Taking a Chance

“You didn’t have a significant other?” he asked.

“Nobody serious.” Jo didn’t tell Ryan “serious” wasn’t in her game plan. “You?”

Ryan shook his head. “I’ve been divorced less than two years. Most of my spare time until recently was spent with my kids.” A ripple of emotion passed through his eyes. “My ex remarried and moved to Denver this summer.”

“Can she do that?”

“Regrettably, yeah.”

Their food arrived, and once they started eating, Jo didn’t ask any more about his kids. Obviously he missed them. But because they lived half a country away, she wouldn’t have to have anything to do with them. Maybe this relationship had more promise than she’d thought….

Dear Reader,

Perhaps I shouldn’t confess such a thing, but I’m at an age where I’ve gotten…settled. I like my life just the way it is. But as we all know, stuff happens.

I’m also at an age where I particularly value my friendships with other women. The way women connect with each other and offer quiet support has always interested me. I’ve been fascinated by the history of the westward movement, covered wagons to early settlements, which has become the topic of women historians who write about quilting bees and church socials and shared child care while the wagons rolled.

All of this came together for me when I conceived this trilogy. Women, settled in lives that should have been permanent, now find them disrupted by divorce, death and ambition. Three women, who now must scrimp financially, come together to share a house while they build new lives.

What these women find is something unexpected: friendship. That’s what UNDER ONE ROOF celebrates—the support we women have always offered one another, whatever else life throws our way.

Good reading!

Janice Kay Johnson

Taking a Chance

Janice Kay Johnson

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

JO DUBRAY WAS suddenly terrified. Not just nervous, as she’d been at eighteen when she moved into a dorm room with a girl she’d never met. No, she was so scared her hands were actually slick on the steering wheel of her Honda and her heartbeat was drumming in her ears.

What had she been thinking, to commit to living with a group of total strangers?

Pulling up in front of the house, her car piled high with all her worldly goods, she still liked the neighborhood. She made herself notice that much in an attempt to calm herself, to say, See? The decision can’t be that bad.

Not far from the university, this particular street was narrow and edged with sidewalks that twisted and buckled to accommodate the roots of old maples and sycamores. Lovely old homes peeked between leafy branches.

As Jo parked in the one-car driveway, the house itself pleased her as much as it had the only other time she’d seen it, during her fleeting, find-a-place-to-live visit to Seattle. A classic brick beauty, built in the 1920s, the house had the run-down charm of an elderly lady whose proud carriage denies the existence of a sagging hemline or holes in her gloves. Wood trim, once white, peeled. The retaining wall that supported the lawn six feet above the sidewalk had crumbled and the grass was weedy and ragged, shooting up through overgrown junipers someone long ago had planted to avoid having to tend flower beds. But leaded glass windows glinted, the broad porch beckoned and dormers poked from the steeply pitched roof.

Despite an inner tremor, she carried one suitcase up to the house as a sort of symbol: I’m moving in. Then, on the doorstep, Jo hesitated. She had a key, but she didn’t feel quite right using it yet. In the end, she rang the doorbell.

Kathleen Monroe, her hostess/landlady/housemate, a tall elegant blonde, answered the door with a warm smile. “Jo! You’re here at last! What did you do with your car?” She peered past Jo. “Oh, Helen must have found a spot on the street. That’s great. You can unload without hauling everything a block. I’ll need you to move before morning so I can get my car out of the garage, though.” Her brilliant smile lit her face again. “Come on, I’ll take you up to your room, as if you don’t know where it is. But on the way you can meet Helen, who makes up our threesome.”

Jo crossed the fingers clutching her suitcase. Not having met the third housemate had been one of her reservations about taking the plunge. But Kathleen hadn’t found another woman when Jo had made the commitment, so it had been a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Given the fact that she was quitting a full-time job in San Francisco to go back to graduate school at the University of Washington, Jo had taken it. She couldn’t afford a condo to herself. Anyway, it might be fun to have roommates again, she had told herself at the time.

“Oh, and you haven’t met Emma yet, either, have you?” Kathleen continued, in the same friendly way. “Let’s stick our heads in the kitchen—Emma’s starting dinner.”

The kitchen was shabby like the rest of the house, the linoleum yellowed and peeling, the cupboards painted a peculiar shade of mustard and the counters edged with a metal strip. “I’ll be remodeling as I can afford it,” Kathleen had promised Jo when she’d showed her the house initially. “If you’re interested in pitching in with painting and such, I’d welcome you.”

Jo had agreed, liking the homey feel to the high-ceilinged rooms, the scuffed oak floors, the pine table in the kitchen laid at the time for breakfast with quilted mats and a bouquet of daisies in a vase. It might be fun to help the house regain her grace.

This time, however, Jo wouldn’t have noticed if Kathleen had painted the cupboards purple. She was too nervous about meeting her landlady’s fifteen-year-old daughter. What if she had spiked hair, a dog collar and listened at all hours to Eminem at top volume?

No dog collar, but Jo was more shocked than if the girl had worn one. She was painfully thin. Her head looked too large for her pathetically skinny body, and her pale-blond hair was dull and thin. The sight of somebody who had to be recovering from a serious illness—or starving herself to death—stirring spices into a pot of what smelled like spaghetti sauce was beyond weird. She cooked, but did she eat? Why hadn’t her mother said anything about her problem to Jo when she’d mentioned having a teenage daughter?

Kathleen gave no sign now that anything was wrong, either. “Emma, meet Jo Dubray. Jo, my daughter, Emma.” Her voice was proud, her smile allowing no option but for Jo to respond in kind.

“Emma, how nice to meet you. I hope you don’t mind having a stranger down the hall.”

“Well, you won’t be strangers for long, will you?” Kathleen said brightly, not allowing her daughter to respond. “Now, let’s say hello to Helen and then I’ll let you move in.”

Jo gave a weak smile over her shoulder at the teenager, who was rolling her eyes. Then she let herself be led toward the stairs.

“Oh,” Kathleen tossed out, as if the tidbit were trivial, “did I mention that Helen has a daughter?”

She hadn’t.

Anxiety cramped anew in Jo’s breast. How much more had Kathleen not thought to mention?

“No,” Jo said. “How old?”

“Ginny is six. She’s just started first grade.”

Oh, hell, Jo thought in acute dismay. A teenager had sounded okay; she’d be hanging out with friends most of the time, anyway, wouldn’t she? Jo didn’t remember being home much herself when she was fifteen and sixteen. But a six-year-old was another story. She’d be watching Disney movies on the TV and bringing friends home after school so that they could shriek and chase each other around. She’d interrupt at the dinner table, ask nosy questions and pop into Jo’s bedroom, her private sanctum, without the courtesy of a knock.

Jo didn’t want to have children herself, which made the idea of living with one unsettling.

Struggling to remember the details of their agreement that would let her move out if she hated living here, Jo almost bumped into Kathleen, who had stopped in the doorway of the small, back room she’d called the den.

Jo peered around her.

A woman who looked about thirty sat at the desk, staring at an open phone book in front of her. A gray sweatshirt hung on her, and the one vibrant note in the room, her auburn hair, was bundled in a careless knot, as if it were an inconvenience instead of a vanity. A thin, pale child leaned against her. When she saw Jo and Kathleen in the doorway, she ducked behind her mother in apparent panic before peeking around her shoulder to stare with wide eyes. The woman didn’t even look up.

“Helen,” Kathleen said, in a voice that had become notably gentler, “I’d like you to meet our new housemate. Jo Dubray, this is Helen Schaefer and her daughter, Ginny.”

Helen lifted her head, but slowly, as if it ached. Her gaze took a minute to focus on Jo. The smile looked genuine but wan. “Oh, hi. I’m glad you’re here.”

Ginny hid behind her mother.

“Nice to meet you,” Jo said insincerely.

On the way up the stairs, she whispered, “Why’s the girl so scared of people?”

Kathleen touched a finger to her lips. “Ssh. I’ll tell you about it in a minute.”

Jo felt sick to her stomach. What had possessed her to think this was a good idea? For the same monthly rent, surely she could have found a room somewhere that, however tiny, would have been hers alone.

Companionship, she had told herself. Instant friends, even, in this new city.

Oh, God. Instead she was going to be living with a perky Princess Grace look-alike who was in serious denial, an anorexic teenager, a sad woman and a first-grader whose huge, vivid eyes showed secret terrors.

In the large bedroom that looked down on the overgrown backyard, Jo set her suitcase on the floor and said firmly, “Tell me.”

Kathleen hesitated, then sat in the overstuffed, flowered armchair beside the dormer window. “Helen is really very nice, and Ginny won’t be any trouble. Poor thing, she’s as quiet as a mouse.”

“What,” Jo asked, with a grimness she failed to hide, “is wrong with her?”

“Ginny?”

“Both of them.”

“Helen was widowed recently. About three months ago.” Kathleen made a face. “I felt sorry for her. But I should have consulted you.”

“It’s your house.” A fact that Jo had thought wouldn’t matter. All for one, one for all. That’s what she’d imagined.

Echoing the absurd, visionary sentiment, Kathleen said plaintively, “But I want us to live together as equals. All of us.” She sighed and looked down at her hands, fine-boned and as elegant as the rest of her. “I didn’t really want us to take on a child. For one thing, we don’t have another bedroom, unless we make over the den for her. For the time being, she’s sharing with her mother. The thing is…” Troubled lines creased her forehead, and at last she said with a faint, twisted smile, “I suppose I…identified with her. In a way we don’t have anything in common, because as far as I can tell, Helen loved her husband, and he died instead of deciding…” She stopped, apparently choosing not to say what her ex-husband had decided. “But we’re alike in that we both suddenly find ourselves on our own, with the horrifying knowledge that we have no real job skills and are rather lacking in everyday competence. Do you know, the last job I held was in college, when I waited tables at the sub?”

Shocked, Jo asked, “What have you been doing?”

“Being a wife.” Kathleen met Jo’s eyes, her expression stark. “Putting on charity luncheons. Entertaining. Being a wealthy businessman’s prop.” Her laugh was brittle. “Sad, isn’t it? I’m half a century out of date.”

Jo could think of a million things to say, starting with: How did you let yourself be used like that? But they didn’t know each other well enough for her to be so tactless.

“Helen,” she said instead. “Is she always so…withdrawn?”

“No. Oh, no. She was nerving herself to call her attorney, who hasn’t been doing what he should be. He was their attorney—Ben’s, really, and now she’s thinking she shouldn’t have left so much in his hands, but she’s having a hard time being assertive enough to insist on more control, or to fire him.”

Being assertive had never been hard for Jo, who had difficulty imagining turmoil or timidity over something as simple as firing an incompetent lawyer.

“Is her little girl always like that?” she asked.

Kathleen hesitated. “She’s very quiet,” she said at last. “I don’t think she’ll bother you.”

The expression in those big, sad eyes would bother Jo, but she only nodded.

“Emma…” Her question—questions—died unspoken in the face of Kathleen’s blandly inquiring expression.

“She’s trying to take Ginny under her wing, but that poor child is very shy.” Kathleen’s brow crinkled. “I worry about how she’s doing in school. At home, she doesn’t want to be away from her mother even for a second. She stands out in the hall when Helen goes in the bathroom.”

An image of the little girl just waiting, a small insubstantial presence with that haunted gaze fixed on the closed door, flickered through Jo’s mind. She almost shivered. Ginny reminded her of a kid in a horror film, she couldn’t remember which. The kid had probably turned out to be a ghost. No, what Ginny reminded Jo of was herself, in the year after her mother had died.

Kathleen shook her head and then smiled with the brilliance of a hundred-watt bulb. “Well. Can I help you carry stuff in?”

Tempted to snatch up her suitcase and flee, Jo ran through her options and came up with no viable one. It might not be so bad. She could stay for a few days, a week, see how it went. Maybe Helen wasn’t as lost in grief as she seemed. Maybe the little girl was just painfully shy. Maybe Emma…

Here, Jo stuttered to a stop. Maybe Emma would sit down at the table and tuck into the spaghetti tonight? Maybe she was recovering from a debilitating illness and not anorexic at all? Feeling a surprising sting of sadness for the girl with the sweet smile and fragile body, Jo couldn’t believe any optimistic possibility.

But maybe living here would work. At least long enough to find something else.

“Thanks,” she said. “I have a bunch of boxes.”

Kathleen stood. “Then let’s go get them.”

EMMA DIDN’T EAT dinner. She’d nibbled so much while she was cooking, she felt stuffed, she said. Her mother didn’t argue, although Jo thought she saw strain briefly on Kathleen’s face. Why didn’t she make her eat? Jo wondered.

The teenager puttered in the kitchen, cleaning up, while everyone else sat around the table twirling spaghetti on forks and making conversation. Jo felt as if Emma were the ghost at the feast. Two ghosts now, she thought morbidly, both children. Every time she looked at Ginny, who ate with tiny, careful motions, taking sips of milk only after shooting wary glances around, Jo was sorry. Happy children were bad enough, but unhappy ones were worse, she was discovering. She longed for the pathetic girl to bound out of the chair and interrupt the adults with a noisy announcement that she was going to go play Nintendo. Loudly. In the next room.

“What good spaghetti!” her mother said. “Thank you, Emma.”

Everyone murmured agreement. Emma smiled with apparent pleasure and offered seconds.

Kathleen tapped her glass of milk with her spoon. “I propose that we have a round-table discussion after dinner. We can talk about rules, expectations, pet peeves…whatever anyone wants.”

Jo shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”

“Why don’t we clean up first?” Helen said, in the first minor burst of initiative Jo had seen from her. “Emma cooked. She shouldn’t have to wash dishes, too.”

Wash dishes? Aghast, Jo took a more comprehensive look at the kitchen. No dishwasher? Was it possible?

It was.

She dried while Helen washed and Kathleen put food away. Emma, shooed from the center of activity, sat with Ginny and murmured to her, her head bent and her ash-blond hair forming a curtain that hid both their faces. Twice, though, Jo caught sight of Ginny peeking around the teenager to fix anxious eyes on her mother. To make sure she was still there, Jo supposed, and hadn’t slipped away.

As her father had.

Helen didn’t say much as they washed, but she seemed…normal. Present. She gave Jo a couple of shy smiles, apologized when she bumped into her, and asked once, “Are you all moved in?”

Jo thought of the pile of boxes in the corner of the upstairs bedroom and the larger pile of boxes and furniture she’d left in storage in San Francisco and shook her head. “I meant to get here earlier in the afternoon, but traffic into Seattle was awful.”

They had one of those innocuous conversations where they discussed the rush hour and the respective traffic jams in the Bay area and Seattle. If she didn’t look toward the starving teenager and terrified first grader, Jo could almost feel reassured.

The women were just pouring cups of coffee and herb tea—soda for Ginny—when a knock on the front door made Jo jump. Seeming unsurprised, Kathleen said, “I’ll get it,” and left the room. She came back a moment later, followed by a man.

And what a man, Jo thought with a burst of pure, disinterested admiration. Well, okay. Maybe not disinterested.

Broad shoulders, heavy-lidded, smiling eyes, thick, dark-blond hair streaked by the sun, and a craggy, intelligent face interested her very much.

“Jo, my brother, Ryan Grant,” Kathleen said, rolling her eyes. “He gets lonely and can’t stay away.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” the man said mildly. Gray eyes met Jo’s for a strangely electric moment before he turned to hug Emma. “How are you, kiddo?” he asked in a low, gruff voice in which Jo recognized gentleness.

“Uncle Ryan!” Emma’s pixie face brightened. “Cool! Are you lonely?”

“Nah. I just like all of you.” He touched Ginny’s shoulder. “Hi, Hummingbird.”

Hummingbird? The tiny bird’s quivering energy seemed the farthest thing from Ginny’s repressed, frightened self.

But the name provoked a small smile, quickly hidden but startling.

The man—Kathleen’s brother—smiled in return, seemingly content, and said, “Do I get a cup of coffee?”

“There’s spaghetti left,” Emma told him eagerly. “I can warm some up for you if you want.”

“Thanks, but I’ve eaten.”

“We,” his sister said sternly, “were just going to have an official round-table meeting to discuss rules.”

“I can make up rules,” he said obligingly.

“You don’t live here. Contrary to appearances.”

“I’ll referee.”

With a tartness Jo appreciated, Kathleen said, “Unlike men when they get together to play, women rarely need a mediator.”

Jo could see the resemblance between sister and brother, both what she thought of as beautiful people. Kathleen, though, had the carriage and confidence of someone who had grown up with money—the easy poise, the natural ability to command, the chic French braid—while her brother had shaggy hair and wore faded jeans, work boots, and a sweat-stained white T-shirt under a torn chambray shirt, hanging open. His hands were brown, calloused and bleeding on one knuckle. He looked like a working man. Intrigued, Jo continued to watch their byplay as Kathleen told him with mock firmness that he could stay and eavesdrop, but not contribute—unless he wanted his name on their chore list.

Ryan chose to pull up a chair just outside the circle when the women sat back down at the table. He hovered behind Ginny and Emma, elbows resting on the backs of their chairs, his quiet murmurs eliciting giggles that Emma let peal and Ginny buried behind a hand.

Kathleen had grabbed a pen and spiral notebook, now open in front of her. “Well, let me say first that I’m really glad you’re both here.” She smiled warmly at first Helen and then Jo. “I think this is going to be fun.”

Jo had thought so, too, until she’d nearly chickened out before knocking on the front door. Despite her apprehension, she let herself believe that it really would be. Both girls still knew how to laugh. Whatever troubled them, they weren’t beyond hope. Sure, she hadn’t wanted to live with kids, but they weren’t hers. She’d probably see them only at meals—and apparently Emma wouldn’t be sitting down with them for hers, if she ate any at all.

“Now,” Kathleen continued, “I genuinely don’t want to be in charge. I hope we can agree on how we want to run the house, the levels of cleanliness and noise and privacy we all find acceptable. It’s one reason I chose both of you, women close to my own age. I thought we’d be likelier to enjoy the same music, have the same…well, standards, I guess.” She looked around. “I’ll start. I figured we should divvy up chores.”

They decided each would cook dinner two nights a week, with Sunday either a joint effort or an everyone-on-their-own day. Other meals, they’d take care of individually. The two who hadn’t cooked would clean the kitchen together after dinner.

“Unless Ryan invites himself,” his sister said dryly, “in which case he can clean up. By himself.”

“Hey!” he protested. “I’ve been known to bring pizza. Or Chinese takeout.”

“You should see his refrigerator at home,” Kathleen told the others. “Beer, cheese, mustard… Classic male on his own.”

The question, Jo decided, was why such a gorgeous man was on his own at all. He had to be in his early thirties. Guys with wicked smiles and tall powerful bodies like his had been snapped up long before his age. So…what was the catch?

Oblivious, thank goodness, to Jo’s speculation, Kathleen added, “And I hope everyone will clean up after themselves in the morning and after lunch?” The question was more of a tactfully phrased order.

Jo and Helen murmured assent.

Otherwise, they agreed that everyone would pitch in on Saturday mornings to clean house. Bedrooms would be sacred to their owners—knocks were mandatory, and a closed door should be interpreted as a desire for privacy.

Very conscious of Ryan Grant’s interested gaze, Jo said, “We should discuss our schedules as we know them, so we’re not all trying to use the bathroom at the same time. Fortunately, my first class isn’t until 9:00 this semester, but that may change.”

She’d made the decision to go back for a graduate degree in library and information science. She’d been lucky enough to have risen from page—her job while in high school—to clerk and finally branch manager in a San Mateo County public library. She loved books and libraries. What she hated was knowing that, although she had the same responsibilities as branch managers with master’s degrees, she didn’t get equal pay. And she wasn’t going to be offered any more promotions, or ever have the chance to rise to director. In fact, if she were to move, she would never be offered even a comparable job. Jo was too ambitious to settle for what she had.

Two years of penny-pinching, with full-time graduate school and part-time work, and she would be a degreed librarian. No more subtle condescension. Jo had every intention of ending up director of a major library system. The only drawback to moving away from the Bay Area was that she was farther from the only family she cared about: her brother Boyce, who lived in San Francisco, and her aunt Julia in L.A. But once she had her master’s degree, she could go back to California.