Read Asking for Trouble for Free Online Page B

babies.’”
    “Of course I want you to come,” Mira said hastily. “Of
course I do. I’d be so happy. I’d be so grateful.” She was actually crying, Alyssa saw with some shock. “Sorry,” she said,
gulping a little, laughing, but still crying. “Hormonal. I’m crying at phone
company commercials. But I want you. I do.”
    “You’ll want her more when you see how much work twins are,”
Dave said. “You have no idea. And people say God doesn’t have a sense of
humor.”
    Susie looked at him and laughed. “Oh, dear. It’s so true.
But oh, my goodness, Mira, you’re already so far along!”
    “Ten weeks,” she said, brushing at her eyes with an
apologetic laugh of her own. “But we didn’t want to steal Desiree and Alec’s
thunder from the wedding, so we thought it would be better to wait to tell
everyone.”
    “Pretty fast work there, bro,” Alec said.
    “Thanks. I do my best,” Gabe said modestly. “But,” he added
seriously, “it’s because we knew we wanted to have more than one. Of course, we
didn’t realize we’d be having more than one right out of the gate.”
    “And I’m thirty,” Mira added. “I’ll be thirty-one by the
time the babies are born. We figured if we wanted to space them a few years
apart, it was time to start. And we thought it might take a while, once we
started trying. But it turned out that it happened the first month.” She smiled
at Gabe, her color mounting a bit higher, and he smiled right back at her.
    “Just another example of Mira’s efficiency,” he said with a
grin for his brother. “And don’t tell me Desiree doesn’t have a full time line mapped
out for the two of you, because I won’t believe you. Or that Dad agreed to
marry you without some major premarital counseling, including who’s cleaning
the bathroom and how many kids you both want and whether you keep your money in
a joint account, because I know he didn’t. I’ll bet you got it from Rev.
Wilder, too, just like we did.”
    Alec laughed. “Could be. On both counts.”
    “But wait a minute,” Alyssa protested, still stuck on Topic
A. “I thought twins only ran in families on the female side. I thought I was
the only one more likely to have them.”
    “Fraternal twins, that’s true,” Gabe said.
    “Oh.” Susie’s hands were clasped in front of her chest, and
she looked like she’d just got the best Christmas present ever. “Are you saying
. . .”
    “One placenta,” Gabe said. “Identical twins.”
    “Identical twins,” she breathed. “Oh, that’s . . . Girls or
boys?”
    “They think boys,” Gabe said. “We won’t know for sure for
another month or so, but it’s looking like they’ve got the equipment.” And he
looked even more smug.
    That made her parents laugh at each other again. “I am definitely coming to help,” Susie said.
“You just try to keep me away.”

 
    And that was all very lovely. All very heartwarming. And depressing
as hell. Everybody so wonderfully successful, everybody so happily partnered.
Everybody except Alyssa, unemployed and single, sleeping alone in her childhood
bedroom on Christmas Eve with not a single good prospect on the horizon,
boyfriend-wise, job-wise, anything -wise.
And this year, she was thirty.
    It was time to start. Pretty
hard to start all by yourself. Well, she thought as she scraped plates and loaded
the dishwasher, at least she’d get to be an aunt. She tried to feel good about
that. It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy for Mira and Gabe, because she was. But
it was so hard not to be jealous.
      “Don’t save that,”
she told Joe as he began to put the leftover spaghetti noodles into a plastic
container, working deliberately, the way he always did. Which made her want to
grab the container from him and show him how to do it fast, like a normal person.
    “Why not?”
    “They don’t taste good warmed up. The texture’s all wrong. It’s
better to use fresh ones.”
    “But if you save them, you don’t have