The Complete Novels of the Lear Sister Trilogy

by Julia London

  “Now Bonnie, when we met on Monday, you indicated you were agitated about a recent event, do you recall?” Daniel asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Bonnie said primly. She was sitting ramrod straight, her hands folded in her lap, looking gorgeous with her dark hair cropped short and wild, just like he saw in the magazines he read when he was getting chemo.

  “Would you care to talk a little about that?” Daniel prompted.

  She sighed, looked at Aaron. “I guess its old news now. It was just that our daughter Rachel had been up to care for Aaron while I went back to Los Angeles to take care of a few things—”

  “Because your primary home is in Los Angeles, correct?” Daniel clarified. “And you’ve come to New York to be with your husband during a difficult time.”

  Aaron thought Daniel was being a little heavy on the forlorn bit.

  “That’s right.” Bonnie nodded, just as forlornly. “Anyway, Rachel did not want to come to New York. She’s trying to finish her degree, you see—”

  “That’s not why she didn’t want to come, Bonnie, and you know it,” Aaron said.

  “Aaron?” Daniel said gently. “Remember our rules—no one talks over their partner. Everyone has a chance to speak. When Bonnie finishes, you’ll have your turn to speak.”

  Bonnie sat a little straighter. “It is true that Rachel has had a difficult time finishing school and moving on with her life,” Bonnie conceded. “She has been a doctoral candidate for a couple of years now.”

  Daniel chuckled. “I can attest to the fact that taking a couple of years to finish a doctorate may not be as strange as it sounds.”

  “Yes, well, Rachel has been dating this man—a professor—and hasn’t really shown any inclination to finish her doctorate and get on with her life.”

  “Can you give me some examples of her disinclination?”

  Aaron damn sure could, but Bonnie always got to go first.

  “Okay, for example, she travels to England frequently to find a topic for her dissertation. Her degree is in ancient British history, we think, but she says there are so many interesting ideas that she hasn’t been able to land on a topic yet.”

  “And you think that is . . . ? What, untrue?”

  “Of course we think it’s untrue,” Aaron interjected impatiently.

  “Aaron thinks it is untrue,” Bonnie corrected him. “But I don’t. Rachel is bright and articulate and has a heart of gold. She just doesn’t understand where she fits in to this world, and she never really has. And when she has to land on something as defining as a dissertation topic, she can’t find her answer.”

  “And why is that, do you think?” Daniel asked. Bonnie shrugged. Daniel nodded, wrote something down on his notepad. “How exactly did Rachel’s indecision lead to your recent agitation with Aaron?”

  Bonnie snorted and looked out the window. “Aaron wouldn’t leave her alone. The whole time I was gone, he kept badgering her about her useless degree, and her useless boyfriend, and her weight. By the time I got back from L.A., Rachel had fled back to Providence.”

  “That was very upsetting for you, wasn’t it, Bonnie?”

  “It certainly was. He swore he wouldn’t do that,” she said, pinning Aaron with The Look.

  “But I didn’t swear I would let my daughter flounder,” Aaron shot back at her.

  “Aaron, remember our rule,” Daniel reminded him once more.

  Aaron came very close to telling Daniel to go fuck his rules, but he bit his tongue because he had promised Bonnie he would do this counseling, even if it killed him.

  “Let’s talk a moment about the promises we think we hear. Bonnie, what did you hear Aaron promise you?”

  “That he would change,” she said, shooting him another look. “And that he would attend marriage counseling with me, that he’d go to church and listen, and that he would stop berating our daughters for every little thing. He’s been doing that all their lives, always thinking he knows best, and he practically alienated our oldest, Robin, from us for good because he was always pushing, and then there was Rebecca—that poor girl had just suffered through a difficult time with her divorce, and Aaron was so certain he had to teach her something instead of letting her figure it out on her own, and now with Rachel . . . Well, I’m worried that he will push her away, too. And of all our daughters, I think Rachel is the one who really needs us the most.”

  “When do I get to talk?” Aaron demanded.

  “You may talk now,” Daniel said cheerfully.

  “Okay, here is what happened,” Aaron said, sitting up a little straighter. “First of all, this guy Rachel’s been hanging around the last couple of years is never going to support her. In fact, she’s been loaning money to that loser, which means she’s been loaning him my money. She can’t even see the irony in that! She’s all, ‘Dad, he really needs it more than me.’ Bullshit! And speaking of irony, here’s my second point,” he said, pausing to take a breath. “I told her when I first got sick that she had one year to finish her degree. I said, ‘Either shit or get off the pot, but you have to figure out how to make your own way in this world, because dear old Dad ain’t going to be around to make it for you.’ Come on, Bonnie, you backed me up on that,” he reminded her.

  Bonnie looked at her lap and nodded.

  “So I told Rach that the money train she’d been living off of for thirty or so years was leaving the station. And you know what? She had more than a year! She had almost two, for Chrissakes, and she still hasn’t finished her degree!”

  “And how does it make you feel when Rachel doesn’t do as you ask?”

  Was this joker kidding? “Well, Daniel, it makes me angry, and before you give me that smirk, I’ll add that you have no idea how maddening it is to see your own flesh and blood just twisting in the wind. Of all our girls, Rachel is the most creative, and may even be the brightest, but there she goes, spinning her wheels in a dead-end graduate field with a dead-end guy. Aimless!” he said, throwing up his hands. “Totally aimless!”

  “You don’t understand her, Aaron, and you never have,” Bonnie said wearily, and Aaron wondered why she got to talk during his time. “Rachel is a pretty girl, but she’s not a beauty like her sisters.”

  “What do looks have to do with it?” Aaron demanded. “You ask me, Rachel is more attractive than her sisters. She’s got that all-American rosy-cheek look and that long dark curly hair she ties up on her head,” he said, gesturing at his head in a tie-up way. “Her problem is she doesn’t want to go where life is leading her.”

  “Not where life is leading her,” Bonnie said. “Where you’re leading her.”

  Oddly enough, that remark stopped Aaron cold, and he stared at Bonnie for a long moment.

  “How does that make you feel, Aaron?” Daniel asked quietly.

  “It makes me feel like Bonnie doesn’t understand me. I’m not leading her, but that useless degree and that useless boyfriend are. That’s real nice, ain’t it? After ten years of higher education, what have we got to show for it?”

  “Go with that,” Daniel urged him. “Go with your feelings. How are you feeling?”

  “Ashamed,” he said flatly, ignoring Bonnie’s gasp. “Ashamed that we didn’t do better by her. Sorry that I don’t have the time to go back and fix it all. Yet I have to do something because that girl is still relying on me—I asked her, ‘What are you going to do when I die?’ and all she could do was cry. It’s like talking to a wall.”

  “I’d like to suggest a couple of things here, Aaron,” Daniel said, templing his fingers. “First of all, it is possible that Rachel is quite happy in what she is doing. She may not aspire to the same things you aspire to for her.”

  “Obviously,” he snorted, folding his arms over his chest.

  “Your message is a good one, however. You want her to learn to provide for herself, to be an adult, am I right?”

  “That is exactly what I am trying to do, but oh no, I’m the monster,” he said, mimicking quotation marks at Bonnie.<
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  “Perhaps, then, since your usual way of communicating with Rachel doesn’t appear to be working, you might try a different approach,” Daniel said smoothly. “If you feel like you are talking to a brick wall, then change the way you are talking.”

  “How can I be any plainer?”

  “What do you think would happen if you were kind to Rachel?” Daniel asked.

  Aaron blinked. “Come again?”

  “Think about being kind to Rachel. Try seeing the situation from her shoes.”

  Aaron frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Daniel exchanged a look with Bonnie. “If I’m Rachel, I’m thirty years old, give or take. I’ve been in school for a long time. Maybe so long I don’t even remember what the real world looks like anymore. And maybe I like my professor boyfriend because he doesn’t push me; he just lets me be who I am. And maybe, when someone suggests I step outside my comfortable zone into the real world, it makes me nervous, and I do things to maintain a sense of comfort, like overeat.”

  Aaron was already shaking his head at the mumbo jumbo. “Why in God’s name would she be afraid to step out into the real world?”

  “Because,” Bonnie said softly, “every time she has, she stood in the shadow of two very accomplished and beautiful older sisters, and she is criticized for the way she looks, and for the things that interest her, and essentially, for who she is. In Providence, she’s not criticized, she’s accepted for who she is. She’s safe.”

  Aaron felt a little dip in his belly.

  “So I’m going to suggest some communication exercises you can do over the weekend,” Daniel began, and reached for a pair of booklets.

  Aaron closed his eyes, thought that he just might vomit.

  Chapter Two

  Providence, Rhode Island

  Two weeks later

  The whole thing started with a bottle of wine and a heated debate over which spell to use.

  Dagne Delaney, Rachel’s best friend, was over for dinner when Rachel said she thought Dagne’s spell sounded like some kid’s jump rope rhyme, and suggested, seeing as how Dagne was brand-new to the witchcraft thing, that perhaps she needed a little more study before they did something really stupid.

  Dagne, predictably, did not appreciate Rachel’s suggestion.

  In all fairness, Rachel wasn’t into the white magic thing, which she’d tried to explain to Dagne more than once. Dagne’s witch deal was really out there, even for Dagne, but when Dagne was starting off on some grand adventure, she tended not to hear very well. Unless, of course, you said you thought her spell sucked, and then she’d hear each word, memorize them, and repeat them back with a hurtful look like you had criticized her shoes or something. Judas Priest.

  In spite of Dagne being the sort of gal pal Rachel typically avoided—slender, strawberry blond, and pretty—they’d met at Brown University a few years ago when they were both students of history, and quickly discovered a shared fascination for all manner of funky things. Rachel was still a student of history (or as her father said, a perpetual student of history), but Dagne got bored with it, decided she couldn’t afford it on her hair stylist income, and come to think of it, she was way more interested in hairstyling than history. And even though she’d gone on to be more interested in massage therapy than hairstyling, she and Rachel had remained best friends.

  Which was why Dagne was in her house now, bugging her about witchcraft. This particular thing had started when Rachel returned from New York after the worst fight with her father she’d ever had. She had made the mistake of studying her astrology chart to see what was up and concluded that the planets were pushing her to make some changes. When she showed the chart to Dagne, her brown eyes sort of bugged out, and she said, “Girl, you have got to make some changes.”

  And then she’d shown up tonight, fully prepared to make Rachel’s changes for her. After dinner, of course, which Rachel was still in the midst of preparing.

  Dagne helped herself to a glass of wine and asked, “So what have you come up with?”

  “Nothing,” Rachel sighed as she tossed the salad.

  Dagne paused to swipe a chunk of red bell pepper from the salad bowl. “Hey, cool bowl,” she remarked.

  Yes, cool bowl. Very pretty bowl. Cut glass, gilded rim, hand-painted scenes of a lovely French countryside painted around the bottom. “A gift from Myron,” Rachel said. “They must be having a sale at the museum gift shop.” Myron used to be her boyfriend. Now he was her friend and a part-time assistant curator with the Rhode Island Historical Preservation Society. He had a habit of bringing her gifts from the museum gift shops instead of the money he owed her.

  “So I’ve been thinking about this,” Dagne said earnestly. “Did you notice that Mars and Mercury are in retrograde? That makes everything so obvious. I mean, it’s, like, impossible to try and move forward with your life with that going on, right?”

  Who could argue the retrograde theory?

  “Everything is pointing toward reassessment. Whatever you thought your plan was? Rethink it.”

  Rachel snorted as she added slivers of portabella mushrooms to the salad. “What plan? I don’t have a plan. My internship just ended, I hardly have enough to pay the utilities and phone bill, and my dad is so not going to help me out.”

  “That’s the other thing,” Dagne said cheerfully. “Jupiter is getting close to the sun, which, of course, will affect your income, so by the end of the month, you should be flush.” This she announced as if it was a done deal, no questions asked. All Rachel had to do was wake up at the end of the month and presto! Money.

  “Flush?” Rachel said accusingly, and carried the salad to the dining room.

  “Flush,” Dagne said emphatically. “Listen to your cosmic meter, Rachel.”

  Frankly, Rachel sometimes wondered if she shouldn’t listen to anything or anyone besides Dagne. But she had nothing else to cling to at the moment. She returned to the kitchen, grabbed the wine and their glasses, and brought those to the dining room while Dagne grabbed her canvas bag and the tofu lasagna.

  “There’s actually some good news in my horoscope,” Rachel said as she pushed the salad toward Dagne. “When Mars comes out of retrograde at the end of the month, it should kick some butt in my tenth house, which means . . . drum roll, please . . . new job!” She lifted salad tongs in triumph, then handed them to Dagne. “I have to believe things are going to start happening for me—new job, new money, new life. I just have to make a couple of teeny-tiny adjustments.”

  “Like better money management!” Dagne snorted.

  Surprised, Rachel looked at her across the lasagna. Dagne raised her brows, silently daring Rachel to argue. Oh sure, like Dagne was a wiz at money management, which she was not.

  “I mean you should stop giving it away,” Dagne clarified.

  Rachel laughed. “I don’t give it all away.”

  “Really? You’re always loaning money to friends,” Dagne said, and the Wiz at Money Management should know, since she’d borrowed money from Rachel in the past. “But now that you’re completely on your own, you’re going to have to take care of yourself first.”

  “Fine,” Rachel said with a shrug. “Better money management. And I need to lose some weight.”

  Dagne winced a little, looked at the salad bowl again. “That’s really a beautiful bowl,” she said. “It’s amazing how antiquey they can make these copies look.”

  Wow. Apparently she did need to lose some weight. “You don’t have to act like you haven’t noticed,” Rachel said petulantly.

  “Hey, I think you look terrific,” Dagne insisted. “Full figures are all the rage. But you know . . . it never hurts to drop a couple of pounds before you start a new project.”

  So much for trotting out the double-fudge brownies for dessert. But it wasn’t like Rachel’s weight was anything new. Her dad mentioned it every other breath, Grandma kept sending diet books, Mom tiptoed around the subject like she thought Rachel might crumple into a c
rying heap. She’d steadily put on a few pounds each year until she was now about twenty pounds . . . okay, twenty-five. Or more . . . over what she ought to weigh. It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t have two older sisters, Robin and Rebecca, who were both pencil thin and beautiful, and rich and married to wonderful men and had beautiful children surrounding them.

  And here sat Rachel, their fat-ass little sister whose eyes were too far apart and her hair too wild to be stylish and her feet too big for really cool strappy high heels.

  “I’m sorry,” Dagne said.

  “Don’t be,” Rachel said sincerely. “I need something like finding a new job to plant the boot in my butt and make me do it. I’ll just have to stop buying the junk food Myron likes.”

  Dagne frowned at that, picked up her fork, and stabbed her lasagna. “As to that,” she said sternly, “you should know that Venus and Neptune are on a collision course, and when those two worlds collide, look out, because you just might find the love of your life, and his name is so not Myron.”

  “I know his name isn’t Myron.”

  “I mean, the guy eats you out of house and home, he’s always borrowing your stuff and your money, and what do you get out of it?”

  Rachel could feel her face flaming. “We’re friends,” she said, and hid behind a good slug of wine.

  “You’re his friend. Myron just takes.”

  “That’s not true. He’s been very supportive of my education when no one else would be, and he’s been a real trooper when it comes to Dad. He picked me up at the train station when I got back from the trip through hell, and he couldn’t have been more understanding. And look at all the stuff he’s given me.”

  “I just think it’s weird to be friends with a guy who dumped you.”

  “He didn’t dump me! It was mutual!” Rachel insisted. “And he’s just a friend, Dagne. What’s wrong with that? It’s not like men are banging down my door.”

  “They would if you’d let them,” Dagne said, and that was the moment the debate started, because Dagne flashed a bright smile. “And when I’m through with you, girl, they’ll be lined up around the block.”