Mad About Max. Penny McCusker

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      Chapter Three

      After the Chinese food and ice cream, they’d moved on to Jack Daniel’s, the only man, according to Janey, who really knew how to comfort a woman. Sara was usually a rum-and-Coke woman, heavy on the Coke, or maybe a Baileys Irish Cream if she was feeling especially adventurous, but she had to admit Janey was right this time. The first shot of whiskey burned her throat and turned her stomach. The second still had her gasping for air, but it hit her bloodstream like a warm massage. By the third she was singing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and doing her tap routine from when she was eleven years old. It wasn’t the song she’d tap-danced to—the two didn’t even go together very well—and she had to imagine the tapping sounds because her loafers didn’t really do the job on Janey’s linoleum. But that song just demanded some life-affirming action and the one she’d chosen wasn’t going into effect until she saw Max.

      Her pleasant buzz started to fade after that. By the time Janey, who’d appointed herself deignated driver and switched to coffee early on, pulled into Max’s driveway, Sara was already rethinking her get-it-over-with-now strategy.

      “Shhh,” she said to Janey, putting her finger over her pursed lips when the tires crunched and popped on the gravel drive. It didn’t do anything to lessen the noise but it made her feel better.

      “Having second thoughts?”

      “Second? It’s more like…” She looked at her hands, fingers spread, then lifted her feet, one at a time. “I can’t count that high just now.”

      Janey chuckled.

      “I know that laugh,” Sara mumbled. “You don’t think I’ll do it, but I will. I’ll just do it tomorrow.”

      “I don’t think you’ll remember any of this tomorrow.” Janey turned off the lights and eased past Max’s house.

      She pulled up in front of the old bunkhouse Sara had converted into a little cottage, complete with a white picket fence and a generous garden, the frost-browned vines and bare trees decorated like a graveyard for Halloween. Every year when Sara put up the wooden gravestones with funny sayings, she’d secretly dedicated one to her perpetually broken heart. Well, that was going to change. “When New Year’s Day rolls around, I won’t need a resolution,” she said to Janey. “I’ll already be over Max.”

      “From the look of things, you won’t have to wait till tomorrow to get started on that resolution.”

      Sara twisted around in her seat, this way and that, groaning when she realized what Janey was talking about. Either Bigfoot was coming toward her car or Max was. She would’ve preferred Bigfoot. A three-hundred-pound ape-man with an unpredictable temperament would’ve been much easier to face.

      Janey glanced over at Sara, muttering, “I’ll buy you a couple of minutes to get it together, then you’re on your own,” and she popped out of the car, crossing her arms on the top of the door.

      Max pulled up short when he saw it was her rather than Sara. He turned toward the passenger side of the windshield, but the way Janey was staring at him was a challenge he couldn’t ignore. “Don’t you have someplace else to be?” he asked her.

      “Jessie is spending the night at Mrs. Halliwell’s.”

      Max frowned. “That doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

      Janey lifted up a shoulder, and gave him a crooked smile. “Moral support,” she said. “And entertainment—at your expense, hopefully.”

      Max just shook his head. They had a…unique relationship. No matter what he said or did, Janey would roll her eyes or huff out a breath, as if he had absolutely no clue about anything. Max wrote if off as a kind of younger sister/older brother thing that came from knowing each other their entire lives. If it had been anything else, Janey would’ve told him, he figured. СКАЧАТЬ