Once in a Lifetime
Page 4

Halfway through, the bell above her door rang. Naturally. Dusting herself off, she moved into view just as another woman came in.
“I’m looking for something to take with me on vacay next week,” she told Aubrey.
“What do you like to read?”
“Oh,” she said, “a little of everything…”
Aubrey knew this also meant the romance section, so she again pointed the way.
The woman leaned in close and whispered, “Do you carry that Fifty Shades book? And maybe…book covers?”
Aubrey was back to attempting to demolish the back wall when the bell rang again.
A woman entered with her three little kids and one of those tiny dogs that looked like a drowned rat in her shoulder bag. The thing was yapping as though his life were in mortal danger.
From his perch in a nook beneath the stairs, Gus, three times the size of the dog, growled low in his throat.
The dog immediately shut up. Probably terrified that the cat was going to sit on him. Aubrey gave Gus a warning look. They’d had this talk. There would be no bitch-slapping the customers, even the four-legged ones.
Gus stalked off all stiff-legged, with his tail swishing in the air. Aubrey reached out and stroked the little dog’s head, and he pushed closer for more.
For just about all her life, she’d wanted a dog, preferably a puppy—one of the big breeds. She’d begged and pleaded her case, but her dad—pre-divorce—had always been firm.
Puppies make noise.
Puppies are messy.
No puppies, he’d always said. Ever. For a while there, Aubrey had actually believed she could get him to change his mind. She’d even rescued a dog once and brought it home, convinced her father wouldn’t be able to turn away a stray.
The puppy had been gone the next day. “The owners came and got him,” her dad had said. “He’s living on a farm in the country.”
After her mom had divorced her dad, Aubrey had gone to work on her mom. Tammy loved dogs and was on board. But they’d lived in a pet-unfriendly building, and that had never changed.
Aubrey had never gotten her puppy.
And now she had a fat, old-man cat named Gus.
Her customer, looking harassed and exhausted, sent the kids to the children’s section and smiled wanly at Aubrey. “What would you recommend for me to read?”
“What do you like?”
“Anything.”
Aubrey nodded. She’d found that this was rarely actually true: In fact, it usually meant that the person wasn’t a reader at all. “What’s the last book you read and enjoyed?” she asked, looking for a hint just in case she was wrong.
“Uh…I can’t remember.”
Nope, not wrong. Aubrey directed her to the latest Nicholas Sparks. After the sale, she went back to the demolition.
The other day, she’d put a bucket of books just outside the store. They were gently used cookbooks, encyclopedias, and miscellaneous nonfiction. The cookbooks had vanished almost immediately. The other books still sat out there, and despite the fact that she had a big FREE sign posted, every day at least one person would stick his or her head in the door and yell, “Are these really free?”
Today it was a twentysomething guy wearing a ski cap, down jacket, bright yellow biker shorts, and round purple sunglasses, à la John Lennon. Mikey had been a couple of years behind Aubrey in school, and by the looks of things, was still a complete stoner.
“Dude,” he said. “Are these books really free?”
“Yep,” she told him.
His brow went up, and he surveyed the store. “So…is everything free?”
“Nope.”
“’Kay. Thanks, dude.”
At the end of the day, Aubrey tallied the sales, got the day’s new arrivals stocked and shelved, and locked up. Seeing the lights still on in the flower shop, she moved down two doors and knocked on the back door.
Ali opened up, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, an apron, and lots of flower petals. She smiled and pulled Aubrey in. “You’re just in time. Leah brought over her leftovers, and I’m about to inhale them all by myself.”
Leah operated the bakery between Aubrey’s bookstore and Ali’s flower shop. She was sitting on the counter near Ali’s work space, licking chocolate off her fingers. “Better hurry,” she said. “Ali wasn’t kidding. There’s two kinds of people here, the quick and the hungry.”
Not needing to be told twice, Aubrey moved toward the bakery box and helped herself to a mini chocolate croissant. No one made them like Leah. “Oh, my God,” she said on a moan after her first bite. “So good. I’ve been tearing up that back wall and am starving.”
“I hate you,” Leah said.
Aubrey felt herself go still and, out of a lifetime habit of hiding her feelings, schooled her features into a cool expression that she knew was often mistaken for bitchiness. “What?”
“You just worked for hours without getting a speck of dirt on you?”
Aubrey looked down at herself. “Well—”
“And your hair is perfect,” Ali broke in, taking in Aubrey’s appearance. “I hate that about you.”
Leah nodded.
Both of them had businesses running in the black, hot-as-hell boyfriends who loved them madly, and their lives on track. And they were jealous. Of her.
It was just about the nicest compliment they could pay her, and she went back to breathing. She should have known they weren’t being mean—neither of them had a mean bone in her body. “Lifelong habit,” she said. “Being perfect.”
Leah laughed and offered another goody from the bakery box. “You could at least get chunky. Or a little dirty, just once in a while.”
“I don’t usually get dirty.”
Ali shook her head. “Back to hating you, Wellington.”
Aubrey smiled now and reached for the last mini croissant at the same time as Ali. “I’ll totally fight you for it,” she said.
Ali grinned. “I could kick your skinny ass, but since the croissant will just go straight to my hips, it’s all yours.”
Aubrey took a bite of the croissant, licked her fingers clean, and then pulled her laptop out of her bag. “I finally got Internet, and I’m trying to decide what to name my Wi-Fi. I’m torn between FBI Security Van and Guy in Your Tree. Any opinions?”
Leah snorted chocolate milk out her nose.
“How about Pay for Your Own Effing Wi-Fi, You Cheap Ass?” Ali asked.
They laughed for a few minutes, cleaned up their croissant crumbs, and then Leah dropped the bomb. “Heard about Ben,” she said.
Aubrey nearly dropped her laptop. “Um…what?” Her heart was thundering, but she was telling herself that they couldn’t know. No one knew. Not even Ben himself.
Leah was looking at her oddly. “The whole tossing-your-drink-in-his-face thing at the Love Shack the other night,” she said.
Oh, that. Aubrey relaxed. “It was an accident. I was aiming for Ted.” She took a side look at Ali because one of the most weaselly, shitty things Ted had done was sleep with both Ali and Aubrey while letting them each think that he was single. And they hadn’t been the only women he’d done that to, either.
Aubrey had recovered quickly because…well, she knew men were jerks.
Ali had been thrown for an emotional loop, and, clearly remembering just that, she smiled grimly. “I hope you ordered a second drink and corrected your error.”
Aubrey shook her head. “I got…discombobulated.”
“You?” Ali asked. “Pissed off, yes. But discombobulated? That’s not like you.”
Yeah, Aubrey was real good at the tough-girl facade. But then again, she’d had a lifetime of practice. “Hard to keep it together when you toss a drink in the wrong guy’s face.”
“And not just any wrong guy,” Leah said with a laugh. “Ben McDaniel. Lucky Harbor’s favorite son. How’d he take it?”
Aubrey shook her head at the memory. “He didn’t even flinch.”
“He wouldn’t,” Leah said. “He’s pretty badass.”
He hadn’t always been like that. In school, he’d been the first to land himself in trouble, but he’d been fun-seeking, not tough as nails and impenetrable. Even through college. Afterward, he’d been an engineer for the city and had led a nice normal life.
Then his wife had died, and he’d taken off like a bat out of hell, living a life of adrenaline and danger as if survivor’s guilt had driven his every move.
“It was his job,” Leah said. “He saw and did things that changed him.”
Ali was watching Aubrey carefully. “Maybe you should try to make it up to him.”
Aubrey could see a certain light—a matchmaking light—in her eyes, so she headed to the door.
“Where you going?” Leah asked.
“Things to do.”
“Or you’re chicken,” Ali called after her with a laugh.
Or that…But the truth was, Aubrey wasn’t chicken. She was realistic. Nothing would, or could, ever happen between her and Ben.
No matter how much she might secretly wish otherwise.
Two minutes later, she was in her car. It was time to face the names on her list. Up first was her sister, Carla.
They weren’t close. Growing up in two separate households had done that. Living with parents who didn’t speak to each other had done that. Carla being told that she had gotten all the brains had done that.
But eight years ago, Carla had needed a favor. She’d found herself needing to be at her job at the same time as she’d needed to sign some documents to accept a very important internship, so she’d asked her look-alike sister to go sign for her.
Aubrey had been working her butt off full-time and trying to keep full-time school hours as well. Busy, exhausted, hungry, and admittedly bitchy, Aubrey had agreed to the favor, even though she’d known it would be a real crunch to get there in time. She’d left a little later than she should have, gotten stuck in traffic, showed up late, and lost Carla the internship.
Carla had been forced to ask their dad to step in, and she still hadn’t forgiven Aubrey.
Sighing at the memory, Aubrey parked at the hospital where Carla worked and asked for her sister at the front desk. Aubrey was kept cooling her heels for twenty-five minutes, though when Carla finally showed up in the reception area in scrubs and a doctor’s coat with a stethoscope around her neck, she seemed genuinely exhausted and surprised. “Hey,” she said. “What’s wrong? Mom?”
“Everything’s fine,” Aubrey said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”
Carla nodded but gave her watch a quick, not-so-discreet glance. “About?”
Aubrey drew a deep breath and then let it go. “Remember the time you asked me for a favor and I screwed it up?”
Carla’s gaze was moving around the room, taking in the people waiting to be called by the hospital’s various departments. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, I want to apologize,” Aubrey said, “and find a way to make it up to you.”
Carla looked at her watch again. “Wait—which time was this again?”
“The one and only time I screwed up,” Aubrey said a little tightly.
Carla’s gaze landed on Aubrey then, looking a little amused now. She pulled a protein bar from her pocket and offered half to Aubrey, but since it looked like cardboard, Aubrey shook her head. “It was when I was supposed to sign those documents for your internship,” Aubrey said. “And I got there late.”
Carla chewed her cardboard bar. “Oh, that’s right. You were probably busy with Mom, having your hair or nails done. That was your life, right? Dressing up and being a beauty queen, while I had to go to the toughest school and study all the time.”
Aubrey had been operating under the assumption that she was the jealous sister. And she was jealous as hell and always had been, because Carla had had it all: brains, the big fancy medical degree, not to mention their father’s pride and adoration. But in feeding her green monster over the years, it’d somehow escaped her attention that Carla might have been jealous as well.
She didn’t know what to make of that.
“I lost the internship,” Carla said, “and had to wait an entire year to get another shot at it. Dad was fit to be tied. He’d set the interview up in the first place. He said—” She broke off, clearly tempering herself.
“What?” Aubrey asked. “He said what?”
“That I’d acted like you.”
Aubrey absorbed the unexpected hit and nodded. “Well, then, I imagine he was quite pleased to know it was me who screwed up and not you.”
Carla’s smile was brittle, and Aubrey wondered if she smiled like that, too. “I never told him,” Carla said. “How could I? I’d gone on and on about how you were changing, how you were maturing. How I could count on you.”
Aubrey winced. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’d like to make it up to you.”
Carla gave a small laugh. “How? How could you possibly do that?”
“I don’t know,” Aubrey said. “We still look like twins. Maybe you have another conflict of interest, and I could—”
“What? Operate for me? Meet a patient and discuss treatment?”
Aubrey met her sister’s eyes. They were hazel, like her own, magnified slightly from the glasses Carla had worn since grade school. They only added to the smart image.
She wasn’t going to get forgiveness—she could see that now. And she probably didn’t deserve it anyway. “No,” she said quietly. “I can’t do any of those things. We both know that.”