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Chapter One
Josie
‘Families are like fudge- mostly sweet, with a few nuts.’ Les Dawson
‘Where are you?’
Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Josie Heiner ignored the text from her mother and continued to study the to-go menu in front of her. It was pointless to reply. Text exchanges with her mother were always the same.‘Where are you?’ ‘Never mind, could you pick up dinner?’Since it was Friday, there would also be a reminder that her twin brother Kyle and his boyfriend Jonas would be coming, possibly their great aunt or her mother’s best friend.
‘Never mind, can you pick up dinner? Don’t forget it’s Friday. Kyle and Jonas will be joining us.’
Josie snickered. Right on time. Her mother was nothing if not predictable.‘Taking care of dinner now,’she text back before waving the hostess over to take her order. “I’m going to need a family style fettuccine with pink sauce, a family style chicken parmigiana, a family style spaghetti and meatballs, a large bruschetta, two large orders of garlic knots, a family style Greek salad, and... ” her eyes dropped back to the menu “a dozen chocolate chip cannoli if you have them.” She held out a faded, slightly chewed on debit card, inwardly cringing as the order was totaled. If it were up to her, family dinner night wouldbe a bring a dish potluck or one of those two for twenty pizza and a dozen wings specials. Her mother would stroke out if she showed up with pizza and wings.
‘Order extra. Aunt Beckett is coming.’
“One step ahead of you mother,” Josie muttered, sinking onto the dark, wooden bench that was reserved for guests waiting on to-go orders or a table.
‘Kyle says he has exciting news!’
She didn’t fight the eye roll this time. Any news from her brother was exciting to their mother. Kyle could fart in public, and Ruth Heiner would gush about how talented her eldest child was, like he had cured cancer or walked on water. To be fair, Josie could acknowledge that this time Kyle’s news was exciting. He was finally going to make an honest man out of Jonas, and Josie, for one, couldn’t wait.
It was no secret that the one thing Kyle sucked at was planning any sort of event, he relied on Josie to pull things together; he had already made it clear the wedding would be no different.
‘Picking up Alfredo’s for dinner,’she text to the group chat she had with Kyle and Jonas. She chuckled when Jonas replied with a joke about it being a special occasion. She started to ask if one of them could grab a bottle of wine, only to stop mid-text when the hostess walked towards her with four large sacks of food.
“Thanks,” she murmured when the hostess awkwardly handed them to her.
The drive home was quicker than Josie would have liked. Friday night dinner with the family should have been fun, but mostly it was stressful. Her father would hide out in his office, pretending to be busy with work while secretly watching camping ASMR videos on YouTube. Her mother would scurry around like a rat on crack, fussing and fretting over the dumbestthings until Kyle arrived, and then it would turn into ‘omg Kyle is the best thing since sliced bread.’
If their mother’s Aunt Beckett came, and she usually did, there was also the bonus stress of her bickering with Josie’s mother Ruth. God, what she wouldn’t do for a normal family that sat around sipping hot chocolate and playing board games. They’d tried that a handful of times, only to have Ruth accuse Aunt Beckett of cheating at whatever game they were playing, which resulted in Aunt Beckett calling Ruth a sore loser. Monopoly, Uno, and Sorry were all banned from family night.
“Did you get my messages,” her mother asked as she carried the bags of food into the kitchen. Josie nodded, setting the bags on the white marbled countertop. “So, you know that Kyle has exciting news.”
“Yup.”
“I think it might be engagement news.” It was, but that was for Kyle and Jonas to say, not Josie. “So, try not to be a Jealous Josie tonight.”
Jealous Josie. The old nickname had Josie wrinkling her nose. “Do you have to call me that?”
“Oh Josie, really.” Ruth rolled her eyes before turning her focus to the bags of food that lined the island in the middle of the kitchen. “I don’t know why you make such a fuss over something so trivial.”
“Seriously?” Twenty years of having her family taunt her with that awful nickname wasn’t trivial. She’d been five the first time someone called her a jealous Josie. It had been Christmas and Aunt Beckett had just given Kyle a couple of different pairs of dance shoes and a gift certificate for a year’s worth of dance lessons. Josie had received a little cat-shaped backpack.
According to family lore, Josie had burst into tears and started blubbering about how it wasn’t fair since she was the one who wanted to be a ballerina. She may or may not haveaccused Aunt Beckett of loving Kyle more. The one absolute in the whole thing was Aunt Beckett saying “don’t be jealous Josie'' before telling her to look inside the bag; there had been a pair of ballet slippers and another gift certificate for dance lessons. She’d stopped crying immediately, but it was too late. Jealous Josie had stuck.
“I’m just saying... ” Ruth glanced over her shoulder, her blue-gray eyes twinkling. “Kyle said he had exciting news. If it’s what I think it is... well... we don’t need jealous Josie making an appearance.”
“Oh. My. God.” Shaking her head, Josie shot her mother a disgusted look before stomping towards the living room. Despite what her mother thought, she didn’t sit around sulking every time something exciting happened in Kyle’s life. She was happy for him, and usually the one cheering him on the loudest.
In fact, while everyone else had been busy trying to talk Kyle out of opening his own dance studio, Josie had helped him put together the perfect business proposal and even co-signed for the loan when the bank said he would need one.
Their mother in particular seemed to forget that Josie was a silent partner in the dance studio, which meant Kyle’s success was her success. Shoot, she had even been the one to plan his perfect marriage proposal. Would a jealous person do that? Most of her family seemed to think so. They didn’t understand that a person could be happy for someone else while bemoaning their own failures over a pint of mint chocolate chip; which is exactly what Josie was going to do after Kyle and Jonas dropped their engagement bomb.
‘You are so going to owe me,’Josie thought, picking up a silver framed photo of Kyle and her at their high school graduation.
A faint smile curved her mouth upward. With the exception of Kyle being three inches taller, they had lookedalmost identical with their long blonde hair and perfect winged liner. They’d been oblivious babies, basking in the glory of graduating, completely unaware that their father’s routine checkout would bring news that changed their lives.
Kyle took the cancer diagnosis the hardest. He’d refused to believe their larger-than-life dad could be sick. His way of dealing with it had been to apply for a three-month long dance intensive in New York City. While he was training to be a better dancer, Josie was taking turns with their mother driving their dad to chemo. She could have been bitter that he left, most of her friends seemed to think she should have been.
