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  Praise for Claire LaZebnik’s Previous Novels

  The Smart One and The Pretty One

  “Winning… moments of real depth combine with witty dialogue as LaZebnik deftly spins each turn convincingly to avoid easy answers.”—

  Publishers Weekly

  “This sparkling novel about two sisters is both witty and stylish. You won’t be able to resist LaZebnik’s charming take on modern relationships. Read it!”

  —Holly Peterson, New York Times bestselling author of The Manny

  “A funny and endearing novel that truly captures the devotion and rivalry between sisters… whether they relate to the smart one or the pretty one (or both), readers will find this book irresistible.”—

  Booklist

  “Another alluring tale of two seemingly different sisters… Recommended for fans of intelligent chick lit.”—

  Library Journal

  “A deliciously intimate portrait of sisters.”

  —W. Bruce Cameron, author of 8 Simple Rules for Marrying My Daughter

  “A fun novel… perfect for reading on a beach.”

  —WomansDay.com

  “Claire LaZebnik explores the sister bond with warmth, wit, and honesty. I loved this novel.”

  —Jill Smolinski, author of The Next Thing on My List

  “Sisters everywhere will recognize themselves in The Smart One and the Pretty One. Claire LaZebnik has written a touching take on love, longing, and the ties that bind.”

  —Heather and Rose MacDowell, authors of Turning Tables

  “Claire LaZebnik has written a wonderfully smart and funny novel about the complexity of love and friendship between sisters. Filled with real warmth and astute observations, it made me wish I had a sister of my own. You’ll enjoy every heartfelt page.”

  —Leslie Schnur, author of Late Night Talking and The Dog Walker

  Knitting Under the Influence

  “At turns hilarious, at times heartbreaking, and so, so honest about life, love, and friendship. I loved it.”

  —Melissa Senate

  “Charming… smart, engaging characters, each of whom is complicated and real enough to be worth an entire book on her own.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “LaZebnik juggles periods of personal crisis while maintaining her characters’ complex individuality. Social knitters, especially, will relate to the bond that strengthens over the click-clack of the girls’ needles.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] funny and heart-tugging story about three twenty-something Los Angeles women who drink, cry, and, of course, knit together whenever they can.”

  —Arizona Republic

  “The characters and problems here are more realistically portrayed than in many chick-lit books, which makes this a nice combination of humor and heartache. Recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Fantastic… has great, believable, and well-written characters that bring the story to life. This is a story that no one will want to miss!”

  —TCM Reviews

  “A hilarious tale, sometimes sweet and touching and sometimes out-loud laughable. But mainly it is honest and hits home about life, love, and dating.”

  —BookLoons.com

  “Knitting Under the Influence is about three young women living in L.A. who meet every week to knit, share secrets, and exchange insights about the challenges of their lives. It’s ultimately about how friendship helps us forge a sensible path through our frazzled lives.”

  —Palisadian-Post (CA)

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Claire LaZebnik

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  5 Spot

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.5-spot.com

  5 Spot is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  The 5 Spot name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: September 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-446-57440-2

  Contents

  Praise for Claire LaZebnik’s Previous Novels

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  What Mom Gave Me

  Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  For Julie, Alice, Nell, and Ted, with love and gratitude

  1.

  The heat wave that had tortured us for most of September finally broke and Tuesday morning was cool and overcast, so I volunteered to take Eleanor Roosevelt around the block. My mother thanked me a little too enthusiastically, effectively conveying the message that her expectations of me were so low that she was bowled over by a simple offer to walk the dog.

  I was trying to get Eleanor Roosevelt’s leash on, dodging her happy dancing legs and scolding her to hold still, when my cell phone rang. I dropped the leash so I could get the phone out of my jeans pocket. Eleanor Roosevelt stopped wiggling and looked at me, confused. This wasn’t how the game went.

  “Hey, Rickie,” said a male voice on the other end.

  I breathed in sharply. “Ryan?”

  “Yeah.”

  I gave a delighted bounce and Eleanor Roosevelt jumped and barked with sympathetic excitement. “Are you back in town?”

  “Yep. Just got back a couple of days ago.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Same here. Sorry I didn’t keep up with your e-mails the last month or so.”

  “No worries,” I said. “Have you seen Gabriel yet?”

  “Last night. We talked for a long time. I still can’t believe it—I leave home for six months, and they decide to get divorced? What’s up with that?”

  “It’s a mess.”

  “Want to come over and discuss it with me?”

  Just nine words, but they were enough to make every inch of me tighten with desire. I kept my voice casual, though. “Right now?”

  “I’m not doing anything. You?”

  “Nah, not really.” I glanced down at the dog and whispered, “Sorry, girl.” Into the phone I added, “Half an hour good?”

  “Perfect. See you.”

  I gently nudged Eleanor Roosevelt away from my leg and hung the leash back up on its nail in the coat closet. The dog whined and followed me as I headed toward the kitchen, where my mother was working on her laptop.

  “I thought you were taking her on a walk,” she said, looking up.

  “I just got a
call. I’m going to meet a friend for lunch.”

  “Can’t you walk the dog first?”

  “I said I’d be right over.”

  “You’re breaking her heart.”

  I looked back at the yellow Lab. She ducked her head down but kept her eyes pinned on my face hopefully. “She’s just a dog,” I said, even though I felt bad about disappointing her. “She’ll be fine.”

  “Just run her around the block—”

  “I don’t have time. I promise I’ll walk her later.”

  My mother rose from the table, heaving a dramatic sigh. “Come on,” she said to Eleanor Roosevelt, who immediately raised her head, her eyes gleaming with sudden joy. “I’ll take you.” Eleanor Roosevelt gave a leap of pure happiness and trotted ahead of Mom out of the kitchen, toward her leash and the walk she loved so much.

  I went the other way, toward the garage, and got in my car. I drove past them on the street. Eleanor Roosevelt was hauling my mother along, practically pulling her arm out of its socket in her delight at being out and about.

  I didn’t slow down and Mom didn’t wave.

  Ryan worked on movie shoots as a production assistant. He was always traveling to different countries. Sometimes I’d be at a movie and see his name in the credits, and I’d feel a funny burst of pride even though he hadn’t told me anything about it and his name was always buried way at the end.

  We met when his brother, Gabriel, and my half sister, Melanie, first got engaged. I was sixteen, moody and insecure and far more excited about being Mel’s maid of honor than I would ever admit to anyone. Ryan was five years older, just finishing up college, and, as Gabriel’s brother and best man, my official partner in all ceremonies and table seatings. He was tall, cute, mildly roguish, and so far out of my league that I immediately developed a major crush on him and proceeded to spend way too much time trying to figure out what relation Mel and Gabriel’s children would be to ours when Ryan and I got married in turn.

  Ryan winked at me and squeezed my arm when we walked back down the aisle together after the ceremony. Feeling grown-up in my strapless silver bridesmaid dress, I thought that meant he was finally seeing me as a woman, until I took a sip of champagne in front of him a little while later and he said, “Don’t be in such a rush to grow up. Being a kid is more fun.” I thought he was just being patronizing, but over time I came to realize he meant it—the guy was in no rush to become an adult. Me, I was in too much of a rush, although how much too much only became evident about three years later.

  Anyway, when Ryan left his seat at our table to flirt with Melanie’s former college roommate who was twenty-four and gorgeous—or at least so blond and tall that she passed for gorgeous—I surrendered the fantasy that I could ever be anything other than Mel’s little sister to him.

  Our paths continued to cross through subsequent years of family holidays and celebrations, but Ryan was never more than civil and distantly friendly until a couple of Thanksgivings ago at our house, when my mom seated us together and something just clicked. The timing was finally right, I guess. He was a footloose twenty-eight-year-old and I was a twenty-three-year-old with responsibilities. Made us almost the same age.

  We talked to each other the entire evening, mostly about our families. We both knew what it was like to be the younger and less successful sibling—maybe that was what bonded us, made us similarly sarcastic, similarly vulnerable, similarly determined not to let anyone see through the sarcasm to that vulnerability.

  Ryan was actually better-looking than Gabriel. His features were smaller and more even and he was a lot thinner, but he lacked Gabriel’s charm and exuberance. Gabriel was a chubby teddy bear of a guy whose overgrown beard and mustache made him look like he’d taken refuge in a cave for a number of years, but wherever he went he took up a lot of space in a good way. He made every room feel a little warmer and homier and more welcoming because he was in it, whereas Ryan hovered around the edges wherever he was, always an observer, always a visitor, never at home. It was no surprise he took jobs that let him travel all over the world: he liked being rootless and independent.

  We surreptitiously exchanged phone numbers that Thanksgiving night. A few days later he called me, and we met at a restaurant for dinner and ended up back at his place. From then on, whenever he was in town, he got in touch with me.

  Neither of us told our families. They might have thought it was meaningful when it wasn’t.

  I would be the first to admit that I hadn’t ever completely gotten over my crush on Ryan, but the more I got to know him, the more I realized he wasn’t a guy you could pin a lot of hopes on. The second you tried to grab on to him in any way, he turned slippery and slid right through your fingers. The reason he liked me was because I was smart enough to leave him alone most of the time.

  It was harder than it looked.

  He greeted me now at the front door of his small apartment building, in answer to my intercom call. “The lock’s broken,” he explained as he gave me a brusque kiss on the cheek. “I can’t buzz people in anymore. Have to come down.”

  “Can’t you get them to fix it?”

  He shrugged. “I’m only in town until the next job. Someone who lives here all the time can deal with it. Come on.”

  He led me upstairs and I studied him from the back. He looked good: a little thinner than the last time I’d seen him, and his wavy light brown hair hadn’t been cut for a while, but both things suited him. The guy could still pass for a college student even though he was over thirty.

  The last time we’d gone out for drinks together, we had both been carded.

  We entered his apartment. It looked exactly the same as it had six months ago, when I’d last been there: an IKEA sofa, a couple of framed generic prints on the wall, a large-screen HD TV. Not much else. “So you already have another job lined up?” I asked, turning toward him as he closed the door behind us.

  Ryan nodded. “Yep. With Jonathan Bluestein.” I must have looked pretty blank, because he added, “He directed that movie I worked on a few years ago, Coach Class. I’m not sure you ever saw it.” He didn’t bother to wait for my response. “Anyway, I leave for Turkey sometime early or mid-December for a three-month shoot.”

  “Really? Turkey? Wow.” I tried not to sound disappointed. I thought he’d be in town longer than that. “You’ll miss Christmas.”

  “Yeah and it’s so meaningful to me,” he said. “What with my not being religious or having kids. I care as much about missing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.” There was a slight, possibly awkward pause. “Take off your shoes, stay awhile,” he said then with a sly grin. “You want something to drink?”

  “It’s not even noon yet.”

  “I’m still on European time.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not. I’ll have a glass of water, though.” I followed him into the kitchen, where he opened the fridge, which was empty except for a bottle of wine, a few take-out packets of soy sauce and hot mustard, and a six-pack of Evian water. “Do you ever eat at home?” I asked as he handed me one of the waters.

  “Never.”

  We went back into the other room and sat next to each other on the sofa, a little stiff and awkward the way we always were when we hadn’t seen each other for a while, and he told me about the shoot he’d just been on, which had taken him first to Paris and then to London.

  “You’re so freakin’ lucky,” I said. “I want your life.”

  “You can’t have it. I still use it.” He flicked at my hair. “What’s going on with this? I remember when you first did this green stripe thing, but now it’s looking kind of faded and putrid. And then there’s some red dye over on this side—”

  I moved my head away from his touch irritably. “I don’t know. I’m just growing it out, I guess.”

  “Then dye it all back to normal,” he said. “It just looks like a mess. And then there’s the piercings and the tattoos…”

  I self-consciously reached up and touched the ring in my eyebrow and th
e stud in my nose.

  He shook his head. “Honestly, Rickie, when are you going to clean yourself up? Let yourself look like a pretty girl for once?”

  I crossed my arms. “So you’re saying I’m not pretty?”

  “You’re pretty,” he said and, leaning forward, carefully uncrossed my arms like he was peeling a banana.

  That was enough of a cue for me: I fell back against the sofa cushions, eagerly pulling him down on top of me. This is what I had come to see him for, after all.

  I was twenty-five years old and rarely had the opportunity to have sex. Lust ruled my body. I couldn’t even look at a men’s jeans ad without getting aroused. So, once the dam had burst, I started grabbing at Ryan like some kind of crazed thing, eagerly sliding my hands over his chest and then tearing off my own shirt to offer up my small breasts to his touch.

  Everything he did felt so good I could have screamed—my whole body, all of my skin, every inch of me responded to the slightest touch from his fingers. When we finally moved to his bed, both of us stripping off our jeans a little frantically before climbing up, I pushed him down and straddled him and he laughed and let me do whatever I wanted until he was breathing pretty hard and then he rolled me over onto my back and took charge.

  I wondered at some point whether I was the last woman he’d slept with or if there had been another—or others—since then, some Parisian girl, or maybe a British one. I told myself it didn’t matter. But I couldn’t put the question completely out of my mind.

  Afterwards, we lay side by side, catching our breath.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said eventually.

  “Never,” Ryan said. “We have to never stop meeting like this. Promise me that when you’re married and all settled down with like ten or twelve kids, you’ll still meet me like this.”

  “You don’t think my husband will object?”

  “Nah. He’ll be grateful. How could one man ever keep up with you, Rickie?”

  “I’m really not such a major nympho,” I said. “I only seem like one because I get it so seldom. I mean, this is it for me until you come back to town again.”