“Where’s Maddie?”

I looked up from where I was staring at my desk. She was right—you could totally see my crotch through the tempered glass top.

“She’s at lunch,” I told Bobbie.

“Why so glum, chum?”

My sister stepped inside and slowly sat down on the leather couch in the corner. So many memories of Madeline on that couch… And now she’d given her two-week notice.

My fingers combed through my hair, and I tried to tug the despondence out of my head. It didn’t work. The wrong woman was still sitting on that couch, and Maddie was probably out doing job interviews during her lunch hour.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Having lunch with my big brother?”

I waited silently.

“Okay, I was supposed to have lunch with Aaron but he’s still stuck in some sponsorship meeting. So I thought I’d try Maddie instead.”

I was the consolation prize. Great. I gave her a noncommittal grunt, but at least the tightness in my chest eased a bit when she stood up to approach my desk.

“You’re looking better,” I said as she sat down in the visitor’s chair. “You’ve got some color again.”

“Yeah, now I’m green.” My blank stare made her roll her eyes. “Morning sickness, Brainiac.” She clutched her belly, bent over and faked a retching sound.

“Charming.”

“Isn’t it? One of the fun things about pregnancy.” Her tone was sarcastic but her demeanor made me wonder if she was gestating a unicorn—she was so damn chipper.

“You mean there are fun things about pregnancy?”

“Sure.” But then my sister pressed her lips together tightly. Either she was going to hurl, or she’d decided not to talk about it anymore—at least not with me.

I grabbed a file folder from a fan-shaped array of them on the left side of my desk. “I don’t have time for lunch, sorry.”

The truth was that I was still uncomfortable around a pregnant Bobbie. It was hard enough for me to accept the fact that I had no control over the situation, but now Madeline was pressing me to accept the fact that it shouldn’t be a “situation” for me in the first place. Which reminded me…

“Don’t you have a job to get back to?”

Bobbie’s mouth turned down. I hadn’t meant for my words to come out sounding so, well, snarky. But really, was she still working at the lodge? Or had she quit that job now too?

“I talked to them, and they were really understanding.” ‘More understanding than you,’ was the unsaid implication. “It’s kind of shoulder season now, so things are slower. It’s getting too late for hikers but too early for skiers.” She shrugged. “I’m taking my vacation time now to figure it out.”

“Are you going to quit?” My stomach soured at the thought of another abandoned career.

She shook her head emphatically. “No. I really love that job, and I’m good at it. I’m just trying to, well, you know.”

No, I didn’t.

“Are you still staying with Aaron?” Our mother had downsized to a one-bedroom condo a few years ago, not that it had stopped Bobbie from crashing there before in between jobs and apartments and boyfriends.

“Yup. He’s been really… amazing.” She sighed, and despite the bit of pallor lingering on her skin she looked happy. Birds-chirping-around-her-head kind of happy, in fact. I had to grudgingly admit that it looked good on her.

“How does he feel about the baby?”

She frowned. “He’s okay.”

“Okay?” My eyebrows rose. “Well, that’s a ringing endorsement.”

“I don’t know. We’ve kind of been avoiding talking about it too much. We just started dating, and we’re not quite sure what we’re doing yet.”

She made a vague gesture to her lap, which disconcerted me. It was a bit late to have the birds and the bees talk with her.

“You mean with dating?”

“I mean with the baby.” She folded her arms protectively over her stomach, looking worried. The imaginary birds around her head fell silent, one of them metaphorically plummeting to the ground.

“How can you not know?”

It boggled my mind. If it were me, I would have already had several conversations and set agendas and goals and made a list of pros and cons and—oh. This was probably exactly the kind of thing that Madeline was talking about.

“We’re just not sure what to do. I still don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

Bobbie looked at her lap, then up at me, then down to her lap again. It felt like she was silently asking me for advice, and for once I had none to offer. Madeline had told me to back off, and I was trying my best. I didn’t know if Bobbie was ready for this either, but I knew I couldn’t actually tell her that.

“I don’t think anyone is ever really ready to be a parent,” I said lamely, opening a folder and staring blankly at the contents. “It’s kind of a learn as you go along thing, right?”

She nodded. “You know what I keep thinking, and I feel so guilty about it?”

“What?”

“I keep wondering if I’d be a better mother than Mom was.”

Wow. I shoved the folders aside. She pretended to be staring at her hands, but she was peeking up at me every few seconds—probably to gauge my reaction. My initial reaction was one of a complete loss for words, though. She probably hadn’t expected that—I usually had an opinion about everything she did.

“Say something, Brain!”

Shaking my head, I leaned back in my chair, trying to approach this conversation systematically. “Do you think Mom did a bad job?”

“No! Not really.”

If she was waiting for me to put words in her mouth, she’d better get comfortable. I bobbed back and forth in my chair as it reclined, flipping a pen between my fingers.

“It’s just that… well, I think it was harder after Dad died, right?” she said. “It’s not like she lost it, but she didn’t really have her shit together either.”

Pot. Kettle. Madeline would have been proud of me for keeping my mouth shut. I merely hummed instead. Of course I agreed with her, but I didn’t trust my opinion not to run away from me without letting my brain catch up.

I cleared my throat before coming up with, “It was hard at times for all of us.”

Holy shit. If I came up with any more of these mind-blowingly erudite observations, I would have to record them and write a fucking motivational book.

My sister looked at me as though an alien had replaced me. I threw the pen down on the desk.

“Okay, fuck. I don’t know, Bob. Yeah, there were times when I worried Mom might burn down the house, but that didn’t mean she didn’t love us. Hell, she was almost beside herself with her love for us. Nobody’s perfect.” Well, except me, right? It was a good thing that Madeline wasn’t there, or she’d give me a withering look.

“Remember the time she forgot to pick me up from camp? She thought it ended the next week?” She snorted, but I still remembered the tears mottling her face when an irritated senior counselor dropped her off.

Of course, it hadn’t helped that it was the beginning of my entrepreneurial programming phase, and I’d managed to convince her that Mom had sold her to Camp Iwanna to finance my new computer.

“You always got along better with her than I did,” I pointed out. “You guys are a lot alike.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of!”

When I looked at her more closely, I saw new lines of worry etched in her face. This baby thing was really freaking her out. Hell, it was freaking me out too.

“You can’t live your life in fear,” I said.

I knew Aaron would step up—that was just the kind of guy he was. He also knew that I would string him up by his life-giving balls if he didn’t. And to whatever extent she could, I knew that our mother would enjoy being a grandma. Bobbie just needed more confidence. It was sobering to realize that I was probably a big part of the reason she doubted herself.

“Ha! That’s easy for you to say! You’ve never been scared by anything.”

I swiveled in my chair to look out the enormous window behind me. Shit, she was so wrong. I was scared of lots of things, which is why I had a low tolerance for excuse making. It would be too easy to do it myself.

“Brain?”

“Everybody’s scared of something,” I muttered, looking out over downtown. Busy people, busy lives, failure, success, family, solitude—it was all out there. Some people worked their asses off for it, and for others it fell into their laps.

If I were going to be honest, I would tell Bobbie that I was afraid that I would lose Madeline, or at least fuck it up somehow. I was afraid that my ideas and applications were one-hit wonders and that I would crash and burn like so many start-ups before me.

With a jolt I realized that I already lived in fear; it was what drove me to succeed. I kept pushing Madeline to take a chance, but all the chances that I’d taken weren’t risks so much as they were tunnel vision. The real leap of faith would be to let go of the reins a bit.

“Honestly, Bobbie, I think that having that fear might help you as a parent. If you’re aware of what you’ll fuck up, you’ll try harder.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Seriously, it’s the clueless, arrogant assholes who screw up their kids.” Like me? Again, I imagined Madeline and myself in this situation. For the first time, the idea didn’t make me want to puke.

A strange noise behind me made me turn back around. Bobbie’s face was pink, and she pressed her fist into her stomach.

“Sorry. I’m hungry. But thanks for the, uh, pep talk.”

I exhaled heavily as I stood up. She rose as well, then paused as I slipped my phone into my pocket. “Okay, let’s go feed the parasite,” I grumbled, but my sister’s surprised smile was contagious. Maybe there was hope for me yet.