by Maisey Yates
She wondered, though, if she didn’t really have anything to blame but the distance between herself and her sister for the blowup that had happened. They had pulled away from each other over the years. Nothing dramatic.
But it was like the pain in their lives was a loose thread, and the more time pulled at it, the more the fabric between them unraveled and they began to separate.
She walked into the kitchen and just stood there, and then she began to assemble ingredients. It was fifteen minutes past their agreed time to meet, and she had dry ingredients, bowls and lots and lots of butter set out on the counter, and she had just come to the conclusion that Rachel probably wasn’t going to come, when her sister walked through the door.
“Oh,” Anna said. “You came.”
“Of course I did. I said that I would.”
And Rachel did like to martyr herself to a cause, even if that cause was pastries.
Anna bit back the uncharitable comment.
“Emma is really happy working at J’s.”
Rachel said that while she was taking an apron off the peg, and she was very carefully not looking at Anna.
“Oh?”
“Yes,” she said, tying the apron around her slender waist and taking a scrunchie off her wrist and putting her long red hair up in a bun on the top of her head with practiced ease. “I’m sorry that I got angry about it. She’s happy. And I think... I don’t know why I didn’t see it. I think she needs a break from being here. From the grief. I mean... He died here. We had the funeral here.”
It hit Anna then how strange it was to see her sister like this. Not knowing what to do. Not being certain. Anna had always found Rachel’s certainty about the world intimidating. Rachel just did things. What needed to be done. Always.
There was only five years between them, but sometimes Anna felt impossibly young standing next to Rachel.
Even more so now.
Rachel had buried a husband. Rachel had a daughter who was getting ready to go to college.
Rachel, for her part, looked far younger than she was, the blessed side effect of living where the sun rarely shone. That, and a combination of what Anna assumed were blessed genetics. At least, they definitely were from Wendy. They wouldn’t know about their father. Neither of them knew him.
Rachel had told her once that she had some vague memories of him, but he’d left for good before Anna was born, and she didn’t have any of her own. She’d never been particularly sad about that. He’d hurt her mother terribly. He’d abandoned his daughters.
He was a cheater.
A cheater...like her.
But she’d had reasons for what she’d done.
Maybe he did, too.
“I’m glad that she’s happy,” Anna said quickly. “And that... It makes sense. I know what it’s like...” She blinked hard, debating whether or not she should say the next thing. “I know what it’s like to need a break from your life. And that really is all I said to her. That if she really wanted something that she needed to come forward with it now. Because if you don’t you’re just going to end up hurting people later.”
“I... Thank you for saying that to her. I don’t know how to do this part.”
“Your daughter growing up?”
“No. People not needing me.”
The silence settled between them for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve always had someone to take care of. You. Emma. Jacob. You grew up.” She pulled a face. “Jacob died. Emma is getting ready to live life on her own. I don’t know what that means for me.”
She stared at Rachel, unsure of what to say. She’d never imagined her sister feeling insecure. Not ever. “You don’t...have to take care of us,” Anna said.
“I know,” Rachel said. “I mean, I’m realizing it.”
“I meant you don’t have to take care of us for us to...need you.” Things might be difficult with her sister, but she was her sister.
“Thank you,” Rachel said, her voice thick. She drew in a shaking breath. “Let’s start laminating, though, okay?”
They both started with their own large batch and began endlessly folding chunks of butter into the dough so that it would bake just right and make the delicate, flaky layers they would need for good croissants.
They worked in silence, which was preferable to fighting.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said.
They both kept folding. Layer after layer.
“For?”
“For what I said. For the... The way that I said it. I don’t understand, Anna, and I don’t even know... I haven’t had the capacity to even try for the past few weeks. And it definitely wasn’t something I should have gone off at you about when we haven’t even had a discussion with any kind of civility yet.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t say I didn’t mean it. I did.” She blinked.
“You’re just sorry you said it that way?” She turned the dough and folded it again.
Another layer.
“I don’t know that it was right that I said it at all,” Rachel said softly.
“Oh.” Anna’s heart was thundering as she continued to work the dough.
There wasn’t anything to say after that, Anna supposed.
“I wanted to hurt you because I was hurt. It’s that simple. And I guess I’m that small.”
“You didn’t have to be mean to me.”
“I know,” Rachel said. “Do you ever just feel mean?”
“Oh. All the time. But I haven’t been allowed to show it.”
“Why?”
She snorted. “Really? Look at who I was married to. I was the pastor’s wife. I had to be happy and perfect all the time.”
“I never needed you to be.”
The words took the air out of her. “Well, I don’t know. Mom did. Because you were so good and easy and I was...me. And when I found Thomas I know Mom was sure the issue of me was solved.”
“You really think Mom thought of you as an issue?”
“She was afraid. I know she was. Afraid I’d end up... I mean, I guess like I am.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Because we don’t talk. I was thirteen when you got married. You had Emma. Jacob got sick. I had my own friends, and then I threw myself into my life and...we just never talked.”
Anna just wasn’t happy to let things lie. Not anymore. She’d destroyed her marriage with her actions. There was no more decisive act than the one she’d committed, so why she shouldn’t face her sister and their distance she didn’t know.
They’d both just gone with it. For years.
Anna was done just going with it. It had been the way she’d dealt with life for far too long, and it had been dry. Arid. It was no life at all.
Rachel herself had lived more vividly. Somehow, she’d responded to the way their mother had raised them and found happiness, even though she’d found trials, too.
Rich. Layered. Life.
Anna had been hiding instead. She’d found a stark, literal way to behave. To make herself perfect. And she’d learned just how little that meant in the end.
She wanted more. Better.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Anna said. “I mean, it makes sense that when we were younger and we were in such different places in our lives we didn’t connect. But now...we have this great place we all love between us. We’re close to each other in proximity. We had big family dinners all the time. There was always a feeling of being a close family. Jacob and Thomas, and Mom and Emma and then there’s you and me. And all those connections but ours is just...polite. Why?”
Rachel’s cheeks were red. “I don’t know. If you don’t know, why should I know?”
“I—I don’t know, but you’re older, so you should know.”
“Oh, thanks. I—I rea
lly don’t think about it. I didn’t even realize it until I was...alone like this. Until Jacob wasn’t there. And then it seemed so obvious how things between you and me aren’t like they should be.” She paused for a moment. “I guess there were some things about your marriage that I resented. And the worse off Jacob was, the more...”
She sucked in a sharp breath and her head lowered, a tear spilling down her cheek. And Anna dreaded what her sister might say next, but she knew she had to listen. Because she’d asked the question. Because when you set off a bomb you can’t hide from the destruction and wasn’t she learning that?
She had asked the question.
So maybe she should bridge the gap, too.
She reached out and pulled her sister in for a hug.
“I loved him so much, Anna,” Rachel said on a choked breath. “I love him so much. Still. And I wanted more and better for him than what he got. And sometimes... I wanted easier for me. And that isn’t fair. It’s not fair, because he wasn’t a burden. He was my great joy. He was the love of my life. But sometimes I just... I got tired, and I got sad. I wanted things to be like they were. I wanted us to be able to have what we did. Because I loved that. We found something that worked. We found happiness. It wasn’t like it was a long slog of sadness. It wasn’t. But it was hard sometimes, watching you two. Watching you get to be a wife the way you were. I let it make us distant. And knowing it wasn’t perfect now doesn’t change how I saw it then.”
Anna didn’t know what to say to that, because she would never have guessed that being around her was hard for Rachel for those reasons, not for a moment. Not when Anna could see plainly that Jacob had more affection for Rachel in his every breath than Thomas had for her, particularly in the end.
And she had to think of her own whys. Which she’d been avoiding for a long, long time now.
She’d hidden her own issues with Rachel, with her life, behind the careful, perfect pastor’s-wife facade she’d built around herself. She’d used it to keep her own feelings a mystery from even herself. But it was all crumbling now.
She could see clearly now that Jacob and Rachel had been together in a way that had worked a sore spot into her own heart over the years.
Because after those family dinners, she’d imagined them together. How they talked, laughed, behaved, kissed, after everyone had gone home.
Thomas just closed the door on her and went back to his important work.
“I pulled away from you,” Anna admitted finally. “Because watching the way that he looked at you made my heart break. Not because I felt sorry for you, and I know that maybe I should have. It made my heart break because I’m selfish, and I could see that he... He loved you. He loved you so much, Rachel.”
“Thomas loves you.”
“No,” she said definitely. “And if he did, he doesn’t now.”
Rachel paused for a moment, then met her sister’s gaze. “I was afraid to ask this before. I was being selfish. But I want to understand now. Why did you do it?” There wasn’t any condemnation in the question. And Anna knew if she wanted Rachel to understand her, she had to give her a chance to understand.
But how could she do that when she hardly understood herself?
What had seemed clear while she was in it felt muddled in the rubble.
Anna blinked, and she rolled the dough again, created another layer. “Do you remember what it was like in school when a boy would smile at you and it made you feel warm all over? And it could make your whole day. Your whole day could center around that smile. I remember feeling that way about Thomas. He was so...important. And he cared so much about everyone. He cared so much about being a good person. I admired that. And I wanted it. Because you know... Mom always made it sound like marriage was the most important thing. The absolute most important thing for us to do was marry a good man. So that we didn’t end up in the same situation as her. And also, to not have sex before we got married so we wouldn’t get pregnant.”
Rachel laughed. “I failed at that.” She rolled and folded another layer.
“You did?”
A sly smile curved her sister’s lips. “I slept with Jacob before we got married. I couldn’t help myself, in spite of Mom’s pregnancy fearmongering.”
“Well, I didn’t sleep with Thomas. I waited. We both did. It was important to him. And it was important to me for the same reason. But that’s the thing. I loved that about him. I loved that he could wait. I loved that he had restraint. And that he wanted to do the right thing. I knew that if I could just marry him that my life would be perfect. That it would be everything that I was supposed to be. Rachel, I knew that it was the right thing. But somewhere along the way he quit smiling at me. And then he quit looking at me. And I realized that I lived with a stranger.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Yes. Not with his fists. And, no, he didn’t sleep with another woman, but he... I thought I lost the ability to even feel the kind of joy that I used to feel when he looked at me. I tried to talk to him, but you can’t talk to someone who isn’t going to talk back. You can’t fix what someone else doesn’t think is broken. And I... I felt that thing again. When I met Michael.”
“Michael,” Rachel said. The word had a strange weight to it. Anna looked over at her sister and saw that the tips of her ears were red.
It reminded her that even though they were talking now, it didn’t mean everything was fine. It didn’t mean it was a smooth path.
“Yes. He made me feel beautiful, Rachel. And everything he did felt so good. And he hasn’t called me since Thomas walked in on us.”
“Thomas walked in on you?” Rachel’s movements stilled again.
It was Anna’s turn for her ears to turn red. “Not like that. But we were...just coming out of the bedroom. Thomas was looking for me...
“It was awful. But I can’t go back, and on some level that’s a relief. If I had taken it to the edge, or if it had happened in a different way, then I would have... It wouldn’t have gone this far. He would have wanted to fix it and I don’t know what I would have done. But now... There’s no choice, is there?”
“You said that you didn’t... That he didn’t...”
“Oh, are you talking about the sex?”
“Explain that to me,” Rachel said.
Anna shook her head. “I mean, I can. But there’s nothing really to explain. It became more and more infrequent, until...basically nothing. Not anymore. And I wanted to fix it, and he told me that I cared too much about the things of this world.” She huffed a breath and tried to do something about the shards of glass in her chest. “What does that say about me, Rachel? I would go to bible studies, and the women would all be giggling, and talking about their husbands wanting sex even though they were tired, and acting like it was the worst thing in the world that they wanted that from them. I knew that whatever Thomas was doing wasn’t some Christian, pious purity thing. I knew my sex drive wasn’t a sin. I knew it because I was surrounded by women in the church who had happy, healthy marriages with lots of sex. And I... Look, he never wanted it all that much. What I thought was restraint prior to marriage turned out to be...disinterest. But it became nothing. Nothing. Everybody is always going on and on about how much men want sex, and how much they need it. And if he doesn’t, then what’s wrong with me?”
She’d never told anyone else this. And the words felt like a rope thrown out to Rachel. And Anna could only hope she’d grab on, that she’d let it connect them.
“I... I don’t know what to say.”
Roll. Fold. Roll. Fold.
“I understand that me standing here and complaining to you about a lack of sex is... Maybe it’s not fair. Because I get that you had to make a marriage work without it.”
“It’s different,” Rachel said, and the vehemence in her voice told Anna she’d grabbed onto that rope. “It had nothing to do with the lack of care,
or lack of interest in me. And I know that. It was medically difficult. And then...not happening. And, yeah, on a physical level I miss that. But I missed it from him. Because I missed the closeness that we had. The love that we have between us. It’s because we had intimacy that I miss it, and I don’t just miss it in a general sense.”
“Well, I wanted it. And when Michael showed up, and he started flirting with me... For the first time I thought maybe I wasn’t the problem.”
“Why didn’t you talk to any of your friends about this?”
“How?” She turned to face Rachel fully. “How do you talk to any of your friends from church about how their pastor won’t...? That I feel like he doesn’t love me. That I’m so lonely, and my entire heart feels like a dry desert. Michael showed up and it was like water refreshing me, reviving me. For the first time in so long.”
She turned away again, staring intently at the pastry dough. “I wanted to keep it to myself. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, because I knew that what I was doing was wrong. I knew if I talked to one of my friends, or to you, you’d ask me why I had to do it this way. Why I didn’t get counseling or leave him before I slept with someone else. I just wanted it so much. I decided not to care. I decided to go ahead and keep it to myself. I talked to everyone at church less and less. I talked to you less and less. Because I didn’t want anything to come up that might make me stop. That might turn me away from the path that I was on, because I knew it would end with me having sex with him. And I wanted to. I really wanted to.”
A tear slid down her cheek. “I’m so angry at Michael for abandoning me. And that’s what you get, isn’t it? I am the cautionary tale. I’m the scarlet woman from our childhood. I destroyed a marriage, even if it was mine. And I was punished for it. I’ll never be able to go down into town again. I’ll never be able to look anyone in the face. I lost my husband and I lost my lover, too. So there you go.”
They went on working for a while after that in silence. The only sounds in the kitchen the buzz of the fridge and the rolling pins.
“It’s funny,” Rachel said slowly. “I had kind of the same thought that you did. That I would marry a good man who would never leave me, and everything would be fine. And he did leave. He didn’t choose it, but he’s gone all the same.”