Dixie ignores me. “Winnie, are you going to wear that cute blue sundress? Because, if not, can I borrow it? Blue looks better on me anyway.”
“Fuck you. I look fabulous in blue.”
“You look better in red,” Dixie counters with a grin. “I’ll lend you that cute red tank I have that would look amazing with your black print capris.”
“Hello!” I bellow, and Dixie kind of jumps and then turns and stares at me.
“Yeah? What?”
“I asked you a question. Is Zoey visiting, or does she live here?”
Winnie laughs as she stands up, leaving her half-empty coffee mug on my kitchen table. She gives me a cocky smirk. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
And then she saunters out of the room. Dixie gulps down the rest of her coffee and puts the empty mug on the counter, nowhere near my dishwasher, and chases Winnie out of the room. “Do not get in the shower first! I called dibs already, remember?”
I hear them both running through the living room and around the corner to my guest bedroom and bath. I sigh heavily. Holy crap, they’re annoying. I run a hand over my face as if trying to scrub the annoyed look off of it and then take the final sip of my latte. Sadie watches me like I’m a caged monkey at the zoo. “What?”
“She’s living here,” Sadie tells me as she stands and grabs Winnie’s cup off the table. There’s a wet coffee ring left in its wake. “She told Dixie that her parents retired and live in Sacramento and she and her brother, Morgan, are both in San Fran.”
“Oh. That’s amazing,” I can’t help but confess, because of all my sisters, Sadie is usually the one who doesn’t attack me like a gleeful hyena when I let my guard down. “I wonder how long she’s been here and how I haven’t run into her before.”
“I’ll find out at brunch and let you know,” Sadie replies and places her cup and Winnie’s on the counter next to Dixie’s. Still not the dishwasher but A for effort.
“Where’s brunch?”
Sadie pauses, and a smile slowly spreads across her lips. Of all my sisters, Sadie looks the most like me, her hair the exact same shade of blond, her mouth the same width, her eyes the same color. That means her smiles always look devious. She used to always get blamed for shit when the three of them got into trouble because she, like me, can never pull off an innocent face. “You still have a thing for her? After a decade?”
“I didn’t say that,” I reply promptly. “I’m just asking a question. Making small talk.”
She laughs a little as there’s a loud thud from the guest room and one of them swears loudly.
“We’re meeting her at MKTin the Four Seasons,” Sadie tells me. She starts out of the kitchen but pauses and turns back. “Because it would be kind of cool if you did still have a thing for her. If she’s single and everything. And you could hook me up with her brother.”
Sadie leaves but doesn’t head to the extra bedroom like the other two. I catch a glimpse of her heading into my bedroom at the end of the hall. Of course. She’s going to use my bathroom instead of wrestling the other two for time in the guest bath. Sadie was always the brightest. I shove their cups and mine into the dishwasher and pad down the hall, calling, “Oh, don’t worry about me. I don’t need to shower.” I leave the kitchen for the living room and drop down on the couch. I grab the remote and turn on the sound system, filling the room with some Tragically Hip so I don’t have to listen to the sorority thumping around as they get ready.
Zoey Quinlin lives in San Francisco. Well, things just got interesting.
4
Zoey
I laugh so hard my coffee almost comes out my nose. I lift my napkin from my lap and hold it in front of my face just in case, but I manage to swallow the coffee down. Winnie’s snorting laugh almost ruined it for me, but I managed. God, I thought she would have outgrown that goofy laugh by now. She’s been doing it since she was a kid, and somehow it’s just as adorable even now that she’s an adult.
I was kind of worried when I woke up this morning and dressed for brunch that we’d have little to talk about after we filled each other in on the last eleven years, but we’ve picked up like no time has gone by. Babysitting these girls was always a treat. They’re fun and a little bit wild. I think that’s why their parents paid me to do it even when Winnie was technically old enough to be in charge. The three of them together were unpredictable and a wee bit crazy.
We had spent the first hour of brunch catching up on each other’s lives. Winnie is a teacher, just like her mom. In fact they work at the same school in Toronto. Sadie is a nurse at a hospital there too, but both Dixie and Winnie say she should have been a doctor. Sadie laughed it off but there was something in her blue eyes that said she agrees. Dixie works in PR for the San Francisco Thunder. I didn’t have to ask about Jude. I knew he was a professional hockey player, but they freely threw more details at me. He won two Cups, he is alternate captain, he has won almost every award in the league at least once. He lives in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco. I had to suppress a smile at that. Adam had wanted to live there, but I thought it was too ostentatious.
Winnie stops snort-laughing, and the cackling from Sadie and Dixie dies down too. I take a deep breath. My sides hurt and my cheeks are sore from smiling, which hasn’t happened in…well, I can’t remember the last time it did.
“So I feel like you know everything we’ve done in the last eleven years. What about you?” Sadie asks as she pours more green tea from the tiny ceramic pot the waiter brought her.
I shrug. “I told you all there is to know. Morgan was already going to Berkeley, and when I got in, my dad decided to take a job at a church in Sacramento to be closer to us. He retired, but he and my mom areboth still there, and Morgan and I both settled in here. I’m working in real estate. I was in commercial, but I transferred into residential a monthago.”
“That does seem like a good fit for you,” Dixie tells me, absently brushing her ash-blond bob from her eyes. “You always loved houses. I remember when you babysat you used to take us for ice cream just so we could walk around the streets at night, and you could look into all the windows of the cottages.”
“That makes me sound like a peeping Tom!” I protest, but she’s right. I used to love to walk the streets of that tiny town and glance in any open windows. The cottages were all so old and there was amazing woodwork and elaborate staircases to glimpse. “I do still love old homes.”
“So do you live in one of the Victorian charmers around here?” Sadie asks, her expression inquisitive. “With your husband?”
