The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Pastor Rick came back and set paper plates down in front of each of them, saying, “Here we go! Here we go!” His wife was right behind him with their drinks and napkins.

  The plates were wrong, though. No catfish. No fried okra. No iceberg salad. Instead there was what looked to Miss Birchie like something ready to be mailed—a rectangle of parchment paper, tied up in a string.

  “Well, now, what’s this?” Miss Wattie asked.

  “It’s salmon. It’s wrapped and steamed with fresh herbs and spring vegetables,” Pastor Rick said.

  A moment of silence. Wattie turned to whisper something, her lips almost touching Birchie’s ear. A lot of Birchie’s conversations happened with Miss Wattie whispering to her in full profile, Wattie’s breath stirring the snowy fluff of tendrils that had escaped Birchie’s bun. It was so common a sight these days that no one thought anything of it. Not right then.

  “But this is the Fish Fry,” Miss Birchie said, emphasis on “Fry.”

  “It’s called salmon en papillote,” Pastor Rick said.

  “That sounds French,” said Birchie darkly, but poor Rick missed the tone.

  “Yes! Yes, it is French,” he warbled happily. “And so much healthier.”

  Birchie looked like she might say more, but Wattie stayed close, her voice a breathy background noise, soothing Birchie down. After a moment Birchie’s sparse lashes dropped, and she said, “Well, let’s try it, then.”

  Miss Wattie turned to face her own packet. Her full lips compressed into a wide, flat line. She’d calmed Birchie, but she made no move to try this wrongful food herself.

  Birchie peeled back the wrapping to reveal a pile of bright green asparagus and a few cherry tomatoes, their skins wrinkled from the steam. Her mouth pursed and pruned into a dot, the exact opposite shape of Wattie’s but expressing the same feeling.

  Pastor Rick turned to Jeannie Anne Darian. “Did you find your last two volunteers for nursery duty at VBS?”

  Jeannie Anne started to chirp an answer, but Birchie talked over her.

  “Is there no cornbread?”

  “Well, no . . . we thought . . . Carbs are . . .” Pastor Rick began unhappily, and Birchie overspoke him, too.

  “And still and yet no biscuits?”

  “There might be crackers in the pantry,” he offered.

  “This is nonsense,” Miss Birchie said, and Miss Wattie leaned in again to whisper. Wattie had prevented more than one hyperpolite evisceration in her time. But no biscuits was too much, and Birchie turned to her and said, “No, Wattie, it won’t do.”

  In the wake of this soft-spoken utterance, the table quieted. Pastor Rick was new, but even he understood the power of these words, spoken by the reigning Birch in Birchville. He was almost cringing with propitiation.

  “You should try a bite before you judge! It’s so healthful. And delicious. I know you’ll like it if you try a bite.”

  Birchie inclined her head away from Wattie’s calming whispers. She pushed aside the vegetables with her plastic fork, digging to find the salmon. It was shiny with olive oil and tomato juice, dotted with bits of black pepper and herbs.

  “Oh, dear, no, I can’t possibly eat that,” she said, her voice gone dangerously sweet. Sweet as icebox pie. Sweet as sugar tea. Wattie leaned in closer, her whispers urgent now, but Birchie talked over her, blue eyes bright in her powdered face. “It looks like Pastor Campbell’s penis, all pink and freckled.”

  The delivery was so prim and cheerful that it took several seconds for the words she’d said to register. Deacon Lester choked. He stifled himself, trying to asphyxiate quietly in the dawning shocked silence. Anna Gentry spilled her icy sweet tea down her blouse and didn’t so much as squeak. Jeannie Anne Darian paused with her bite of fish halfway to her lips, her eyes bugging in her pretty, pug-dog face.

  It didn’t seem possible that Emily Birch Briggs would say the word “penis” or acknowledge the existence of such a thing. Had a six-foot penis gone running across the church lawn on legs, everyone would have expected Miss Birchie to go completely blind in a six-foot-penis-shaped blotch, right at the center of her field of vision. Lovely sunset, she might remark, peering through it to God’s glorious vistas. But now she had acknowledged the existence of genitalia in the fellowship hall; worse, she’d said out loud that associate Pastor Campbell had a set. She’d described it in such great detail that it seemed likely she had met the member in question, which was purely, purely unthinkable. Sweat popped on Pastor Rick’s forehead, and all the deacons were gaping. Pastor Campbell, hearing his essential self so maligned, opened and shut his mouth several times, with no words or even breath coming out.

  Wattie, the only unshocked person in the room, stood up and said, “Birchie, we need to go home. Now.”

  Miss Birchie poked disdainfully at the fish with her plastic fork, saying, “Well, but it does, Wattie! Ask Jeannie Anne. She’s seen that penis much, much closer. Hardly the assigned use for the choir-robe room, though I suppose that’s not for me to say.”

  The air, already shocked and sparking, became fully live with electricity. The whole room went so quiet that folks nearby could hear Wattie fierce-whispering to Birchie, “Get up! Get up! We need to go!”

  As if a current were running around the room, the congregation came to understand, one by one, what Birchie was matter-of-factly describing, and they stared at my grandmother in shocked horror. Birchie knew every sin in town, after all, but she heard gossip the way a queen heard supplicants. She never discussed what the town called “news” with anyone but Wattie, instead going directly and privately to First Baptist sinners like the apostle Paul, except with homemade soup. Her stern encouragements to put away wrath, tithe properly, or stop the coveting of other people’s wives were done behind closed doors. Birchie was the scion of decency, and these words from her were as shocking as the idea of the adultery itself. All the horror was focused on my grandmother, right up until Jeannie Anne blushed.

  Not a delicate blush either, the sort any lady might have touch her cheek when such vivid language landed at the lunch table. This was a crimson shame wash that started at the forehead and didn’t end even at her throat. Her chest reddened in the V of her light knit top. Her skin became a scarlet backdrop for the glistening pink and pepper-freckled bite of fish still held at the portal of her glossy lips.

  She saw it then, how she had that morsel an inch away from ingestion, and threw it violently away. The fork landed with a sad plastic clatter, followed by an unfortunate plopping as the fish hit the table. Whispers started at the closest tables to Birchie’s center one, spreading outward like a rustling tide.

  Frank Darian was the last to come to understanding. It wasn’t until his wife shoved her chair back and stood up from the table that his expression changed from shocked to something awful. A disbelief. A pre-pain wondering.

  “Jeannie Anne?” he said, and she walked away. “Jeannie Anne?”

  She didn’t turn or falter but kept twisting through the tables as whispers built and roiled around her.

  Birchie watched her go, eyes overbright and an incongruous smile on her face, watching her verbal wrecking ball smash two key church marriages. Wattie stood helpless beside her, no longer whispering; her urgency was gone. She seemed oddly resigned, patting at the silver-white zigzags of her short hair as if putting them in order were her main concern.

  “How could you?” Associate Pastor Campbell rasped at Birchie. He stood up, his chair scraping back, and slapped his hands down hard against the table. He leaned in toward her, threatening almost, and raged again, “How could you!”

  “How could you?” his wife whispered, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

  “Birchie,” Wattie said, calm and firm, “I need your help,” but Birchie was scraping her own chair away, rising to her full five feet to glare right back at Campbell.

  “Don’t you raise your voice to me, you humping goat. I will turn you over my knee and paddle your saggy ass,” Birchie said. The tone
was right, frosty and imperious. But the words! These were not words that Emily Birch Briggs would ever, ever say, and they were followed by a high-pitched, crazy titter.

  Pastor Campbell stepped back, away from the confusing sound, his face registering equal parts rage and disbelief. Then he seemed to notice his wife, crying in the chair next to him.

  Wattie waited it out, standing beside Birchie until her awful cackle stopped. Then Wattie touched Birchie’s arm, and Birchie turned to her as if she had just discovered her there.

  “Did you see his saggy ass, Wattie? Did you see it?” Birchie said, and then mimed humping at the table.

  Three hundred of the faithful sat frozen, watching Emily Birch Briggs having a mental breakdown, and only Wattie spoke.

  “I surely did, but, Birchie, Mercy Lester is slicing up peppers by the hush-puppy batter,” she said.

  Birchie’s avid face clouded into confusion, and she stopped her obscene rocking. A few years back, Mercy Lester had put the Fry on the high road to apostasy when she’d tried to add cheese and jalapeños to the hush-puppy batter. Birchie had spotted her before they got mixed in. While Miss Wattie scooped the offending ingredients off the top, Birchie had put a forgiving arm around Mercy’s shaking shoulders, like Jesus sheltering the woman caught in adultery. Instead of asking for a sinless someone to cast the first stone, Birchie had reminded the outraged congregation that Mercy had been raised a Presbyterian before marrying Davey Lester; could anyone expect her to know better?

  To bring it up now was such a non sequitur that it looked as if Wattie were losing her mind right along with Birchie, but Birchie said, “Lord, that girl! Let’s go and stop her,” as though Mercy and Davey hadn’t moved to Montgomery three years ago.

  Her face stony and unreadable, Wattie began guiding her out.

  “Well, now. Now. Well. Now.” Pastor Rick floundered.

  As the two of them made their slow way out of the hall, the congregation came one by one into this clarity: Miss Wattie’s whispered soothings and asides had long hidden a crumbling at Birchie’s center.

  It was unthinkable. Miss Birchie, as they all called her, smelled like rose petals and history. She was the last Birch living in Birchville, ninety years old but still with her perfectly erect spine, her interested eyes, her ancient collection of Very Nice Handbags. For many of them, Miss Birchie was the town. The idea of the town. She was the avatar of the town as it used to be in some Old South utopia that only existed if you were white and well-to-do and Baptist and didn’t notice how folks who weren’t all of those things had fared. Even before they made it out of the room, people were texting me. Once the door closed behind them, they started calling me as well.

  I didn’t answer. By then it was already past noon, and I was on my way to Rachel’s house. My phone was turned off, and my mind was made up. I was ready to drop my Bat bomb, and I was braced for the kaboom.

  3

  I pulled up in front of Rachel’s pristine Colonial in East Beach, with its black shutters and butt-ugly Tara columns. I was the first one here, but I parked on the street anyway. If I pulled in to the driveway, Mom and Keith might block me in; I’d be trapped, with no way out if the interrogation became unendurable. I’d baked a pecan pound cake, so that everybody would at least come to the conversation cheerful and full of sugar, but they would still want to know when and where and how I’d let this happen. Rachel especially could be so pushy.

  I’d been penciling and inking far too long, leaving the scripts to other writers. I couldn’t invent a good origin story for Digby any more than I could think of one for Violence. Digby himself, while very young, might be impressed to hear he’d sprung from a late-night encounter with a Batman. But what about Digby’s older self? I didn’t want to tell my parents or Rachel or my kid that I didn’t know his father’s name. Or job. Or medical history. Or even if he was a decent person, but that was the truth.

  He had good taste in comics, I could say. He was an excellent French kisser.

  As I trudged up the stairs onto Rachel’s wraparound white porch, her husband, Jake, came barreling out the front door, blind, slamming it behind him. He almost ran me down. I tried to dodge and stumbled. He dropped the bag that he was carrying to catch me before I pitched back down the stairs with the cake carrier.

  “Damn it, Lay!” he said, and then I flushed and he froze, his hands still on my arms. He hadn’t called me Lay in years.

  I had my balance, so I crabbed sidewise away from him, out of his grasp. I didn’t like him touching me. Most of the time, I thought of him as Rachel’s accessory, buckled on but irrelevant, like a wristwatch.

  His hands hung in the air for a second, awkward and empty, before he dropped them to his sides.

  “Damn it yourself, JJ,” I said at last, giving him his old name back, too, as lightly as I could.

  The letters made my mouth taste sour, and I had a hard time connecting them to the man in front of me. I thought of him as either Jake or Mr. Rachel. We hadn’t been Lay and JJ to each other since we were kids. We’d spent our afternoons from third grade on in my family’s basement rec room, reading new comic books as fast as they came in. We’d eat Fiddle Faddle and parse plot twists, trying to guess if our favorites would survive the cliffhanger endings. As we put each issue away into a plastic sleeve and filed it in order in the proper box, we’d discuss what superpower we would each want, debating hyperspeed or flight, teleportation or telekinesis.

  I never said it out loud, but like most girls I wanted to be Super Pretty. Rachel had dibs on that power, though. Every boy I knew turned into a stammering wreck in her presence, even JJ. Maybe especially JJ, who blushed and puffed whenever she breezed through the rec room. JJ mostly wanted to be Super Not-a-Fat-Kid, though he never said that either. We knew these things about each other without saying.

  Then when we were seniors, JJ’s daddy had a massive stroke and died. In the wake of it, things went all kinds of wrong and weird between us, and he quit school to help his mom run Jacoby Motors, their used-car dealership. Our paths never crossed after that. We never spoke or even saw each other. Not once. His house was biking-distance close to mine, so it had to be on purpose.

  Four years later he showed up at Mom and Keith’s annual drop-in Christmas Eve party. I was on door duty, but I didn’t recognize him. He was a tall, blond stranger, smiling and holding a bottle of Riesling.

  “Merry Christmas!” he said.

  He leaned in to kiss the air near my cheek, and, oddly enough, I recognized him then, by smell. He was three inches taller, with a gym body, subtle highlights, and maybe a nose job, too. For sure he’d done some kind of movie-actor nonsense to his teeth. Uniform and overwhite, they made his smile seem insincere. But under a dash of subtle aftershave, I caught the essential smell of my onetime best friend.

  “JJ?” I said, boggling at him.

  “I go by Jake now, Leia,” he said, and then clapped me on the shoulder. Heartily. As if I were some bro of his in a beer ad. “Good to see you! We’ll have to catch up.”

  He thrust the cold wine into my hands and breezed past, heading right for Rachel. He stayed with her all night, lounging against the wall, telling her all about how he’d saved the family business and now had a three-year plan to open up a Nissan dealership as well. He was Self-Made Ken, charming the pants off Holiday-Champagne-Buzz Barbie.

  He’d called me Leia because you don’t call the first girl you ever had sex with by her old pet name. Not when that name was “Lay.” Not if you’ve always been in love with her stepsister.

  Now I stood in the wake of our old names, clutching my cake carrier to my chest and feeling an odd, bad tang in the air around me. He bent down to stuff spilled clothes back into the bag he’d dropped. It was one of Rachel’s reusable Whole Foods bags.

  “Are you on a Goodwill run?” I asked him. Stupid, but it was the only thing that came into my head.

  “No. What are you doing here?” He shoved his flop of blown-out blond hair off his forehead a
s he straightened up.

  “It’s Sunday,” I said. “Where else would I possibly be?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Rachel canceled lunch. She sent you an e-mail.”

  A khaki pants leg with a razor crease ironed into it was hanging out of the bag. I tucked it back in and saw a baby blue shirt with pinstripes and a button-down collar. This was practically Jake’s uniform. Then I realized that the gray knit wad of cloth on top was a pair of boxer briefs, and I flushed and made myself look back at his face. Really look.

  He had dark circles under his eyes, and his face was puffy. For a moment it was like I could see the round, sad face of my old friend JJ. A ghost face, transparent and faint, superimposed over my brother-in-law’s chiseled features.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him quietly, human to human.

  His mouth turned down, fiercely unhappy, and he said, “Nothing. I have to go.”

  He pushed past me and took the stairs, race-walking toward his red Nissan Armada.

  “Go where?” I called after him.

  He didn’t so much as glance over his shoulder. He threw the bag into the SUV and climbed in after it. I hovered on the porch, cake carrier in hand, my original mission shattered. Part of me wanted to slink home, but after Jake’s bizarre behavior I had to check on Rachel and Lavender. I tried the door, and it wasn’t locked.

  I stepped into Rachel’s vaulted foyer, and immediately I heard her running toward me from the kitchen, shrieking, “I said get out, you motherffffuuuu—”