Playing For Keeps

“This morning,” Joanna said. Glynnie looked at her. “Your grandchildren’s father? Dark hair, dark eyes, charming smile? Totally clueless—”

“Okay, ladies, I’m back,” Dale said, making them both jump. “Now, which one of these would you like? I’ve got ’em all in stock.”

“That one,” Glynnie said before Jo could protest again, naturally pointing to the largest one in the batch. She whipped out her AmEx and smacked it down on the counter, dumping the hapless frog beside it. “And you said you can deliver it in time for their birthday?”

“Sure thing. If you’ll just fill this out—” he handed her a clipboard with a form of some kind on it “—we can get it all set up for you.” While her mother did as he asked, he turned his attention to Joanna. “So. You’ve got kids?”

Was it her, or did she detect just the slightest edge to that question? “Three,” she said. “The boys and an eleven-year-old girl.”

“Sounds like you’ve got your hands full.”

Before Joanna could answer, Glynnie said, “Oh, it’s not so bad.” She handed him back the clipboard. “They’re with their father every weekend. Are you married, Mr. McConnaughy?”

Dale dropped the clipboard, which clattered to the counter, while Joanna fumbled for her brain before it landed on the floor and rolled away. When he looked up, Joanna pointed to her mother behind her back, then mimed hanging herself.

Then he did this slow, lazy grinning thing, and Joanna felt her blood heat up a degree or two. “Why?” he said to her mother. “You fixin’ to ask me out?”

Nice save, she thought as her mother—or the alien that looked like her mother—merely smiled. “Oh, I wasn’t asking for myself. I’m happily married, thank you.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that, Ms. Swann. But you know…” Dale leaned forward, bracing his hands against the edge of the counter. Those nice, slender, sinewy hands. “Maybe you should be careful who you ask that question. Some folks might take it the wrong way. Especially from a woman as attractive as yourself.”

Glynnie laughed. “Boy, you really know how to lay it on thick, don’t you?”

“Just speaking the truth, Ms. Swann,” he said, ringing up the sale. “Just speakin’ the truth. As a matter of fact, when you two first came in—”

“Please don’t tell me you thought we were sisters.”

Again with the loopy grin. And a noncommittal shrug. “A man can’t help what he sees.” He bagged up the frog, then handed it to her, along with the charge slip and a copy of the order. “Somebody’ll give you a call before we come out, okay?” he said, and then a mini swarm of customers came in, affording Joanna the perfect opportunity to grab her mother’s arm and drag her out of there.

“What were you doing?”

“Just having some fun,” Glynnie said, wresting her arm out of Joanna’s grasp. “Remember fun?”

Joanna stomped around to the driver’s side of the van, unlocked the doors and climbed in. “Yeah,” she said, slamming shut her door as her mother got in. “I remember fun.” To her annoyance, her eyes burned. “I think.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake—you don’t think I really meant anything by that, did you?” her mother said. “I was just testing him. And you’re right. That smile, that attitude…He is like Bobby. And God knows you don’t need to go through that again.”

Joanna twisted the key in the ignition, backing the van out of the parking space the instant the engine growled to life. “God knows,” she echoed, probably shaving five years off her mother’s life by darting across four lanes of traffic to make a left turn.

Two weeks later the roof still leaked, Bobby still hadn’t reimbursed Joanna for his half of the plumbing bill and Gladys, Henry Shaw’s Great Dane, was still pregnant. On a brighter note, however—well, brighter for Joanna and the female canine population of Corrales—immediate and permanent sanctions had been imposed on Chester’s wild oats. The dog seemed to be resigned to his fate, even if, judging from his actions, he was still a little fuzzy on the ramifications of his visit to the vet. But then, as long as Joanna knew he was shooting blanks, she really didn’t care all that much what the dog knew.

So all in all—she steered the van into the pickup lane in front of the elementary school—things were about the same.

The bell rang. Joanna didn’t bother looking for the boys in the blur of shrieking children disgorged from the sprawling series of buildings. A minute later, however, she picked out their shrill little voices like a mama sheep recognizing her lambs’ bleats from all the others in the herd.

“I called shotgun!” Matt, the oldest twin by ten minutes and the image of his father with his dark eyes and straight hair, bellowed beside the van. The twins were fraternal, not identical, as different in temperament and personality as they were physically. Although they were extremely well matched when it came to fighting over something they both wanted.

“Nuh-uh, I did!” Ryder bellowed right back as somebody yanked open the passenger side door and a whirlwind of elbows and knees and backpacks flew into the front seat. “Mo-om! Tell him to get in the back!”

It never ceased to amaze her how they could have the same argument, day after day, over something neither one had ever won. “Both of you get in back and your seat belts on,” she said mildly. “We’re gumming up the works here.”

“Aw, Mom…it’s just to the house.”

“Now.”

With a lot of grumbling and shoving and one backpack smacking Joanna in the face, they crawled through the space between the front seats and plopped into the back. “Didja bring any snacks?” Matt asked. “I’m about to starve to death.”

“I imagine you’ll survive until we get home,” Jo said, pulling out into the single-file stream of minivans and SUVs and pickups leaving the parking lot. “Either of you got any homework?”

“Nope,” Matt said. “Did it all in school. An’ I got all my spelling words right on my pre-test, too, so I don’t have to take the test tomorrow!”

Joanna’s eyes darted to the rearview mirror to catch Ryder’s sinking expression. Damn. For the millionth time, she tried to gauge how to respond to Matt’s good news without further damaging her other son’s increasingly fragile self-esteem. “Wow, Matt-o. You must’ve studied really hard.”

“Nuh-uh. I just knew ’em without even looking.”

Thank you, Matt. “How about you, Ry?” she said gently, wishing she could ruffle his cinnamon curls, which even as short as she kept them were every bit as obtuse as her own. “You have much work today?”

“I don’t remember.” His green eyes, a little darker than hers, flashed in the mirror’s reflection. “I think I finished all my math in school, maybe.”

“You did? That’s wonderful!”

His mouth stretched into a thin smile and Joanna’s heart cracked. The child had been tested every which way to Sunday, but there seemed to be no real reason why the very material that came so easily to Matt should be such a struggle for his brother. Joanna knew, even if she didn’t find two or three unfinished papers in his backpack, there was still a good hour to hour and a half of spelling and reading and math fact practice, just so Ryder wouldn’t fall more behind than he already was. It was hard on her, it was even harder on a child who’d already spent six and a half hours at school, but what was hardest of all was seeing the perplexed expression in Ryder’s eyes at his brother’s seemingly effortless success.

From birth, they’d been total opposites. Matt had come out protesting his confinement at the top of his lungs. Ryder had opened his eyes right away, calmly taking it all in, flinching only at his brother’s raucous cries from across the room. Matt had been the first to roll over, the first to crawl and walk and talk, always barreling through life at full throttle. Ryder, however, had to be coaxed to go down the same slide his brother had just rocketed down ten times in a row. And then only if Bobby or Joanna went down with him. He was the one who’d patiently spend ages building the three-foot-tall tower of blocks, his brother the one who’d knock them down.

Academically, however, they’d seemed to be on a par with each other until last year. While Matt continued to gobble up new skills like the hungry little caterpillar, Ryder had begun to struggle. Although quiet and attentive in class, he was now almost a full grade level behind. What got Joanna, though, was that she would have expected the reverse to be true, that the one who’d spent the first five years of his life in perpetual motion, except when he was asleep, would have been the one more prone to learning difficulties, not the quiet, contemplative one.

The quiet, contemplative one whose self-confidence was beginning to leak at an alarming rate, no matter what Joanna did to caulk it.

Both boys were out of the car and into the kitchen before Joanna could close her door and drag her weary butt into the house. Dulcy, her middle-schooler, had already been home for a half hour. What passed for music blared from her room. Cats swarmed Joanna’s ankles, begging her to make it stop.

“Turn it down, Dulce!” Joanna hollered automatically, hanging her car keys on the hook by the back door. The music dimmed from brain-numbing to merely irritating; a second later, the child stomped down the hall in her customary sexless hooded sweatshirt and jeans, brown eyes flashing behind wire-rimmed glasses.

“Okay, which one of you dorks was in my room?”

“Not me!” came out of two crumb-speckled mouths.

“Right.” Dulcy held up The Evidence: a box of colored pencils. “This was brand new and full when I put it in my desk yesterday, and now half the pencils are either gone or broken. And I know one of you did it—”

The phone rang.

“—and now I have to use them for a social studies project and I don’t have them and this like so pisses me off—”

“Dulcy! Hello?” Joanna said into the phone, glaring at her daughter. She couldn’t hear whoever it was for the eruption of “I don’t know where your dumb old pencils are!” behind her.

“Well, one of you does and I’m not leaving this kitchen until I get ’em back!”

“Sorry, hold on,” Jo said into the phone, then slammed it against her sternum. “Kids! Take it elsewhere!”