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“I just wish he would have stood up to his own family like that for me,” I said.
“Well, maybe he’s just getting started,” Kate offered. “Maybe you should go back to London and see what he does now.”
“Ha. Not on your life!” I reached for a tentacular calamari, only to have Joni steal it from my reach. “Hey, I wanted that. You’re supposed to give pregnant ladies everything they like, you know.”
“Gimps too,” Joni said, gesturing toward her scarred knee, which was propped up on the only empty chair at the table, marring her otherwise perfectly svelte dancer’s legs encased in cutoff shorts.
“I don’t think that counts when you’re six weeks post-surgery, babe,” Kate informed her. “Speaking of, what’s the prognosis from PT? When can we expect you back on the stage?”
An unfamiliar darkness shadowed my baby sister’s face as she stuffed another calamari in her mouth and chased it with the remainder of her wine.
Kate and I just waited her out.
Eventually, Joni mumbled something under her breath.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Kate asked. “Did you forget how to speak?”
“IsaidI tried to do a cabriole,” Joni enunciated with flushed cheeks. “And then I fell. Hard.”
Kate and I glanced quizzically at each other, then back at her.
Joni just huffed.
“A cabriole,” she repeated as if we should know exactly what that meant. “It’s a dance move. A really hard one. Where you jump and hold your top leg at a forty-five or ninety-degree angle, and then beat the bottom leg to it without losing that angle.” She sighed. “It used to be only men could handle it. I was the only one in theChicagocast who could do it at all, male or female.”
“So, it made you a hotshot,” Kate said with better comprehension.
“It got me hired,” Joni corrected her. “The director told me point-blank that’s why he chose me to understudy over more experienced dancers.”
I nodded appreciatively. “That’s awesome, Jo. Badass, really. Sounds like that PT is really paying off quickly.”
“I said I tried it,” she muttered. “And I fell. Like a sack of bricks.” She leaned over onto the table and buried her face in her hands. “I’m finished. I can barely do a pas de bourree without feeling like my knee is twisting off. But my Equity benefits ran out, so PT is done. I’m over. Finished.”
Another glance at Kate told me she didn’t know what “pas de bourree” meant any more than I did, but it was clearly something that upset Joni.
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” I said as I rubbed her back, lying the way only family can. “You’re young, Jo. Your body is going to bounce back. It’s only been, what, three months since the accident?”
“Yeah, maybe just take a little more time on your own,” Kate chimed in. “Hey, why don’t you visit Marie in Paris? We could probably scrape up a ticket for you.”
Joni just sat back up and made a face. “And sit around in her tiny apartment while she cracks eggs and whines about her boss all day? No, thank you.”
“That’s right, I forgot she had a thing for one of the Lyons brothers,” Kate said. “What’s his name again?”
“Daniel,” Joni said with relish. “And I only know that because Mimi used to write Mrs. Daniel Lyons all over her recipe notebook like she was freaking twelve. How pathetic is that?”
“So she still just likes the one?” Kate asked. “I thought there were two hot brothers running the Lyons family now.”
Joni and I both looked at her in surprise.
“And how would you know that, Katie?” I asked.
She shrugged. “One of them has a stylist. She likes my shop. And she gossips.”
That tracked. Kate’s shop was small, but she’d grown a national following with influential stylists all over the place—to the point where she was considering getting into that line of work herself.
“Anyway, yeah, there are two,” she said. “Look.”
Joni and I both leaned over as Kate pulled up a picture on her phone. Two extremely handsome men looked directly into the camera outside something that appeared to be a benefit, maybe, or a very fancy award ceremony. Despite the fact that they were brothers, the resemblance between them wasn’t particularly strong, and their personality differences were even clearer. One was probably my age, with dusty blond hair, blue eyes, and a bright smile. The other was older, dressed in a somber gray suit and wearing glasses. His brown hair and gray eyes were the personification of a storm cloud, and his mouth bit back a perennial scowl.
