The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Lav’s phone buzzed, and instantly the scared child with MIA Ken and Walking-Dead Barbie for parents was gone. Instead there was a disaffected teen, sneak-checking texts from boys under the breakfast table. A teen whose father still hadn’t called me back, though I’d left him three more messages, each meaner and more insistent than the last.

  It was one thing to decide that I was going to help Lav, but another to figure out how to actually do it. Rachel-style commando assistance—armed, invasive, and permission-free—was an art form, but it was not my medium. Watching Lav sneak-text, I had a new idea.

  “Hey, kid,” I said. “No phones at the breakfast table.” I held my hand out.

  She looked up, startled and busted.

  “You know better,” Rachel said mildly.

  Lavender rolled her eyes and passed the phone to me across the table.

  “Come and get it after breakfast,” I said.

  “Let’s make it after lunch,” Rachel was saying as I hurried away.

  I got the phone back to my room, fast. It would lock itself up in a minute or two, and I didn’t know Lav’s passcode. Jake hadn’t taken my calls, but he might well take one from this number. I closed my door and sat down on the sofa.

  It took me a sec to find him, because I went looking in the J’s out of habit. In Lav’s world Jake’s number was stored up in the D’s. I touched that word, “Daddy,” and saw that my hands were trembling. It wasn’t a word that had ever been lucky for me.

  He answered, though. And fast, picking up on the second ring.

  “Lav?” he said, his voice breathy and grainy.

  “Guess again,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Strike two,” I said, downright bitchy.

  It was mean, but for the first time since Jake had cut me out of his life like I was a tumor, I had the option to be mean to him. When he’d reappeared at my family’s drop-in Christmas party, thrusting wine at me as he sauntered by to charm my stepsister, I’d been knocked for such a loop. I’d avoided him that evening, then fled back to art school in Savannah. Rachel was courting distance from Norfolk at U Richmond, but I’d been sure that it would come to nothing. He wasn’t good enough for Rachel, and my stepsister had a rigorous belief that she deserved the best. I hoped she’d see past the new money and the newer nose. When they got engaged, I’d taken refuge in good manners, hyperpolite and horrified. Once he’d fathered my niece, I was committed to that politeness. But now? I had cosmic permission to tear him a new one, and I had a lot of mean saved up.

  “Why do you have my daughter’s phone? Is she with you?” Jake asked.

  “You don’t know? Jesus Christ back at you, JJ,” I said, incredulous. “Why haven’t you called her?”

  A pause.

  “Rachel told me not to.” Maybe even he heard how pathetic that sounded, because he was talking again before I could answer, defensive. “Anyway, I did go by the house. No one was home. Is Lavender hurt?”

  “Of course she is, you douche. All her limbs are still attached, if that’s what you mean, but her dad’s gone missing,” I said. “Every day you spend hiding, that hurt gets deeper and less repairable.”

  He made a huffing noise. “It’s complicated.”

  I huffed back. “Let me simplify it for you: Call your kid. If you need permission, I am giving you permission. If you need some testicles, I can’t help with that, because it sounds like you let Rachel pack them up and bring them with her down to Birchville. Beg, borrow, or steal, but get a set. Get one, and call your kid. Today. This afternoon. She’ll have her phone back after lunch.”

  “They’re both with you in Alabama?” Jake asked. “Are they okay?”

  “No. No, they are not. When your most important person ditches you, it feels like he pulled the world out from under your feet and took it with him. It feels like a long, fast fall, and there is no soft landing,” I said, and I wasn’t speaking only for Lav now. I was talking on my own behalf as well, finally defending the kid I’d been back when we were Lay and JJ and everything we did, we did together. Back when he’d screwed me and screwed me over. “It can ruin a kid. Ask me how I know.”

  “Are you making this about you?” he asked, trying for incredulous. Trying for disdain, but I could hear a hitch in his breathing.

  “Me? No. And it’s not about Lavender or Rachel either. This is about you. This is big-picture stuff,” I told him. “How many times can you do this, JJ? Do you think you have nine lives in you, like a cat? Keep on and you’ll have to change nursing homes when you’re ninety because you screwed over your roommate. Every time you mess up, you stick the people who love you the most with the consequences. Try apologizing. Try making it right. I know firsthand exactly how shitty it feels when you cut and run because you can’t face whatever awful thing you did. I paid for what you did. Every guy I’ve dated since has paid for what you did, and I was only your best friend. This is your wife. This is your own child. If you do this to your child, Oregon is not going to be far enough to let you get away from yourself. Japan won’t be far enough. Mars won’t be. You will have to go all the way to hell to get far enough, and if you don’t call your kid now, if you abandon her without a word like she is nothing, then you deserve to stay there.”

  He was definitely crying now, but he didn’t speak. I didn’t either. I had nothing left to say.

  I closed the connection, my hands downright shaking. I’d said words to JJ that I’d had rotting in my mouth for twenty years. I felt oddly fresh, almost minty, clean in the wake of saying all those words. I’d wanted to ask him to promise me that he would contact Lavender, but I hadn’t. His promises didn’t mean jack, and his tears didn’t either. He might be feeling sorry for JJ, weeping for poor Jake, and not for Lavender at all. He would call or he wouldn’t. I couldn’t control that. But God, it had felt so good to speak the truth at last, biting into him and chewing like a rattlesnake until my venom sacs were spent and empty.

  I wanted to savor it, but a glance at the clock told me I had about six minutes before Birchie and Wattie would be walking out the door. I ran a brush across my tufty bed head and pulled on my voluminous Digby-hiding skirt again. At this point I was pretty much living in this skirt, my sweatpants, and pajamas. I rested my hands on my belly and took three deep breaths to slow my heartbeat. With so much happening, my emotions were a pinwheel, paper light and spun by any wind. Once inside the walls of First Baptist, I could not lose my temper or speak my mind.

  I sent a little prayer up toward heaven as I hurried down the hall. Birchie was not herself, and she was walking into the lion’s den of a riled-up small-town Baptist church. I would not let her go without me. Not when she was the one who had riled it.

  12

  We headed across the road in a tight battle formation. Me and Lavender first, each of us eager to lead the way for our own reasons. Then Wattie and Birchie in their hats and floral dresses and low-heeled shoes, the elderly-southern-lady version of the Armor of the Lord. Rachel, solemn and silent, brought up our rear.

  Our bad luck, Martina Mack was standing outside by the door into the sanctuary in her own floral dress, passing out the bulletin. Behind her was the familiar redbrick building with its tall white steeple reaching up into the bright morning sky. When she saw us, her bug-eyed face flashed surprise and then a fervent, ugly joy. She wiped both expressions away so quickly I wasn’t sure anyone else saw. We kept right on coming, and Martina thrust her stack of bulletins at her hench-crone, Gayle Beckworth, who was passing them out on the other side of the doorway. Martina came forward across the wide front porch to meet us at the top of the stairs.

  The Grangers and the Lesters were heading inside, but they paused when they saw Martina step to meet us. I could see the Fincher family, walking to church from all the way across the square. Jerry Fincher was the youngest deacon, and his wife had her fingers second-knuckle-deep in every church pie. When they saw us, Polly Fincher picked up her toddler and thrust him into her husband’s arms.
Then she sped up so much her baby’s stroller jounced up onto the curb.

  Lavender, oblivious to matriarch nuance, trit-trotted up fast, then squirted around Martina and headed inside, looking for her friends. I stayed in front, the last line of defense between Birchie and Martina. The three of us climbed slowly, in deference to Wattie’s knees. As I reached the top, Martina Mack’s scrawny neck lengthened, and she straightened her spine, looking over my shoulder at Birchie.

  “I’m so happy you came,” Martina Mack said, and she wasn’t lying. She smiled a smile so chilling I almost saw Violence in it, a hunger running deep enough to qualify as cannibalistic.

  “Happy to be here,” I said, even though she wasn’t talking to me.

  She spoke to Birchie as if Birchie were alone. More than alone. As if Birchie were a lamb staked out on a hillside.

  “Did you know I think my grandson’s going to take a little trip to . . . Charleston?” She said it like Dr. Evil, but the question itself was so innocuous I blinked, surprised. I’m sure I looked confused. Charleston? What fresh hell was this?

  “How nice. It’s lovely beach weather,” Birchie said, pleasantly enough. Wattie’s wide-set eyes narrowed.

  Martina pitched her voice loud to say, “Cody won’t have time to hit the beach, I wouldn’t think. He’ll be visiting all of those historic graveyards.”

  My jaw tensed up at the mention of graveyards. This was something to do with the bones, then? But the Birches’ time in Charleston was ancient history. Martina Mack was ancient history in human terms, well into her eighties, but she was not Civil War old. If the bones dated back to Charleston, that ought to be good news for us.

  Nothing in Martina’s sharky smile, so broad that the sun gleamed overbright off the uniform row of her dentures, said she had good news for us. Sally Gentry and the whole Boyd family came spilling back out of the church to see what was happening. Behind us I heard more people climbing the stairs. Martina was playing to a growing audience. A baby started crying, and I glanced back. It was Polly Fincher’s. He hadn’t liked the jouncing, so she’d had to stop her sprint toward this weird drama in order to soothe him. The Gentrys and the Cobbs were on their way up, too. No Frank Darian anywhere.

  “Stomping all over cemeteries sounds like a misery in this heat. But we each have our own odd pleasures,” Birchie said. She was so herself this morning.

  “Speaking of the heat, my grandmother shouldn’t be standing out here in it,” I said.

  I stepped forward, but it only brought me closer to Martina Mack. She held her ground, smelling of thin, sour sweat and boiled egg under baby powder. We were now uncomfortably close, but she wasn’t moving. Birchie and Wattie had stepped forward when I did, crowding me into the middle of a furious-old-lady sandwich. I sidestepped, and now Birchie and Wattie were facing her directly.

  There was a breathless feel of waiting in the folks crowding around us. Whatever damning gossip Martina Mack had learned or invented about the bones, she had already shared it. I could tell, because the gazes of the townspeople had changed since last week, when they brought us all those cakes and casseroles, curious and concerned. Now some looked speculative, some wore an odd, hurt brand of confused, and a few were downright bristling with hostility. I pulled my phone out and shot a quick text to Frank Darian: What does Martina Mack know that we don’t?

  Martina said, “Cody’s sure to find your father’s grave. Isn’t he? He could do a gravestone rubbing for you. I always did think it was odd, burying your father over in Charleston. When you got on that train, we all thought you meant to bring his body home. You’ve never visited Charleston again, not once, not in all the years I’ve known you, so it might be nice for you to have a rubbing of his stone.” Martina Mack’s voice was rich with fake musing.

  Small hairs on the back of my neck stirred as she spoke. Was she saying the bones belonged to Birchie’s father? She couldn’t know that, but if it was purely invented, it was quite a leap. Had Cody told her something?

  Lisbeth and Jack Barley had come outside now, too, bypassing Gayle Beckworth, who watched with avid eyes, clutching her double stack of bulletins. More families were arriving, climbing the stairs, craning in to listen, even though Martina wasn’t really offering fresh information.

  All of Birchville knew that Ellis Birch had died of a heart attack in Charleston, knew how Birchie went away to save the Birch family fortune and buried him there. When she came home, she immediately married a man who Ellis had never thought was good enough. The younger members had heard the story. The older ones had witnessed it. But oh, how Martina’s insinuating tone changed the story! In the context of the old, dry bones, these old, dry facts grew flesh and blood. And teeth.

  Martina was still talking. “He’ll definitely want to pay his respects. See that legendary gravestone for himself. Where exactly in Charleston did you say it was that your father was buried?”

  I could feel the eyes on us, waiting for Birchie’s answer. Most of the congregation seemed hungry more than hostile, waiting for Birchie to deny, explain, defend. The longer she stood silent, the more doubting and anxious and unfriendly that communal gaze became.

  Behind Wattie, Rachel was doing her best poker face, or maybe she was actually not paying attention. If only Rachel would snap out of her lethargy for fifteen seconds. She was so excellent at Church-Lady Bitch Fights. She didn’t know Birchville history, the long-standing feuds and friendships so tightly woven that they made up the very fabric of small-town life, but she was socially adept enough to come in swinging anyway. She caught my drowning look and threw back a helpless little shrug. I wouldn’t have thought that Rachel’s shoulders knew how to do that.

  “Good grief—Mrs. Mack, is it? Your Cody is a morbid fellow,” Rachel said. Her height let her peer over Birchie’s shoulder. “Gravestone rubbings? That sounds like the world’s worst Pinterest board.”

  It was weak, but at least Rachel still had a pulse.

  “Are you going to give us a bulletin?” I snapped at Gayle Beckworth. “Birchie needs to go sit down.”

  I’d broken into a thin, slick sweat myself, and it wasn’t only from being held captive in the early-summer sun. If Birchie had come here to take the town’s temperature, then she was sure getting her answer. It was hot, and getting hotter. She’d let Martina’s accusation stand unchallenged, and now it was growing Southern Baptist–hellfire hot.

  “But why didn’t you bring his body home?” Martina asked so very loudly. “You Birches are like our very own First Family here,” and she couldn’t help letting a little Mack bitterness be present in those words. I wanted to step in harder, but I was scared. I had no idea how reliable her information was.

  If the bones belonged to Ellis Birch, then had Birchie . . . ? My mind balked, unwilling to go down that road. But I needed to say something. I was genuinely scared of what the Lewy bodies might have Birchie do if Martina kept pushing. I risked a glance at my grandmother and saw that her nostrils had flared delicately. Stress made Birchie worse, and oh, but this was stressful. Around us I could hear people whispering in a wind of breathy words.

  Martina stepped in closer still, cleared her throat, and said, “Your daddy is the only Birch not in your family crypt right here in Birchville.”

  Wattie had Birchie’s arm, and I could see her hand tightening, both a reminder of her presence and a warning. Birchie gave Wattie’s hand a reassuring pat and smiled her sweetest.

  “I am a Birch,” my grandmother said, loud as Martina but in a brave, clear tone. “I am a Birch, and I am not inside that crypt.”

  She didn’t say, Not yet.

  She didn’t have to say it to remind everyone that she was sick. More than sick. Dying. And here was known jackass Martina Mack making her stand out on the stairs with the summer sun already beating down upon her head.

  “Let her in!” said Mrs. Partridge, stern, but no one else spoke.

  “Come on,” Wattie said, soft in Birchie’s ear.

  Wattie moved them
forward in tandem. Martina backstepped in a little skip that defied her age, and Wattie had to stop again. It was either stop or push a small, old, vicious lady backward onto her ass.

  “Don’t you dare herd me,” said Martina Mack to Wattie in a tone she never would have dared to use on Birchie. Her cold amphibian eyes scraped over Wattie, the way a stick scraped at gum stuck to a shoe. “Don’t you herd me on the steps of my own church!”

  “This is her church as well,” Birchie said. “Every other week.”

  But it wasn’t. I could feel it wasn’t. Especially not today. I could feel the ripple of movement and negation that ran through the crowd.

  “Oh, Miss Wattie, your poor knees! Come inside and sit down. Miss Birchie, you need to get out of this sun!” Polly Fincher said, shoving her way through to us, breathless. She had abandoned both her kids with her husband and come charging up the stairs from the other side. She shot a withering glance at Martina Mack and added, “Aren’t you supposed to be handing out the bulletins?”

  Cody Mack appeared in the doorway beside Gayle. He was stuffed into a shiny, turd-brown suit instead of his uniform. He stared at us from just inside the narthex, and then he came joggling forward, pushing his way through people, saying, “Gran! Gran!”

  He took Martina’s arm and pulled her away, practically shooing her on into the sanctuary ahead of us. She went, eyes downcast. He was overflustered, and I realized I ought to be grateful that Martina Mack was such a vicious old crow of a lady.

  The cops had found some evidence or gotten some information from the forensic anthropologist that let them draw a line between the bones and Ellis Birch. We weren’t supposed to know this, but Cody hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut, and now Martina had tipped their hand.

  Gayle held out a bulletin toward us, two of her fingers pinching the corner, as if she were passing rancid meat to a pack of foul animals.