The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Birchie!” I said, when I could swallow. “My niece is here.”

  Lavender probably heard that word a minimum of nine times an hour at school, but never from the sweet, pink mouth of a little old Baptist lady.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Leia,” Birchie said lightly, casting her eyes heavenward. “Get off your horse. Everybody has an asshole.”

  Lavender was giggling openly now. I realized that, under the table, my treacherous hand had moved to cover Digby’s nascent ears. That put me in danger of catching the giggles as well.

  Birchie seemed to realize she’d said something wrong. She was looking at me, but her body canted ever so slightly toward Lavender, no doubt waiting for a whisper. Lav had both hands clapped over her mouth, trying to stifle herself. Birchie turned to look at the place where Wattie should be and was startled anew by my niece.

  “Who is this?” she demanded. All at once she sounded querulous and very, very old. “Who is this girl? Why does she keep being here?”

  “That’s my niece, Birchie,” I said gently, all laughter gone. “Remember?”

  “Well, why is she staring at me like a gigged fish? Was the child not raised to have even one manner?” It was a very Birchie turn of phrase, said in her most imperious voice, which made it so much sadder somehow. She was there. But not all there.

  I said, “Lavender was surprised to hear you say . . .” I found I could not repeat the word, not at this childhood table where once I said “poot” and then was stuck for an hourlong lecture about the relationship between my vocabulary choices and the moral decay of the nation. “She’s my niece. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” Birchie said, still querulous, outraged. “Of course I do! But why is she here?”

  “May I be excused?” Lavender asked, small-voiced.

  “There is no excuse for you,” Birchie trumpeted, turning on her.

  Wattie said, “Enough!” in a tone that brooked no argument.

  She rose ponderously to her feet, and at the movement Birchie looked and saw the shape of her friend. Her face wiped itself almost clean of expression, like an old-fashioned blackboard. Streaks of thought were still dusted across it, but they were unreadable.

  “Change seats with me,” Wattie ordered Lavender, swapping out their plates and cups with brisk, angry motions.

  “Did I do something wrong?” Lav asked, and I felt sorry that I had put her in this odd line of fire.

  “No, child, hush. You didn’t do a thing wrong, except you’ve barely touched your hen, and you aren’t as big as a half bug. It’s only Birchie needs things to be a certain way these days, and changing them up, why, it’s pure meanness to her. Pure and simple meanness.” Just as when I had earned her disapproval as a girl, I felt myself shrink nine full sizes. Lavender and Wattie switched sides, Wattie still talking to me with hard-edged reproach. “Nights are difficult for her. Mornings are much better. Isn’t that right?”

  Birchie nodded, calmly reaching for another piece of cornbread. “I moved Garden Club to ten a.m., and Martina Mack acted like I’d said we were going to eat a baby. If I’d known she’d hate it that much, I’d have moved it years ago.” Wattie handed her the butter, and Birchie took it, her body naturally canting toward her friend.

  “I only wanted to—” I said, but Wattie spoke over me.

  “You eat up, too.”

  She cut her eyes at Lavender, and when they came back to rest on me, they were dark with angry promise. My niece’s tiny person was the only flimsy barrier between me and something strong and filled with righteous fury. We all went back to eating, though I could hardly taste the food. Lavender stuffed five bites down, fast as she could. It was so deadly quiet I could hear the buzzy hum of texts and e-mails landing in her phone.

  Into the fraught silence, Lavender said, “That was really delicious! Thank you.” She’d been raised to say these words at any dinner, even if her hostess served up offal. “May I please be excused?”

  I nodded. She gave my knee a quick squeeze under the table. She knew I was in for it. Then she squirted away, already reaching for the phone in her back pocket. I heard her clattering up the stairs, the slim wall of her protection gone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to both of them. “That was low. The seat thing.”

  I wasn’t sure if Birchie knew what I was apologizing for, but she inclined her head in gracious acceptance.

  “Yes, it was,” Wattie agreed. She leaned in toward me. “We can be plain with one another now.”

  That sparked me, and I got a little size back. “You should have been plain with me all along. Maybe I wouldn’t have pulled that trick if you two hadn’t done so much sneaking.”

  Wattie shrugged, an angry, sharp motion. “I love you, Leia, always have. But you aren’t mine to fool.”

  That took me a second, but then Birchie said, “No. You are mine to fool, my sugar.”

  “So you’re both saying Birchie made her own choices, like always. Okay. But how long ago was that?” Wattie’s nostrils flared, a danger signal, but I kept on, asking the hard questions Rachel had pressured me to ask. “You’re deciding things now, Wattie. One thing you decided was to keep me in the dark.”

  “Child,” Wattie said, but with none of the patience she’d shown Lavender. “Birchie’s right, you are perched so way up high on that horse you’re liable to fall and break your tailbone. Birchie made these decisions while she could.”

  “She’s keeping them for me,” Birchie said. “I lose track sometimes. She’ll tell you true.”

  “So hear me,” Wattie said, so in tune their sentences almost overlapped. “She wants to stay here.”

  “It’s not safe,” I said, and Wattie and Birchie exchanged a speaking glance. Birchie actually laughed.

  “And you think dying should be safe?” Wattie asked, equally amused.

  “You know what I mean. Your sons have had this talk with you, Wattie, more than once. Same as I have with Birchie. You and she both need to be living someplace with no stairs, where there are doctors on call. You two should’ve at least had home help for years now, but you fought us on that, too, and we gave up. But now things have to change,” I said, Rachel’s points pouring out of my mouth like I was her hand puppet. “How long ago did Birchie get this diagnosis?”

  “A few years back,” Wattie said, evasive, but it was enough to make me feel gut-punched. Tears started up in my eyes, and, seeing that, Wattie’s face crumpled a little, too, even as she sat up straighter, indignant. “I’m doing the best that I know how to do. And truth told? I wish it was me, because she would do the same as I’m doing. I’m losing my friend, and there’s no one left to stand like this for me. My husband left for heaven way too soon before me. We raised our sons up to be fine people, but when she’s gone, of course they’re going to put me in a home someplace. For my own good, they’ll say. For safety, they’ll say. Just like you. We don’t want that.”

  Birchie took Wattie’s hand, saying, “Now, now.”

  Wattie looked to her, and the naked sorrow on her face undid me. This was hard, and horrible.

  “It’s not fair. I know there’s nothing fair about it,” I said, but I had seen enough to know that Rachel was right. As usual. I knew what I had to do, and I owed Wattie the truth of it, right then. She had given it to me, and so I gave it back. “I’m going to talk to her doctor, but I think you have a good idea of what he’ll tell me. You and Birchie can’t stay here. The closest hospital is thirty miles away.” Wattie’s heavy lids shuttered down over her eyes. For the first time, she couldn’t meet my gaze; Dr. Pettery must have told her this already. “There’s hard change coming, Wattie. And it is coming fast.” I hated my own tone. I sounded like Rachel talking to Lavender, that time Lav announced that she was going to dye her hair hot pink. Wattie tried to exchange a look with Birchie, but Birchie wasn’t looking back. As I had spoken, Birchie had checked out. She slumped in her seat, staring blankly past my head into the garden. I went on. “You need to talk to
your sons, Wattie. I can talk to Sam and Stephen, too. If you and Birchie want to stay together, we can work that out. You get to have a say.”

  Wattie wasn’t quite done yet.

  “You want my say? You move down here. We can make the sewing room into a bedroom for her. So no stairs.” Except the seven on the front porch and the long, steep flight down from the back door, I thought, but Wattie was still talking. “Move to Alabama.” It was so matter-of-fact that I knew it was not a spur-of-the-moment idea. I had a spur-of-the-moment answer, though, and it was a resounding, No. Hell no. Wattie must have seen it on my face, because she got louder and more urgent. “Hear me out, now! You aren’t married, and you don’t even have a fella. Not for serious. You can draw your pictures any old place. You only got yourself to think about, so why not think of Birchie?”

  Her dismissal of my whole life hurt. She spoke as if work for me meant lolling in a cushy chair, scribbling and hooking back bonbons, not a real career with deadlines and travel. As if Mom and Keith and Lavender and Rachel didn’t count as family and my Tuesday gamers and my church community were nothing. But even if I wanted to uproot myself, now there was Digby. I could feel him fluttering and flexing, a second heartbeat at my very center. I had to think of him first.

  Pee-poo are like dis, Rachel had told me once, putting the peachy-pink Crayola that used to be called Flesh into my hand. As if all the flesh that mattered was that color. That crayon was called Peach now, but the ideas behind its old name were still alive and present. Present everywhere, all across the country, but more overt in Birchville.

  I wouldn’t raise Digby in the small-town South, even though there was a lot of good here. Kids still ran free in packs unafraid, unscheduled, still called home for supper by bells, only now the bells were kept inside their phones. We had good neighbors who made me caramel cakes when I visited and kept me in the Facebook group and on the phone tree even when I was seven hundred miles away. Birchie and my father and I had all been born here, and to me there was no prettier country than the deep greens and black-browns and sunny blues of rural Alabama.

  But it was 1987 here in more ways than a movie-rental store. I didn’t want my biracial son growing up in a town where Wattie was the only black face ever seen in the crowd down at First Baptist, especially since half the folks there pretended that she was the Help. Birchie had the only white face ever seen on the regular at Redemption. Here the white families with means sent their kids to a small, lily-colored private school one town over. The county’s public schools were poorly rated, and the black kids and the white kids sat at different lunch tables.

  I didn’t want to bring my pregnancy up now, though. This conversation was hard enough to keep on track without the ultimate derailment my Digby news would bring. Plus, I wanted Birchie to hear it first, and as good news, not blurted in anger. I would not use Digby as my trump card in an ugly argument. Right now Birchie wasn’t fully present, even though her eyes were fixed on me. Her body sat in her chair, listing more and more toward Wattie every minute.

  “I’m sorry. Wattie, call your sons in the morning. We need to plan a trip to Norfolk soon, so you can look at options. You two are going to have to move.”

  Wattie stared me down, silent, as sturdy and impassive as a wall. “We’ll see,” she said, and in the foyer the big grandfather clock began chiming seven. At the sound Birchie pushed back her chair and stood up as if on autopilot, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. Wattie stood, too. “I have to start doing her bedtime things now.” I came around the table to kiss Birchie’s powdery, soft cheek. She did not respond. I usually kissed Wattie, too, but she did not seem kissable just now. Her eyes on me were hard and dark as chips of onyx. Her pointed chin was tilted up at me.

  “Let me help put her to bed,” I said, propitiating.

  She shook her head, no, and then, to my surprise, she kissed me. Her lips on my cheek were as cool as stones from the back garden.

  “I do this every night, and she needs everything to stay just the same. You hear me? Leave things the way they are. You leave things lie,” the stone lips said, and by the end it didn’t sound like she was talking about putting Birchie to bed. It sounded like a warning.

  6

  A rustling thump from above woke me, way too early. I scrubbed at my eyes and checked the clock. Six-thirty in the morning, God help me. Just over my head, pattery footsteps ran across the ceiling, quick and light. So Lavender was actually rooting about in the attic. She’d spent the last couple of days roaming the town with the Darian boys or playing on my old laptop, but this morning was her last chance. It sounded to me like she was taking it.

  I’d found the attic irresistible when I was a little kid. I’d spent the earlier, cooler hours of my long summer days trying on feathered hats and the old lace wedding dress or digging in the sewing table with its box of a thousand unsorted buttons. I’d jumbled things about as I played, dumping a shoulder-padded forties suit into a sea of whalebone corsets, mixing ledgers from the 1890s in with sweater vests and sci-fi paperbacks from my father’s childhood. Knowing Lav, she was probably re-sorting everything by time period or color. At least she was exploring while she could. At 10:00 a.m., the estate-sale company I’d hired from Montgomery would be here to begin the assessment.

  I groaned and pulled the pillow over my head. Sorting through the attic was a job for Hercules, and even he might have to call in the rest of the Avengers. Lav and I couldn’t do it alone if we had three months and a backhoe. The main section took up most of a whole floor, tight aisles winding like a maze through mishmash piles of junk and heirloomworthy prizes. The narrow back room under the eaves was worse. In it, boxes and chests and wardrobes had been piled six deep with no aisles at all, packed literally to the roof with clothes and papers and furniture and books. I’d always been told to stay clear of that back area lest I pull out the wrong piece of keepsake Jenga and topple everything down and smash myself.

  I’d disobeyed enough to know that there was a full set of Jane Austen in the crates right by the door. Persuasion held the powdery remains of pressed flowers, a remembrance of love gone wrong or right. Either way, they’d been dry bones when I found them and were probably dust now. I’d put Persuasion back; the flower’s oils had wrecked the print, so on the pages where they had been laid to rest, the story was unreadable.

  I’d hired the estate team to help sort trash from treasure and to let Birchie claim the things that mattered most to her personally while she still remembered. It was also a message, telegraphing change, like the assisted-living brochures I had printed out for them, like the speakerphone calls with Wattie’s sons. Oh, but it was going to be an ugly day.

  My little old ladies were not going gently into that good nursing home. Wattie fought me every living minute and Birchie on and off as she was able. Today would be the same, but squared. No, cubed. They had a lot of weapons in their crafty arsenal: innuendo, barbed asides, appeals to reason or pity or nostalgia. Birchie especially excelled at “soft reproach,” looking wounded and yet so forgiving at the same time. When she was on point, that look landed on my chest and pushed in, a long skewer of sorry feeling that ran me all the way through.

  It hadn’t changed my mind, though. I’d had a lengthy talk with Dr. Pettery, and he backed my decisions. He’d been concerned for quite some time, but HIPAA and Miss Wattie had kept his hands pretty well tied.

  Rachel had e-mailed me a list of Norfolk facilities with spotless reputations and memory-care units. I’d held off booking travel until Wattie and her sons decided if she’d be touring the facilities with us. Sam wanted her to move to Houston, near his family, but Stephen insisted it was Wattie’s choice. I thought that in the end Miss Wattie would want to stay with Birchie, though so far she had only reiterated that neither of them was going anyplace, thanks muchly. The role reversal, setting rules for women who had half raised me, made me so sad and uncomfortable that I’d spent a lot of time hiding in my room, saying I was working. Which I was, as long a
s we could agree that “working” meant doodling endless Violences on scratch paper and not having any ideas for the prequel.

  I curled up tighter underneath the covers. Closing down the house itself would be easy, when we came to that point. In the 1870s houses had been built to last, and, in this one, entropy had never been allowed to gain a toehold. It was so tidy I could pretty much throw out the milk and eggs, cover the furniture, and call it closed. Updated double storm windows gleamed clean behind crisp sheers. The furniture was old-fashioned but not actually old. Anything that began to sag or wither was banished—usually to the attic. And therein lay the problem. I was even now snuggled up under the stacked, unsorted weight of a hundred and forty-odd years’ worth of Birch family history.

  I was loathe to get up and begin this day, but Digby had no such hang-up. He was already being busy. I put my hand over the place on my belly where I felt his cheery fizz and jiggle. I pressed down, but at seventeen weeks, I could still only feel him moving from the inside.

  I heard the familiar creak of the door between my room and Lavender’s. This room had once been my father’s—his glow-in-the-dark star decals were still all over the ceiling—and the tower room had been his playroom. I made my gummy eyes open and pointed them at the doorway. Lavender froze mid-tiptoe, my laptop in her hands.

  “Good morning,” I said, surprised to find her back downstairs and already playing on the computer.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said. She came all the way in and put it on the desk.

  “I was up,” I said.

  Her eyes cut away. She walked over to the fireplace and picked up the glass shepherdess who was perched, dustless and gleaming, on the mantel. My room, like every other one here, was like a cozy surgical theater—spick, span, and homey. Lavender, whose house was in a constant state of readiness for a Restoration Hardware photo shoot, had seemed right at home. But not just now. She studied the shepherdess with elaborate overinterest, as if Bo Peep were trending on Twitter.