “Glad I didn't set you back on the road to recovery.”

“Oh! No, I didn't mean—”

I sat down on the bed next to her suitcase. The frame creaked and groaned like an exasperated geezer. “Look, Sarah, let's not kid each other, okay? We're not best buddies; we never were. I'm not judging you, I'm just saying you're here because I'm all you've got. Right? So you don't have to pretend to like me.”

She looked just like me, in that second—wide-eyed with surprise, and a little frown crinkling her forehead. Except for the hair. Even my current poodle-hair curls were better than the badly grown-out shag she was sporting.

She said, slowly, “All right, I admit it. I didn't like you when you were younger. You were a bratty kid, and then you grew up into somebody I barely even know. And you're weird, you know. And Mom liked you best.”

No arguing with that one. Mom really had.

But Sarah kept going. “That doesn't mean I don't love you, Jo. I always have loved you. I hope you still love me. I know I'm a bitch, and I'm shallow, but we're still, you know, sisters.”

It would have been a warm, tender moment if I'd jumped up and thrown my arms around her and burst into tears. We weren't that kind of Hallmark Card family.

I thought it over and said, “I don't really know you, Sarah. But I'm willing to get to know you.”

She smiled. Slow, but real.

“That sounds . . . fair.”

We shook hands on it. I stood up and watched as Sarah unzipped the suitcase and started unpacking. It was a pitifully short affair. She'd left most of the good stuff behind, and what good stuff she had left was horribly wrinkled. We made a dry-clean pile, a “burn this” pile, a Goodwill pile, and a keeper stack. That one was short. It filled exactly one drawer of the dresser.

“Makeup?” I asked. She pointed to a tiny plastic case that couldn't have held more than lipstick, mascara, and maybe an eyebrow pencil. “Shoes?”

She pointed to the battered running shoes and held up a pair of black, squarish pumps, something suitable for a grandmother, so long as Grandma didn't care much about appearances. I winced. “The bastard didn't even let you keep your
shoes
?”

“He cleaned out the house and gave everything to the Salvation Army,” she said. “All my clothes. Everything.”

“Jesus.” I had a sudden flare of suspicion. “Um, look, Sarah, not that I'm doubting you or anything, but wasn't Chrêtien the, um, guilty party . . . ?”

She had the good grace to look just a
little
ashamed. “He found out about Carl.”

“Carl?”

“You know.”

“Nope. Really don't.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, if you're going to force me to say it . . . I wasn't exactly guiltless. There. I admit it. I was having an affair with his business partner.”

“Jesus.”

“And the donkey he rode in on,” she finished, just the way she'd always done it when we'd been in school. “But he didn't have to get so
personal
about all of it. He cheated on me, after all. You'd think he'd at least understand that it was . . . well . . .”

“Recreational?” I supplied dryly.

“Yes! Exactly!”

“Should have joined the bridge club, Sarah.”

She gave me a helpless, angry look. “I'm not saying I was guiltless, but . . . he gave me a couple of hundred dollars and told me to buy replacements.
In my new price range.
God, Jo, I didn't even know where to
shop
!”

I took a deep breath and said, “Tell you what? I was going to the mall anyway with a friend, so if you want to get ready—”

“I'm ready,” my sister said instantly.

I picked up the phone and called Cherise.

 

Cherise had, of course, changed clothes in the interim. She'd gone to a magenta see-through mesh shirt with lime green tie-dyed patterns, over a lime green camisole. It all matched the lime glitter toenail polish, which evidently she liked enough to accessorize to.

“Ten,” I said instantly when she got out of her red convertible. “Maybe a ten point five. You blind me with your magnificence.”

“But of course. Man, Jo, I knew you were a saint, but you gave up your hottie for your
sister
? Damn. I'd have blown off taking my grandma to dialysis for that man!”

Sarah came out of the apartment behind me, wearing her wrinkled khaki walking shorts and badly fitting button-down shirt. Cherise's perfectly made-up eyes widened into something usually seen only in Japanese animation.

“Oh my
God,
” she said, and looked at me in horror. “You told me it was bad, but damn, this is a seven point five on the fashion disaster scale. And what's with her
hair
?”

“Cherise,” I said. “I know it's hard for you, but please. Sarah's had a bad time. Be kind.”

“I
was
being kind. That is way worse than a seven point five.”

Sarah said, “Jo? Did she just say you have a boyfriend?”

Trust Sarah, of course, to blow past Cherise's fluff to get to the potentially disastrous part of the conversation.

“Not
just
a boyfriend,” Cherise said. “Boyfriends are Ken dolls. Boyfriends are safe. Her guy is the kind of hottie who needs to keep a fire extinguisher around, just to hose down any passing women who spontaneously combust.”

I stared at her, amazed. For Cherise, this was, well, poetic.

Sarah was, meanwhile, frowning at me. “And you didn't tell me about him?”

I didn't want to bring up David yet. That was going to be a strange and difficult conversation, with somebody as earthbound-normal as Sarah, and I couldn't really mislead her too far. Trying to keep him secret would only lead to low comedy and farce. Not to mention put a serious cramp in my love life.

“He had to leave,” I said. Not a lie. “I'll see him later.”

“I should have known you'd have a boyfriend,” Sarah said. She sounded bitter. “What was I thinking? When do you not?”

“Kind of a 'ho, isn't she?” Cherise asked. Sarah nodded wisely.

“Hey!” I said sharply. “Watch it!”

“Oh, come on, Jo. Your libido isn't exactly on the low end of the curve. I've seen you checking out the boys at work,” Cherise said. “Even, you know, Kurt. The anchor.”

“I would
never
! That man is made of plastic!”

“Oh, the plastic ones are the best,” she said, and gave me a wicked look. “They come with D-cell batteries, off switches, and you never have to meet their folks.”