Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,71

nice.

We. Us. Ours. They’d both been using those words a lot lately, and it didn’t feel weird or wrong.

It felt oddly perfect, as if, at long last, the universe had finally been set right.

Even more odd was the fact that Arlene was a little disappointed that Jack had announced his intention to surrender on Saturday night. Despite the sheer impracticality, part of her had been seriously considering taking him up on the craziness of a Las Vegas weekend. But not this weekend, because Maggie was part of her school’s Playcrafters group, and they were performing a series of ten-minute plays at a local assisted-living facility on Sunday afternoon. And Arlene wasn’t going to miss that.

Not for anything.

As far as her disappointment went, it was very small. Very manageable. It was nicely mixed with her current feeling of breathless anticipation.

After this party was over, she was going to do her best to convince Jack that there was no point at all in waiting for tomorrow night.

Right now the conversation was all about a book called The Hunger Games. Will had gotten an early copy from a friend who did a book review blog at the Boston Globe, and Maggie had loved it so much that she shared it with all of her friends.

She’d made sure to get it back so that Arlene could read it, too. The copy was coming unglued, the pages rubberbanded together.

Arlene had finished it in one sitting, while Maggie was at school.

“Foxface,” Lizzie was saying. “I would totally be Foxface. I would finally have a good reason to use my mad shoplifting skills.”

Maggie looked quickly at Arlene. “She’s kidding.”

Arlene certainly hoped so. Jack was sitting so that his hand was resting lightly against her back, and she appreciated his solid presence.

“Don’t say things like that,” Maggie lit into Lizzie. “My mom doesn’t know that you’re not serious.”

“My mother’s the shoplifter in the family,” Lizzie told Arlene brusquely, with a blunt honesty that was disarming. “She got caught once when my little brother and I were with her and …” Her sharply featured face twisted. “Believe me when I tell you I’d starve to death before I ever did anything as moronically stupid as that.”

Arlene did believe her. “That must’ve been hard.”

“It sucked.” Lizzie glanced at Maggie before steadily gazing back into Arlene’s eyes. “But there are definitely worse things in life to endure.”

“Lizzie,” Maggie said, a warning tone in her voice.

“It’s okay,” Arlene told her daughter, still holding Lizzie’s somewhat challenging gaze. “For the record, I liked Foxface a lot.” She glanced at Jack who hadn’t yet read the book. “I don’t want to say more. Spoiler alert.”

Jack spoke up. “I guess I gotta read this book.”

“Oh, you do,” Maggie told him earnestly. “I’ll lend it to you.”

“I’d love that,” Jack said, smiling warmly back at her.

This was weird. This feeling of … contentment? Satisfaction? Serenity?

It was a sense of unity, of belonging, of rightness.

Maybe this was what it felt like to have a real family—to have someone, very literally, at her back, not just during bad times, but good times as well. Which was not to say that she and Maggie hadn’t been a family, albeit a small one. But it had always felt to her as if it were Arlene and Maggie against the world. With Jack sitting beside her, it felt more as if they were part of the world.

The conversation had drifted to the character named Peeta, and Jason was enduring some intense teasing. If Lizzie was Foxface, and Maggie was the heroic main character named Katniss, then Jason was Peeta. Apparently Lizzie’s brother Mike had some competition in the crush-on-Mags department.

Arlene looked at Jack to see if he’d made note of the boy’s blushing, but he was frowning.

But only because his phone was buzzing. He’d set it to vibrate, and he now pulled it out of his pocket. “Ah, shit,” he said. “I mean, shoot. Sorry. Becca just called me three times in a row.”

Arlene laughed. “I think that qualifies for an ah, shit,” she leaned closer to him to say.

He smiled, but he wasn’t happy. “I better take this,” he told her as he pushed his chair back from the table.

“Say hi for me,” Arlene said, and the face he gave her—Not a chance in hell mixed with Are you freaking kidding?—made her laugh again.

“I’m in the middle of something important,” she heard him say into the phone as he headed for the door to the hallway, “so unless this is