Ask Mariah Read Free

took another sip he walked into the dining room, eager to get away from the kitchen disaster. That's when he saw the list of summer schools Mrs. Polking had left on the credenza. He reached for the paper, but his foot caught on the carpet and he stumbled, spilling beer all over everything.
    "Damn." He shook the beer off the top of the paper, but the ink smeared and only one of the school names remained legible. "Happy Hollow School -- summer school programs, kindergarten through second grade," he read aloud. The school was in North Beach, just a mile away. Maybe he could convince the twins' grandmother to take the girls after school until he could find another baby-sitter.
    Of course, he didn't have much credit left with the family. The girls had terrorized their aunt, uncle, and grandparents long before they'd started in on the nannies. And he hated to ask Sophia to baby-sit. She usually spent her afternoons at De Luca's, helping her husband, Vincent, and her son, Frank, run the family restaurant.
    School was the best answer, at least until he could find another nanny. With any luck the teachers at Happy Hollow would be tough enough to take anything his girls could dish out.

Chapter Two
     
    "You've got to be strong, you've got to be bold ..."
    "I've got to be stupid," Joanna Wingate muttered, adding her own lyrics to the music that blasted through the aerobics class at the San Francisco Health Club. Sweat dripped down her neck and between her shoulder blades as she tried to keep up with the class.
    She glared at the mirror, not just at the sight of herself in leggings and a tank top, but at the image of her sixty-two-year-old mother beside her. Caroline Wingate, decked out in white yoga pants and a hot pink top was kicking her thin legs almost as high as their instructor, a twenty- something blond goddess named Elise.
    Sandwiched in between their sleek figures, Joanna felt like a clumsy elephant. Although she wasn't fat by anyone's standards, she was not a lean, mean fighting machine. No, she was a  twenty-nine-year-old teaching assistant at Stanford University working on her Ph.D. in American history -- and she was tired.
    She had spent nine months supporting her father during a futile struggle with lung cancer that he'd lost two months earlier. She'd given up her apartment, her job, and her boyfriend -- actually, he'd given her up -- to help her mother take care of her father. She'd lost just about everything in her life during the past year except the extra ten pounds she'd gained sitting by her father's bedside.
    Her mother, of course, had not gained an ounce. Caroline's stress had led to days of wanting nothing more than a bowl of soup and a cup of tea. Her mother found comfort in classical music and long walks on the treadmill. Joanna found comfort in chocolate-covered strawberries -- make that chocolate-covered anything.
    "Let's go now, ladies. Follow me." Elise pranced around the room, leading something akin to a conga line. Joanna reluctantly joined in behind her mother, who didn't even appear to be sweating.
    But then Caroline Wingate never perspired. A petite ash blonde, with a hairstyle that never went limp, Caroline was the exact opposite of her daughter. Joanna had long, curly brown hair that drifted past her shoulders and always looked a bit wild, full breasts, and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
    As the conga line neared the doorway, she dashed out and collapsed against the wall outside, rubbing the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. A minute later she was joined by her longtime friend, Nora Garvey, a plump redhead who was working off the lingering weight of her second pregnancy,
    "Are you okay?" Nora asked.
    "I need oxygen." She bent over, placing her hands on her knees.
    Nora laughed and patted Joanna on the back. "Shall I call 911?"
    "Just shoot me and put me out of my misery."
    "You've got to be strong, you've got to be tough," Nora teased.
    "I've got to be crazy