Secret Sisters

by Tristi Pinkston

  Secret Sisters

  by Tristi Pinkston

  This is a work of fiction, and all the views herein are the sole responsibility of the author. Likewise, characters, places, or incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or presented fictitiously and quite hysterically, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is entirely coincidental and would be somewhat creepy.

  Note: This book was originally written before the visiting teaching program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was changed to the ministering program. This reprint does not reflect that change.

  Cover Art by Erin Dameron-Hill

  ISBN: 978-1484091111

  For my husband, Matt—

  Thank you for all your support and

  for your dedication to me.

  I love you.

  The persons depicted in this book

  are professional fictional characters.

  Do not try this at home.

  Table of Contents:

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Ida Mae Babbitt didn’t know what cookie to serve with bad news. She pulled out a dish and arranged three different varieties on it, including chocolate chip because that was always a necessity, then straightened the doily on the back of her sofa. Not a cobweb, not a speck of dust, not one thing out of place—everything was perfect, as it always was. Chaos was simply not allowed in Ida Mae’s immaculate world.

  She looked at the clock. It was nine on the dot, and still, the members of her presidency hadn’t arrived. She took a deep breath, reminding herself of her New Year’s Resolution to stop being critical. Not everyone had her internal clock or built-in aversion to being late. When she heard the footsteps on her porch a few minutes later, she pasted a smile on her face. It wouldn’t do any good to start off the meeting with a sour attitude.

  The ladies filed in and sat down, a carbon copy of the seats they had occupied at last week’s presidency meeting. Arlette Morgan, the first counselor, sat in the rocking chair. Tansy Smith, the second counselor, sat on one end of the sofa, while Hannah Eyre, the secretary, took the other end. Hannah was by far the youngest of the bunch at twenty-eight—the remaining women were a little closer to Ida Mae’s age. Experience, she always said, beats out energy any day, but she was grateful for Hannah’s vitality. Most days, Ida Mae felt like she was living the old saying—her get-up-and-go got up and left.

  “Thank you for coming,” Ida Mae greeted after Tansy’s quick, yet sincere, opening prayer. “We’ve got quite a bit to discuss today. Before we get into all the regular business, I think there’s something you should know.” She took off her reading glasses, which she really didn’t need, and made the pretense of polishing them, although what she wanted was to stall for time. She hated this part of her job—imparting bad news, trying to find ways to help and not really knowing how. It wasn’t always about new babies or new move-ins.

  “Bishop Sylvester told me, in confidence, that his doctor has recommended he slow things down a bit. He’s been having problems with his blood pressure, and if he doesn’t take off some stress, the doctor is afraid he may have a stroke.”

  Tansy gasped. “They won’t release him, will they? We haven’t had such a good bishop since . . . well, I can’t remember when.”

  Ida Mae shook her head. “I certainly hope not, Tansy. I agree with you—he may be a young thing, but he’s got a head on his shoulders.” She stopped to calculate the bishop’s age. He was forty-five. From where she was sitting, that was definitely young.

  “There’s more,” she continued. “His wife, as you know, is in a family way. They thought they were having twins, but they were told last week that she’s actually going to have triplets.”

  “Mercy!” Tansy sat forward. “Triplets? On top of the four they already have? No wonder the poor man is having blood pressure problems.”

  “I think it’s more likely that Sister Sylvester has blood pressure problems,” Arlette said. “He’s hardly ever home. She’s the one dealing with the four little ones, plus the pregnancy.”

  Ida Mae secretly agreed, but remembering her pledge, she spoke up. “Now, we don’t know what goes on in their home, and it’s not our place to judge. Our place is to support the bishop in any way we can. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I think we should try to take care of as much ward business as we can without troubling him.” She lifted a hand slightly against the objection she knew Arlette was about to raise. “Now, I’m not saying we’re going to keep anything important from him. I just think if something comes up and we can handle it ourselves, well, we ought to.”

  Tansy nodded. Hannah, not surprisingly, was silent. She didn’t say much at these meetings, but she sure got the job done once she knew what it was. Arlette’s lips were pressed together so tightly, her wrinkles looked like those stitches they put around scarecrows’ mouths.

  “Yes, Arlette?” Ida Mae asked, figuring they might as well get it out in the open, whatever it was.

  “I just don’t like the idea of going behind the bishop’s back,” Arlette said as she reached into her bag and pulled out her knitting. “It feels sneaky.”

  Ida Mae bit back an exasperated sigh. “We’re not going behind his back, Arlette. Let me ask you a question. You know how the Raleigh family has been down with the flu all week? Well, would it do any harm for one of us to make up a batch of soup and deliver it without telling the bishop we did it?”

  “I guess not,” Arlette said, concentrating on setting the heel of the sock she was working on, some monstrosity in chartreuse. Arlette did lovely work, but the colors she chose . . . New Year’s Resolution. Right. Arlette did lovely work. Ida Mae left it at that.

  “Well, that’s all I’m saying.” Ida Mae tried to make her tone soothing. “We can administrate in our capacity without having to alarm him over every sniffle in the ward. And if something big comes up, of course we’ll let him know.”

  “I suppose you’re right. You are the president, after all, and this is your stewardship.” Arlette’s tone sounded conciliatory, but Ida Mae waited for the other shoe to drop. And it did. “If this gets out of control, I know you’ll handle it.”

  Ida Mae nodded. Leave it to Arlette to remind her of the trouble she’d be in if this didn’t work. But it would work—and it wasn’t like anything bad was going to happen. She pushed back the little voice that said, “But what if it does?” If it did . . . well, she wouldn’t let it. That was all.

  The remainder of the meeting was spent discussing the upcoming service project and visiting teaching. “I’ve asked Sister Bailey to join us at our next meeting,” Ida Mae said. “She’s been telling me of some holes in our visiting teaching assignments, and I thought if we all brainstormed, we could come up with a way to solve the problem.”

  “Next Tuesday at nine?” Hannah asked. Bless her—the meetings were every Tuesday at nine, but she never failed to ask and write it down.

  “Yes, Hannah. Tuesday at nine.”

&n
bsp; The ladies were sent home after a mug of hot chocolate and two cookies apiece. The weather had been mild, but that morning, Mother Nature had realized it was still January and got back to work. Ida Mae wouldn’t dream of sending anyone out into the cold without a warm stomach.

  Rinsing out the last of the mugs, she let out the sigh she’d been holding in for the last hour. She wasn’t given to pity parties, but every so often, she had to wonder why she had been chosen for this calling. It was said in their small Utah town of Omni that if anything needed to be done, Ida Mae Babbitt was the one to ask. They even said she organized her first bake sale at the tender age of three. She was sure that part wasn’t true, but she did have a knack for running things.

  She imagined it had something to do with the fact that her mother had died in childbirth with her younger sister Lola, and Ida Mae was put in charge of the household. She knew how to plan something, get it done, and clean up afterward, but she excelled in doing it alone. She didn’t know how to delegate. She didn’t know how to trust someone else to follow through on their assignment, and how to keep from becoming irritated when they didn’t do it the way she would have. The Relief Society was about working together—it wasn’t a one-woman show. She didn’t know if she could learn to let go enough to be the kind of leader these women needed.

  Chapter Two

  “Aunt Ida Mae?” Ren stuck his head through the back door. “Oh, good. You’re home.”

  “Where else would I be?” she asked. “You know I have meetings on Tuesday mornings. It would have to be a real emergency to drag me away.”

  “Well, sometimes things come up unexpectedly. Because, you know, they’re emergencies.”

  Ida Mae chose to ignore his flippant remark and concentrated instead on putting the mugs into the cupboard. Ren was her only nephew, the son of her sister Lola. A bit of a free spirit, he sported an earring in his left ear—just a small one, but an earring nonetheless—and he hadn’t decided what to be when he grew up. He didn’t consider twenty-five to be grown up yet, obviously. He even had a small ponytail on the back of his head.

  “So, I’ve dropped out of college,” Ren said, taking a seat at the counter. He reached out and plucked a banana from the fruit bowl.

  “Again?”

  “No need to sound like I do it every day. This is only the third time.”

  “Three times is a bit more than usual, don’t you think?” She handed him a napkin. “Don’t people generally enroll and then, at some point down the road, graduate?”

  “That’s for people who want to live in the box.” Ren rose and lobbed his banana peel into the garbage. “Three points.”

  “Two. Three would have been farther back, like, from the living room.”

  “Oh.” He resumed his seat and rolled his napkin into a ball. “Listen, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I tried to stick with it this time—I really did. But I was bored out of my mind. Why does society expect people to have college degrees? Why can’t I just use what I know and get on with my life?”

  Coming from anyone else, this would have sounded like a whiny, cheap excuse for avoiding an education. From Ren, though, it made perfect sense. The boy had been building his own mechanical gizmos since he could sit up and had any number of inventions lining the shelves in his room. He could fix anything. He understood everything. From politics to lawnmowers to quantum physics, you could ask him anything and get an answer. It might not make sense to the common person, but it would be an answer nonetheless.

  Ida Mae reached for the tea kettle, searching for something to do with her hands while she thought about Ren’s question. He sat quietly, flicking his napkin ball back and forth on the counter.

  “It all depends on what you want to do with your life,” she said at last, watching the flame on the gas stove light with a spurt-spurt-spurt. “Do you want to work for a big corporation, or start one of your own? If you’re the boss, it won’t matter if you have a degree. Going to work for someone else might be another story.”

  “You know what I really want? I want to market my inventions. I’ve got a ton of ’em, and they’re really useful, too. I could get patents, and then sell the rights, and make my living that way.”

  “Why don’t you try it?” Ida Mae pulled the hot chocolate tin from the cupboard. “You’ve still got the money from your mother’s life insurance policy, don’t you?”

  “I haven’t used a dime of it,” Ren said. “It felt weird, spending money that was only mine because my mother died.”

  “I know how you feel.” Lola had also left a small bequest to Ida Mae, and it sat in the bank collecting interest. Lola’s death had been sudden and shocking, an aneurism that burst the day after she turned fifty. She’d been too young to die, and Ren had been too young to understand. Ida Mae and her now-deceased husband took Ren to live with them while he finished high school and dealt with his grief. She loved that boy like her own, and probably coddled him a good deal too much.

  “What would it take to start?” she asked. “How do you get a patent, and how do you find someone interested in buying it?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. I need to get on the Internet and see what I can find. Mind if I use yours? My roommate is studying for a big test, and I told him I’d scram so it would be nice and quiet.”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  Ida Mae heard the sound of furious typing a few minutes later and allowed herself a smile. She would not be one bit surprised if the next Bill Gates himself was sitting in her spare bedroom, using her Dell. Ren could do anything he set his mind to. He just needed to set his mind to it longer than the fifteen minutes it took to learn more about it.

  She pulled out the vacuum and was happily Hoovering when Ren emerged from the guest room, his hair somewhat pulled loose from his ponytail. “I found what I need to get started,” he said when she turned the vacuum off and could hear him. “But listen, Aunt Ida Mae, there’s another reason I’m here.”

  “What’s that?”

  He wore his “I-don’t-want-to-tell-you-this” look, and she mentally braced herself.

  “Well, since I’m not a student at the college anymore, and my apartment was in student housing, they want me to leave.” He shifted from one foot to the other. “Any chance I could have my old room back for a while?”

  Her heart gave a leap, an unaccustomed thing for it to do. She had missed that boy, no doubt about it. “Of course you can. I haven’t done a thing with it. You can change that, though—the Spiderman bedspread is probably too young for you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb and crossing his arms. “I haven’t outgrown a lot of things I should have by now. But are you sure I won’t be putting you out? I’ll contribute to groceries and pay rent. I’m not going to freeload.”

  “You could never put me out, Ren,” she protested. “Truth be told, it will do me good to have you around. It’s been a little too lonely lately.”

  Something in her tone of voice must have betrayed her. Ren’s eyebrows went up a notch. “Is everything okay, Aunt Ida Mae? You aren’t going all melancholy on me, are you?”

  “No, of course not. I don’t have time for such nonsense.” She began winding the cord on the vacuum. “It’ll be good to have you back, that’s all.”

  Ren crossed the room in four strides and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. “Thanks, Auntie. I really appreciate this.”

  “Are you sure you want to live clear out here, though? The closest big town is forty miles away.”

  “You’ve got a Walmart and a McDonald’s, and that’s good enough for me,” he said. “I may head in to Salt Lake or Provo every so often to get parts, but I’m ready for some more country living.”

  “Have you got your things with you?”

  “Just my overnight bag. I’ve still got another three days and figured I could clear out later.”

  “Bring your bag in and get settled, then. I’ll start us a good old country lunch.”

  Ren gr
abbed his coat and went outside while Ida Mae rummaged through the fridge for the bottle of mayonnaise that had somehow gotten shoved clear to the back. She couldn’t help the smile that played around her lips. Ren was a little uncouth at times, and definitely unconventional. But she’d be “et for a tater” if she didn’t love him like her own son.

  Chapter Three

  Jeannie Bailey accepted the napkin Ida Mae offered and wiped her plum-tinted lips. “Marvelous cookie, Ida Mae. I really shouldn’t have, but I’m glad I did.”

  Ida Mae waved her hand. “It’s nothing. Now, you were saying . . . ?”

  “Oh, that’s right. About visiting teaching.” She pulled out her notebook. “We had sixty percent visiting teaching last month, which is up from November by eight percent. But we’re still far from one hundred, and that’s a fact.”

  Ida Mae nodded. She’d spoken at length to the sisters in Relief Society about the importance of keeping in touch with their assigned sisters, but there had been a lot of sickness over the winter. It was a shame so many sisters went unvisited.

  “I do have one concern to mention, Ida Mae,” Jeannie said. She leaned forward a little, the couch beneath her creaking a sound of doom. “Martha Anderson told me that when she went to visit the Dunn family this morning, she stepped into the kitchen to get a glass of water and noticed there wasn’t any food in the cupboards. You know those glass cupboards they have? She could see the salt and pepper shakers, but nothing else.”

  Ida Mae frowned. True, they might have had food in the refrigerator, but experience had taught her that if there wasn’t food in the cupboard, there often wasn’t food in the house.

  “Brother Dunn has been out of work for how long now?” she asked.

  “Four months,” Hannah said, making one of her rare verbal contributions to the meeting.

  “That’s a long time. And they’ve never asked for help,” Ida Mae mused. “I think it’s time we did some investigating. I’ll go over this afternoon.”