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  He looked up, catching my eye. “You think?”

  “Definitely. You should meet my sister. In some ways she’s totally independent, and in others, she’s still about six years old.”

  He took a sip of his Coke. “You have a sister? How old is she?”

  “I have two sisters and a stepbrother, actually. My stepbrother is thirty-four, and my half-sister is fifteen. The one I was telling you about is my twin, so she’s the same age as me, obviously. Twenty-nine.”

  “Your twin, really? What’s her name?”

  “Yeah. Her name is—her name is Grace, but we call her Madison.”

  “Are you identical or fraternal?”

  “Um…identical, technically.”

  He smiled. “Identical, technically?”

  “It’s kind of a long story. We used to look exactly alike, but then she dyed her hair blond and had some plastic surgery, and now we don’t look that much alike anymore.”

  “She sounds like an interesting character.”

  “She is. She’s on a TV show right now. Belle of Georgia.”

  He swirled an apple slice around the edge of the fondue pot with his fork. “No kidding. One of my students has a sister on that show, too. She’s taking a lot of flak for it.”

  “Her name’s not Alexa Kassner-Phillips, is it?”

  He looked up at me in surprise. “Yeah, do you know her?”

  I laughed. “She’s my half sister. When you mentioned you teach at Kensington, I wondered if you’d know her. She was mortified when Madison went on Singing Sensation, too, but Maddie got eliminated in the first round.”

  “A few weeks ago? Hey, I watched that. Which one was she?”

  “She sang ‘America the Beautiful.’“

  “Oh, I think I remember her. She wasn’t too bad.” He cleared his throat. “Her voice, I mean.”

  I tried not to smile. “Thank you. She’ll be happy to hear that. I think the reason they cast her on this fake-Americana show is because her singing was so, uh, memorable.”

  “Well, when is it on? I’ll watch it, if you want. Then I’ll know what you’re talking about when you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Thursdays at eight.” I blew the steam off a piece of cheese-covered baguette. “Maybe you could come by later this week and watch it with me.”

  “That would be kind of fun.”

  There was an awkward pause in which, I suppose, he was trying to decide if I had officially invited him, and I was trying to decide the same thing.

  “You want to come by?” I asked.

  He nodded, poking through the bread basket nervously. “Yeah, sure. Sure. I’d like that.”

  Antonia huddled near me in her big canvas barn jacket, the sleeves pulled down over her small, olive-skinned hands. The wind blew her long hair around in dark, witchy tendrils, making her look a little more foreboding than her usual timid self. Maybe it would help keep the kids under control. We were on recess duty for about a hundred small children who were only in their third week of school, still a little wary in their friendships and forgetful of the playground rules.

  “How was your weekend?” she asked.

  “It was good. I met a new guy.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, a teacher. He was nice. We got along really well.”

  She squinted into the sun, watching a couple of kids who were flailing their arms at each other, trying to determine if they were just playing or throwing sand. “So Bill’s really out of the picture, huh?”

  “I’m starting to wonder if Bill was ever in the picture. Have you ever had a relationship like that? Where you break up and you wonder what the point of the whole thing was all along?”

  “Honestly, no.”

  “Well, just trust me. I really like this guy, though. He’s sweet and he’s kind of shy. He’s coming over on Thursday to watch Belle of Georgia with me. We’ll see if my sister scares him off. Or my roommate. She thinks he’s a total weirdo.”

  “Has she met him?”

  I stepped in between two kids who were playing tug-of-war with a beaded plastic jump rope. “Hey. Hey. No pulling, all right? No, Lauren hasn’t met him yet, but she’s already worked out that all of the astrology is wrong and his Myers-Briggs personality test results would make us totally incompatible. She says he sounds like an INFJ, which is bad, because I’m an INFP. I’m meeting another guy for coffee tomorrow afternoon, though, and she approves of him. He’s an INTJ.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have no idea. And she keeps telling me to read The Secret Language of Relationships and leaving it on the coffee table. She says it’s just plain dangerous to even think about dating until you’ve read it.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know that she’s wrong, but it’s astrology, and I have a hard time with astrology. Madison and I were born four minutes apart, and look at us. The stars couldn’t have changed that much in four minutes.”

  “Does Lauren have an explanation for that?”

  “Yeah,” I grinned, jogging off to the blacktop where two kids were fighting. “Birth order.”

  My half sister, Alexa, called just as I was sitting down to dinner, which in this case was a piece of gourmet cheesecake and a Diet Coke. I’d decided to cut calories by skipping the leftover mozzarella sticks Lauren had brought home for me. It didn’t make me feel as virtuous as I’d hoped.

  “I need you to pick me up from the hospital,” Alexa said grouchily.

  “The hospital?” I ran a forkful of cheesecake through the whipped cream. “What are you in the hospital for?”

  “I got bit by some chinchillas.”

  “Some chinchillas? How did that happen?”

  She sighed loudly. I could hear a lot of beeping in the background. “Look, can you pick me up or not?”

  “Shouldn’t you be calling your mother? Or Dad?”

  “Phoebe. God.”

  I pushed Pepper out of the way with my foot and began hunting around for my shoes. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  I felt sorry for Alexa. Since she’d begun high school the year before, she’d been trying desperately to rebel, but her mother’s unrelenting coolness made it impossible. Melody, her mother, bought chakra stones and supported the legalization of marijuana. Melody practiced yoga, quoted from Fear of Flying in conversation, and attended poetry readings at side-street coffeehouses with awkwardly painted signs. Melody held an ironclad monopoly on self-actualization, and at fifteen, Alexa had had enough.

  Last fall Alexa had begun her rebellion by announcing that she wanted to get her nose pierced. Melody turned it into a mother-daughter thing, taking her to a piercing and tattooing place and chatting up the piercing guy as he did his job, then taking Alexa out for sushi. A few months later, Alexa decided that she was going to be a lesbian and made an announcement at the dinner table. Melody responded by filling the house with books with titles like Understanding Your Gay Teen and by having a heart-to-heart under the frilly canopy of Alexa’s bed about her own teenage same-sex crush. When Alexa started blasting scary-sounding music at top volume, Melody dutifully looked up the lyrics on the Internet and printed out copies, sitting at the dining-room table with a highlighter pen studying them like they were T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Recently Alexa had discovered a chink in her mother’s left-wing armor: Melody still ate meat. Ever since then Alexa had been an evangelical vegetarian, which didn’t come as much of a surprise, considering.

  “Good grief,” I said as I found her slouched sullenly in a plastic chair in the ER waiting room. Her black-dyed hair was tucked in limp strands behind her ears, and her entire right hand was wrapped in gauze and medical tape. “How were you planning to hide that?”

  “I just don’t want to hear it from Mom and Dad right now. I’ll explain later.”

  I scribbled my signature on the sign-out sheet and flashed my ID to the woman at the desk. “I’ve owned chinchillas before, Lex. They’re
friendly.”

  “Not these two. They mauled me. Some gratitude.”

  “What were you doing? Feeding them?”

  “No. We were setting them free.”

  “Whose were they?”

  “I don’t know. A neighbor of my friend Allie’s. He had them in a hutch in the backyard. It was inhumane.”

  I stopped in the doorway and turned to her. The automatic doors lurched in their frame, trying to close and then opening again. “You set someone’s pets loose?”

  “We liberated them. They were all cooped up in their own poop, eating that gray pellet food. It wasn’t fair.”

  “Alexa. You can’t do that. You released them to predators, do you realize that? You can’t just send domesticated animals into the wild and expect them to know what to do.”

  She shrugged. “Live free or die.”

  I rolled my eyes and fumbled in my purse for my car keys. “You read that on a bumper sticker. Get in the car.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “I’m upset with you, yes. You can’t sneak around behind your mom and dad’s backs and then expect me to come running to get you out of trouble. I’ve got a life I’m trying to live here, Lex. I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got a social life.”

  She laughed and plunked herself down in the passenger seat. “No, you don’t.”

  “Speaking of gratitude…” I slammed her door and stuck a finger in her face through the open window. “I’d shut up about those chinchillas if I were you.”

  My coffee date with Carter, my last-chance date from Kismet, was off to a bad start hours before I even got off work. The mother of a six-year-old birthday girl had shown up two hours early with a double batch of chocolate cupcakes, and so instead of simply loading my sugar-crazed students onto their school buses and calling it a day, I was stuck in the classroom with them for the long, rainy afternoon. Two threw up: one from the cupcake, one from the inspiration of seeing someone else throw up. By the time I walked in the door of my cozy apartment, going out on a blind date sounded about as appealing as accompanying Alexa to a pet store.

  “Go anyway,” insisted Lauren. “I’ve got a good feeling about it. He feels like a winner.”

  I groaned and flipped a sofa pillow onto my face. “I thought you were into analysis, not ESP.”

  She nudged me with her knee. “Go, Phoebe. Maybe he’s The One, and you’re going to leave him sitting in a Starbucks with his coffee getting cold. You know how sad that is? That’s even sadder than the dog in How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

  I threw the pillow to the other end of the sofa and sat up. “You’re manipulative, you know that?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “I’m motivational. Think of me as your live-in life coach. God, are you ever getting a bargain.”

  Carter was already there by the time I grouchily pushed through the swinging door. As far as first impressions were concerned, he wasn’t much to look at. He was tall and unnervingly thin, with brown hair and brown eyes and brown clothes. All of his clothes: shirt, slacks, tie, corduroy blazer, shoes. At least he matched his coffee.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said, shaking his hand and dropping my handbag on the seat beside me.

  “That’s no problem. I’ve just been catching up on the news. I’ve been out of town a lot.”

  “Oh? Where were you?”

  “Just in Pennsylvania. I travel a lot for work.”

  I laughed uneasily. “You’re not a professional Santa, are you?”

  He grinned. His teeth were crooked, but he had a nice genuine smile. “A professional Santa? Is there such a thing?”

  “Believe it or not.”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t think I’m really built to play Santa. Hope you’re not disappointed.”

  “Not at all.” I decided not to inform him that Santas needed to keep in good shape, or why. “So what do you do?”

  “I’m a professional show-dog handler.”

  I restrained myself from burying my face in my hands. Would it never end? Why couldn’t I just find a nice accountant, or computer programmer, or maybe even a store manager? Sure, Sam had a normal job, but he didn’t count. His veneer of normalcy had been wiped out by his photo collection.

  “Sounds interesting,” I said politely.

  “Yeah, I enjoy it. I’ve always been kind of an animal lover. And I like traveling, so…” He shrugged. “Perfect job, as far as I’m concerned. Do you have any pets?”

  And so I told him about the cats and Pepper and the rest of the herd, even the ungrateful iguana. He listened with rapture, and asked one question after another, and an hour later, I realized I’d never even gotten myself a cup of coffee. When he asked for my phone number, I gave him my real one, with my last name written in my best schoolteacher handwriting. By the time we shook hands again, our next date was already planned: Saturday night, dinner and a movie. One with subtitles.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On Thursday I opened the door to Jerry, his hair wet-looking and neatly combed, holding a bouquet of flowers—carnations, daisies, freesia, and baby’s breath. He was wearing khaki Dockers, a blue T-shirt with a collar, and nice leather Rockport shoes. He looked like he was on his way to church. That was probably for the best, under the circumstances. My mind was already spinning with thoughts of the weekend and my upcoming date with Carter. If I’d realized how well the coffee date was going to go, I never would have invited Jerry over for Belle of Georgia. It almost felt unfaithful.

  “Oh, thank you,” I said, taking the flowers. I stepped back, kicking Pepper out of the way. “Come on in.”

  He looked around the room. “So this is your place, huh?”

  “Yeah. I have a roommate, but she’s out right now.” Lauren had vanished to the library when I told her Jerry was coming by. “Let me just get these in some water.”

  “Wow,” he said, looking around the living room. “You’ve got a lot of pets.”

  “I know. I hope you’re not allergic.”

  “No, no. I’ve got a few cats myself.”

  I cut the bottoms off the flowers under running water and arranged them in a vase. One of Lauren’s many rules for dating was that men with cats were not to be trusted. I didn’t believe in her rules, exactly, but I was afraid to totally discount them. After all, I hadn’t been any luckier than she had. Maybe she was on to something.

  “The dog is my sister’s,” I said. Jerry was scratching her back, crouched down and balancing unsteadily. “Do you want some popcorn?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  I put the bag in the microwave and walked back out into the living room. “Have a seat.”

  He tickled the parakeets’ cage, where Tristan was sticking his beak out through the wire. “Aren’t you going to do the intraductions?”

  “Oh.” I nodded toward the cage. “That’s Tristan and Isolde.”

  “Like the lovers?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t name them. They used to belong to the music teacher at my school. They hate each other.”

  He laughed. “Really?”

  “Yeah. They fight all the time. The cats are sisters—Pippi and Socks. Pippi’s the one with red ears. Socks has the white paws. I got them for free.”

  “You adopted two cats at the same time?”

  “Well, I didn’t want them to get lonely. That’s the same reason I got the rabbit. I felt sorry for the guinea pig. I’m not getting a second iguana, though. Her name is Lucy.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “My sister’s ex-boyfriend. He was going to get rid of her.”

  “I used to have a snake,” he offered.

  “You did? What was its name?”

  “Ozzy. It was a boa constrictor.”

  “Ozzy?” I smiled. “Like Ozzy Osbourne?”

  “Yeah. I thought it was cool. I was a headbanger back then.”

  I looked over at him to see if he was joking. “You were a headbanger?”

  “Yeah. I had a mullet and everything. I
spent every Saturday night at Hammerjacks up in Baltimore.” He reached into the guinea-pig box and let Hugo sniff him. “Those were the days.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious. You don’t believe me?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He pushed up his shirtsleeve. “Can you see that?”

  I looked closely. Faintly on his skin there was the shadow of some kind of skull-and-sword tattoo, just under his shoulder. “Yeah, a little.”

  “That one didn’t remove very well. I used to have six. Now I only have three.”

  “You had them removed?”

  “Yeah. They weren’t very professional-looking.”

  “Where are the other three?”

  He blushed. “They’re under my shirt.”

  “Oh.” The microwave timer went off. “I’ll go get the popcorn.”

  We settled down on the sofa with the bowl of popcorn between us. Pepper came over and plunked herself down on my lap. Jerry ran his hand over Socks, who had curled up beside him. I didn’t care what Lauren said about men and cats—a guy who was nice to my pets was a guy I would have a hard time not liking. The cats liked him, too. Socks rolled over to get her neck scratched and nearly fell off the sofa.

  “This week on Belle of Georgia,” intoned the voice-over, “a very special first date…a candlelit evening…and an unforgettable showdown between the Rebel ladies and their Yankee sisters!”

  With that, my sister’s face appeared on the screen, her blond hair flipping around her smooth spa-treated shoulders, her eyes almost lost in an angry, eyeliner-darkened squint. “You little butt-kissing lesbian bitch!” she screamed.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me that’s your sister,” said Jerry.

  “That’s my sister.”

  He took a handful of popcorn and shook it gradually into his mouth. “You sure you want me to stay for this?” he asked.

  “Unless you’d rather not.”

  “Are you kidding?” He reached for the remote between us and turned up the volume. “This I’ve got to see.”

  As it turned out, it was Madison’s day to go out on a big romantic date with Rhett. They showed her getting ready in the mirrored dressing room, combing an off-center part into her long hair, penciling her eyebrows, complaining about the bad position of being chosen third when there were so many girls to come after her. “Tenth would have been better,” she said.