Sun-Kissed Christmas (Summer) Read Online Free Page B

need him?”
    Diana toyed with her Rudolph nose. “How old do you think Jennie was, anyway?”
    “I don’t know. Twenty-one?”
    “No wedding ring.”
    “And she’s obviously broke.”
    “How can you be so sure?” Diana asked.
    “Well, first off, she’s here for this party. And second, she was way interested in your mom and the house and all.” Marquez shook her head. “Look, I think we should call someone. Or maybe one of the organizers here would know what to do.”
    “They’ll put her in a foster home.”
    “Probably.”
    “At Christmas,” Diana said. “A foster home with strangers.”
    “Could be it’d be better for her.”
    Diana opened the door a crack. Sarah had untied her shoes and was attempting to retie them.
    “Jennie looked so tired,” Diana said, closing the door. “Maybe she just needed a break. Maybe she was just so worn out—”
    “So she decided to take a little nap while peeling out of the parking lot doing eighty?”
    “Her note said she was coming back, Marquez. It said she just needed a little time.”
    “My mom had six kids and no money. She came here from Cuba with nothing. She got way tired. And she never pulled a stunt like this.”
    “But she had your dad.”
    “Still. That’s no excuse.”
    “Maybe Jennie had something to do,” Diana ventured. “Fill a prescription. Buy animal crackers. I don’t know, some motherly thing a mother would do.”
    “Mothers don’t just run out on their kids, Diana.”
    Diana shrugged. “Mallory used to. Whenever the spirit moved her.”
    “But your mom left you with a baby-sitter.”
    “An au pair.”
    “So a baby-sitter with an attitude. The point is, she never left you in a bathroom with a couple of moldy reindeer.”
    “I remember one time she met this guy, three days before Christmas …” Diana hesitated. “Never mind.Long story.”
    She opened the bathroom door again. Sarah looked at her expectantly. Her dirty T-shirt was ripped at one shoulder. Her face was smudged.
    Diana let the door slowly close. She felt herself coming to a decision—the kind of decision she’d kick herself for later. The kind of decision that would give Marquez ammunition for years of I-told-you-so’s and sarcastic comments.
    “Diana?” Marquez nudged her arm. “Listen to me. We can’t take care of her. Remember when Summer wanted to adopt that stray kitten and we had a big roomie meeting and decided we weren’t mature enough to handle the responsibility of changing a litter box every day?”
    Diana nodded vaguely.
    “Diana. We are immature. All the forks we own are from Taco Bell. Summer sleeps with that stuffed animal, that weasel football mascot.”
    “It’s a gopher.”
    “I snort milk through my nose almost every day. And last Saturday I caught you watching
Dora the Explorer
.” Marquez tugged frantically on Diana’s fur-covered arm. “We are not—I repeat,
not—
mature. That kid in there is probably more emotionally mature than we are.”
    “Still …”
    “Think back, Diana. Think back on all those awful babysitting low points. The tantrums, the pouting, the—” Marquez narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute. You’ve never babysat in your life, have you?”
    “Not exactly. Although a friend of my mom’s brought her daughter to dinner once, and I helped her color in her coloring book. It was fun.”
    “Fun?
Fun
? Let me tell you about fun, Diana. It is not fun calling nine-one-one when the kid you’re babysitting gets her arm stuck in the toilet because she thought she saw an alligator. It is not fun trying to unglue a kid’s tongue from the freezer. It is not fun removing a sour ball from some unfortunate child’s nostril.”
    “Boy, you sat for a rough crowd.”
    Marquez paused briefly, her cheeks reddening. “Um, actually, I think I did all those things. I was kind of a hyper kid. The point is, taking care of a kid is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. You are, forgive me, a spoiled rich kid. You’ve never even had a