Playing for Keeps Read online

  Brooke nodded gratefully but braced herself because she had a very bad feeling. “Who’s dead?”

  Mindy choked on a low laugh and swiped beneath her eyes, succeeding only in making things worse. “No one’s dead. Unless you count my personal life.”

  This made no sense. Mindy had been born with a plan in hand. At any given moment of any day, she could flip open her fancy notebook and tell you exactly where she was in that plan. “You’ve got something in your hair.” Brooke gingerly picked it out. It was a Cheerio.

  “It’s Maddox’s. He was chucking them in the car.” Mindy’s eyes were misting again. “You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have kids!”

  It used to be, a sentence like that would send a hot poker of fire through Brooke’s chest, but now it was more like a dull ache. Mostly. She took a step back and crossed her arms. “Why are you falling apart? You never fall apart.” And why are you coming to me?

  Mindy shook her head. “Meet the new me. Remember when we were little and poor because Dad had put all his money into the first POP Smoothie shop and everyone called us the Lemon Sisters?”

  “We are the Lemon sisters,” Brooke said.

  “Yes, but they made it a play on words, like we were lemons. As in bad lemons. As in worthless. I’m a bad Lemon!”

  “First of all, you were the one who told me back then to ignore it because we weren’t worthless,” Brooke said, “so I’ll tell you now—we’re still not. And second, you’ve got a great life, a life you planned out in great detail, I might add. You married a doctor. You now run and manage the Wildstone POP Smoothie shop. You bake like no other. People flock to the shop on the days you bring in your fresh stuff to sell alongside the smoothies. You’ve got three kids. You live in a house with a real white picket fence, for God’s sake.”

  Mindy sniffed. “I know! And I get that on paper it looks like I’m the together sister, but I’m not!”

  That shouldn’t hurt, but it did. Mindy didn’t have the first clue about Brooke’s life these days. Which was another problem entirely. “Min, what’s really going on here? We don’t do this, we’re not . . . close.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?” Mindy’s eyes filled. “I burnt the school cupcakes and the firefighters had to come, and now the whole block knows I’m losing my shit. Dad wants to sell off some of the POP Smoothie shops, including the Wildstone one, so he can retire—”she put retire in air quotes, because the man was already pretty much hands off the business—“which puts me out of work. Linc says I should buy it, and I love that store, you know how much I love working that store, but I can’t so much as potty train Maddox, even though he’s thirty-two-point-five months old.” She drew in a shuddery breath. “And I think Linc’s having an affair with Brittney, our nanny.”

  Whoa. Brooke stopped trying to do the math to figure out how old thirty-two-point-five months was in years and stared at her sister. “What?”

  “Look, I know you hate me, but when it all started to fall apart in the car on the way home from Mom and Dad’s in Palm Springs, I looked you up. Google Maps said you were right on the way home to Wildstone.”

  Palm Springs was six hours south of Wildstone, and two hours from Los Angeles, which wasn’t exactly on the route home, but a definite detour. “I don’t hate you,” Brooke said. Much. “But do you really think your husband, cutie pie Dr. Linc Tenant, the guy you’ve been in love with since the second grade and who worships the ground you walk on is having an affair with the nanny? And since when do you have a nanny?”

  “Since I went back to work at the shop right after Maddox was born.” Mindy sighed. “She’s only part-time, but yes, I really think he’s cheating on me. Which means I’m going to be single soon. Oh my God, I can’t go back to being single! I mean how do you know which way to swipe, left or right?”

  “Okay first off . . . breathe.” Brooke waited until Mindy gulped in air. “Good. Second, why do you think Linc’s having an affair?”

  “Because Cosmo says that married couples our age are supposed to have sex two to three times a week, and we don’t. I’m not sure we managed to have sex this whole month!” She tossed up her hands. “It used to be every day. Every day, Brooke, and we used to role play too, like sexy bad cop and sassy perp, or naughty nurse and—”

  Brooke covered her ears. “Oh my God. Please stop talking.”

  “We have a chest full of costumes and props that we never even use anymore.”

  “Seriously,” Brooke said on a heartfelt grimace. “I can still hear you.”

  “I just miss it. I mean I really miss it. I need a man-made orgasm or I’m going to have to buy more batteries.”

  “Okay, I get it, you miss sex! Jeez! Let’s move on! So you’ve got the problems with Linc, the nanny, and your, uh, lack of new batteries . . . but instead of fixing any of these problems, you, what, ran away from Wildstone six hours south to Mom and Dad’s in Palm Springs?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. And now Mom thinks Millie needs therapy because she’ll only answer to Princess Millie, and that Maddox should be talking more than barking. And Dad says Mason shouldn’t wear pink shirts—but it was salmon not pink. He picks out his own clothes and dresses himself, and I don’t want to squash that. Also, Dad thinks that my ass is getting fat.”

  “Dad did not say that,” Brooke said. The man was a quiet, thoughtful introvert. He might think it, but he’d never say it.

  “No, he didn’t,” Mindy admitted. “But it’s true and that’s probably why Linc won’t sleep with me!” She started crying again.

  “Momma.”

  At the little kid voice, Brooke and Mindy both froze and turned. In the doorway stood Mindy’s Mini-Me, eight-year-old Millie, outfitted in a yellow dress with black elephants and giraffes on it. Her hair was held off her face by a headband that matched the dress. But it was her eyes that got to Brooke. They were the same jade green as Mindy’s. And her own, she supposed. “Millie,” Brooke said. “Wow, you’re all grown up.”

  “Hi, Aunt Brooke,” Millie said politely before turning back to her mom. “Momma, Mad Dog peed on Mason again.” She held up her hands like a surgeon waiting to have her gloves put on. She ran the pads of her thumbs across the tips of her fingers four times in a row. “I’ve got to wash my hands. Can I wash my hands?”

  “Down the hall,” Brooke said, heart tugging for the kid. “First door on the right’s the bathroom.”

  Millie ran down the hall. They heard the bathroom door shut and then the lock clicked into place. And out of place. And back into place. Four times.

  Brooke’s heart pinched. Maybe Millie was more Brooke’s Mini-Me than Mindy’s . . . She didn’t know much about kids, and she was certainly in no position to tell her sister how to live her life, but things did seem out of control—something Mindy had never been a day in her life.

  Her sister’s car was parked in the short driveway in front of the condo, the doors open. Two little boys were rolling around on the grass. One was naked.

  Mindy was staring at them like one might stare at an impending train wreck.

  “Yours, I presume,” Brooke said.

  “Yeah. Want one?”

  She ignored the way her heart took a good, hard leap. “Tell me about Linc.”

  Mindy sighed. “I keep up the house, work at the shop thirty hours a week, and handle all the kid and life stuff. I’m the heavy. The bad cop. And I get that Linc and his brother Ethan had to take over their dad’s medical practice when he had a stroke, but that wasn’t in our life plan. And Ethan’s having some sort of mid-life crisis and taking time off, which leaves Linc working seventy hours a week. When he finally walks in after a long day, I’m invisible. The kids always love the good cop. I want to be the good cop.”

  “So be the good cop,” Brooke said.

  “I can’t be the good cop. I’ve tried. I’m too anal.” Mindy lowered her voice to a whisper. “I want to be you, Brooke. You get to bounce all over the planet, living out wild adven