Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  Me oh my, how I almost laughed out loud.

  ‘Momma, I can tell this visit is tiring you out. Go to sleep. I’ll sit right here by your bed until you’re asleep.’

  ‘Oh God, no!’ she barked, eyes flying open again. ‘You are not going to stay here.’

  I shoved down the laughter comin’ on up in my throat. I knew that in minutes she was leaving to see Phantom of the Opera in Portland after dinner downtown. Momma had always, always wanted to see Phantom. As long as I could remember. She knew all the words to all the songs.

  ‘Oh sure, Momma. Sleep. I’ll sit right here. I have nothing else to do.’

  She pierced me with those bright eyes. I tried to pretend I did not see her red silk blouse below her pyjamas. Poor woman. She’d probably had to throw that nightgown over her head in such a rush when she heard I’d arrived.

  ‘You are not staying. I will not have my daughter staring at me while I sleep. Go home, Isabelle. I can manage here by myself. All alone.’

  She flopped back down on the bed, sighing, her eyes shut. She cleared her throat. She coughed.

  ‘OK, Momma.’ I paused. Oh, how I loved to torture her. ‘Are you sure, though? I would like to stay. I’ll be so quiet—’

  ‘Young lady, you leave right this minute. Right this minute. Do you hear me?’

  I sighed. ‘OK, Momma.’ I bent down and gave her a kiss and said goodbye.

  I left the room, then opened the door in the hallway to a linen closet and stepped in. I cracked the door a tiny bit. About three minutes later I saw a group of older people laughing and chatting as they trooped down the hallway. They were dressed up in suits and sparkles and stopped in front of Momma’s door and knocked.

  The door whooshed opened and Momma stepped out, resplendent in a lovely, shining, purple dress and lace shawl that I had never seen before. Sinda said she had been shopping…

  ‘Beautiful, River, beautiful!’

  ‘Bravo!’ one of the men shouted. ‘Bravo!’

  Momma smiled. It made my heart ache. I had so seldomly seen Momma smile with such abandon and joy.

  ‘Ready?’ she asked. She gave each person a sheet of paper. ‘I have the CD for Phantom in my purse and we can all sing along in the car…’

  ‘Oh, wonderful idea, River!’

  ‘Perfect! I am the Phantom…’ one man sang, baritone. ‘The phantom of the operrrra!’

  I clamped my hand over my mouth. When I was sure Momma was gone, I let my laughter roll.

  I wondered if we’d ever get her back to Trillium River.

  Several days later Henry had to go and lie down because he said he was sleepy and had a ‘tummy ache’.

  ‘When I goes like this,’ he told us, leaning a little forward, ‘it hurts. But when I goes like this,’ he leant back, ‘I feels better.’

  He was upset because he had planned to go to the animal shelter but we couldn’t let him go.

  ‘The dogs needs my love!’ he protested.

  ‘Yeah? And so do I, big guy. Come on, I’ll read to you. We’ll read your favourite books.’

  ‘OK! Dokay!’ He smiled and we went upstairs. ‘You pretty, Is.’

  I thanked him. I noticed he wasn’t moving with his usual pluck. I telephoned the shelter and told them Henry wasn’t coming in.

  ‘Well, that’s a shame,’ Paula Jay, the supervisor, said. She is an ex-prosecuting attorney, about sixty-five years old, and the angel of all animals.

  ‘We love Henry! Why, last week we had two pit bulls dropped off that had been used for fighting. They were scarred and scared and jumpy. Why do men make dogs fight? We should lock those men up in a pen and make them attack each other, horrid, horrid people. Anyhow, where was I?’

  ‘The pit bulls.’

  ‘Oh, yes. So these pit bulls’ teeth had been filed down so they could be used as bait for other pit bulls. Do you understand what I mean, dear? Other pit bulls would go and attack these two, but they couldn’t fight back because their teeth were filed down to almost nothing. Those poor, poor dogs, I would like to take a hammer to those men’s teeth! Oh! Where was I?’

  ‘The pit bulls.’

  ‘Yes, so we thought we were going to have to put them down but then Henry, your Henry, he came in and sat at the edge of their cage. Those two dogs backed right into the corner, barking and whimpering. But Henry, oh my stars, your Henry, he kept talking and singing and on the third day Henry got down on his stomach and the dogs came over and they went nose to nose. Now, when Henry comes in, glory be, those dogs jump up and down, they’re so happy to see him. In fact, we’re not going to put the dogs down now because we know we can place them in a home someday, oh my stars! Why do men make dogs fight? I wish I could sterilise all of them like we do to the dogs, only without anaesthesia, that would calm them down. Now where was I?’

  ‘Henry.’

  ‘Yes, a dear boy and we’ll miss him today. Give him my love, will you? We’ll see him soon.’

  I assured her I would and we clicked off.

  Everyone loves Henry.

  ‘Stay, Isabelle?’

  ‘Sure, Henry. I’ll always stay with you.’

  I kissed his forehead.

  I waited until he was asleep before I put another blanket over him. I watched him, his mouth open, his slanted eyes shut.

  ‘I love you, Henry, my brother,’ I whispered.

  Baking birthday cakes was another forte of the Bommarito sisters.

  For a kid who wanted a normal cake, he could skip on down the street to the local grocery store. But if he desired a cake to end all cakes, with some jazz and a little raz-a-daz, we were the bakery for them.

  We made yellow-and-orange gecko cakes and panda bears in pink aprons and ladybug cakes with liquorice antennas.

  A man with spiked hair wanted a cake in the shape of a guitar for his bandmate, and a lady needed a special cake for a girls’ weekend away so we’d made a giant cake in the shape of a wine bottle. The name of the wine was ‘Women Rule’.

  A local newspaper ran photos and we were overrun with orders.

  School got out and Cecilia came to work full time. If she hadn’t, we would have had to hire two more people.

  Bommarito’s Bakery was booming.

  Momma would undoubtedly give birth to a bleating cow when she saw the changes we’d made.

  ‘Who is that?’ Janie asked, peering out the window of the bakery. ‘I saw him yesterday and the day before.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  The booths and tables in the bakery were filled. Saturday mornings had turned into a small mob scene. All we’d done is offer free coffee with the purchase of a treat. Any treat. Momma would have a bleating cow over this, too.

  Bao was in the back making lemon bars with powdered sugar with Belinda. We had given her simple, repetitive tasks, and she did them well. Bao treated her gently, kindly, and Belinda loved him. She’d been scared at first at the thought of a job, but then had calmed down. She muttered here and there, took a nap at ten o’clock on the dot, but was actually a steady, smiley worker.

  We had a largish room above the store with two windows and a bathroom we’d given to Belinda once we got our acts together and took a second to lift our heads out of the sand and help someone besides our own sorry selves.

  We brought in a refrigerator, a comfy couch, two padded chairs, a TV, rugs, pillows, a few lights, a table and four chairs, and we shoved a twin bed in the corner with a red-and-yellow bedspread. We did not buy a stove or a microwave – sounds callous, but we were afraid that Belinda would burn the building down.

  We brought her upstairs one day after she finished icing eighty cupcakes for a company party.

  ‘Would you like to live here, Belinda?’ Janie asked.

  Belinda’s mouth dropped open. ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes, here.’

  Her face lit up. ‘It beautiful!’ Her face sagged. ‘I don’t have no money.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ I told her. ‘You have a job now. You work for us
and you can live here and we’ll give you extra money, too, for food and clothes and cat food.’

  ‘Joe can come, too?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘Joe can come.’

  Joe the mangy, ragged cat with the dirty pink bow, who Janie sneaked off to a pet boutique for a wash when Belinda was working. I reminded myself to get another bow for the cat.

  Janie and I prodded her into the shower that day. When she got out, we handed her a new pair of jeans, a T-shirt and sweatshirt, new shoes, and socks. We put her other new clothes – jeans and pants, shirts, two sweaters, socks and undies, tennis shoes, and a jacket – in a chest of drawers. We took her old clothes with us and threw them out.

  She had her shopping cart, so we helped her sort through that and threw it all out when she turned around. She never missed it. We left her holding Joe, watching a soap opera.

  Her face told me all I wanted to see: she had found peace.

  So Belinda and Bao worked and we stared at the man.

  ‘I’ve seen him before,’ Janie said. ‘The White-Haired Dove. That’s how I think of him because of that thick white hair. I saw him staring at the house a couple of times…’

  ‘Let’s go meet the White-Haired Dove,’ I said.

  But it wasn’t necessary for us to go to him.

  He was a tall, lean man, and he came to us, limping.

  It turned out that he was our history, on feet, with the gentlest of gentle smiles on his face.

  I remembered that gentle smile.

  Lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes below a grooved forehead. The scar cut through the right side of his face. Life had beaten him up and spat him back out, that was for certain. He was still a handsome man in a toughened-up, roughened-up way, and when those brown eyes filled up with tears, I knew instantly who he was.

  My heart stopped. ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Would you like a sugar cookie?’ Janie asked our dad, nervous, twitchy, as we settled into a booth. ‘We have sharks with braces on their teeth, mermaids with peace signs, and men’s boxer shorts. You know, like underwear. Red or blue. The underwear. You can choose the colour. Isabelle made jock strap cookies, too, in purple. And bras. Pink. Striped. You probably don’t want a bra cookie. Do you? Want a bra?’ She slapped both hands to her face in embarrassment. ‘A bra cookie, I mean. I didn’t make the bras. Isabelle did it. Not me.’

  Janie prattled on. I was speechless.

  I have to say that if the Columbia River had suddenly been run over by a tsunami sweeping up the hill, and had that tsunami deposited a pirate ship on our roof, I would still not have been as shocked as I was now to be sitting in a booth across from our dad.

  He had so gently asked about my gnarled-up face. (He did not refer to it as ‘gnarled-up’.) When I told him I had a bad date, I saw a muscle throb in his temple as he stared out the window. He choked out an ‘I’m sorry,’ then couldn’t speak for several minutes. I saw his hand move towards mine before he withdrew it, but the pain in his bleak expression never withdrew. ‘I’m sorry, Isabelle.’

  ‘Or, I can bring you a plate of garlic cheese bread,’ Janie prattled on. ‘Or a wedding cake? Those are good. I could grab a wedding cake for us to eat. Or a blue spider cake? We don’t serve wine. The moms sneak it in on Wednesday mornings. We don’t. Have it. No wine.’

  I tapped her on the knee.

  ‘We also have giant cupcakes,’ she rambled. ‘We’ve named them Bommarito’s Heavenly Cupcakes.’ She leapt up and grabbed eight – eight – of the cupcakes and plonked them on the table. ‘The flowers almost look alive, it’s sort of freaky, but we weren’t trying to scare anyone, it’s how they turned out, all wiggling and squiggling, like they could talk. The flowers, I mean. Not that I think flowers can talk. I don’t. They don’t talk.’

  ‘Janie.’

  Her head snapped to me. I put a hand on her arm.

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, breathless. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Please.’ Our dad held up a hand. ‘Please don’t be sorry. I can see you have a thriving business here.’ He cleared his throat. He blinked rapidly. Blinking didn’t help. Tears dribbled out of his eyes.

  ‘He’s crying,’ Janie murmured. ‘Those are tears.’

  I raised my eyebrows when she stuck her finger through a non-talking flowery cupcake. She stared at her finger, seemingly surprised at the action it had taken, then raised hurt, green eyes to our dad. ‘Where were you, Dad?’ she said, her voice breaking into little glass shards. ‘Why did you leave us? Why didn’t you come back?’

  The silence was so noisy, I could almost feel the nerves in my head cracking.

  Janie reached for my hand under the table and pulsed it in sets of four. ‘Where were you?’ The icing squished between us.

  Yes, Dad, where were you? Where were you when we fell apart? When things collapsed for our family and then got worse?

  ‘I have…’ He started, cleared his throat, started again. ‘I have thought for years, forever…about what I would tell you girls if I ever saw you again. How I would explain my unforgivable absence.’ He tipped his chin up. ‘I have never veered from my first answer to myself: I would tell you the truth.’

  ‘Truth is good,’ I told him. ‘We deserve it.’

  ‘So where were you?’ Janie asked. She tapped the table, then reached for the sugar packets. I knew she would sort them into groups of four.

  ‘I was in jail for fifteen years.’

  The words hung between us, like an exploding emotional grenade. Fiery, smoky, heavy, dangerous.

  ‘J…’ Janie couldn’t get the word out. She sorted quicker. ‘Jail?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, jail.’

  Jail? Jail! ‘What…what did you do?’ I asked, not sure I wanted to hear this any more than I wanted to hear the details about a human gutting.

  ‘You committed a crime?’ Janie asked.

  I breathed then. Thank God for Janie and her inane questions. ‘No. He made the cotton candy at the carnival too pink.’

  ‘Well…uh…um…um…um! Um! I thought he would say that he was innocent!’

  Janie actually hates crime. It fascinates her to write about it, but when she reads about people committing crimes and innocent people getting hurt, she gets upset. We have to be careful around her. Crime pays, for Janie, but only in her books. The rest of the time she prefers to believe the world outside is a nice, fuzzy, yellowish-pink place filled with Jane Austen and Little Women that she doesn’t have to interact with too much and our childhood was simply a nightmare.

  ‘I wasn’t innocent.’

  We both sagged at the same time against the booth, my stomach slipping down my insides and heading south for my feet.

  ‘I was guilty. I accepted it from the start,’ he stopped. ‘I will never get over what I did. Not a day goes by that I don’t regret it a hundred times.’

  ‘What did you…’ Janie started in on a napkin, ripping each one into four pieces, then reached for another one.

  ‘What did I do?’ His gaze did not waver. ‘I killed a man.’

  ‘You kill—’ Janie stuttered, then ripped another napkin.

  My stomach kept sliding. I wanted to get on that pirate ship and take off.

  Our dad was a killer. ‘Hello, this is my dad. He’s a murderer.’

  ‘I did. I had left you all about three years before and was having…’ He stopped, his voice barely above a whisper. ‘I was having a bad time of it.’

  He was having a bad time? Bits of my childhood shot to my mind, quite unpleasantly. ‘You were having a bad time so you killed someone? Should I feel sorry for you?’

  The gentleness in that familiar face was almost my undoing. How could he have taken that gentleness from us? I remembered my dad laughing. I remembered how he’d taught us to make omelettes and how we’d watch Saturday morning cartoons and lay all over him. I remembered how we rode on wagons to get pumpkins for Halloween.

  And then, in a flash, he was gone.
/>   We were children. Our entire world crashed.

  ‘You should not feel sorry for me, Isabelle. I’m not asking for that.’ His voice was warm and humble and low.

  ‘Do you know—’ I stopped because the rush of emotion about drowned me and I decided to put the murdering my dad did aside for a second. ‘Do you know what happened to us after you left? Do you have any idea?’

  Janie patted my arm. Pat pat, pat pat. Four times. Pat pat, pat pat.

  He bent his head for a second, then lifted it back up. Through my mist of anger and anguish, I had the impression he was a man who was willing to take it on the chin. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. The hurt I caused you has haunted me daily. Nightly. Always.’

  ‘And that excuses it?’ The mist bubbled in me, bubbled in the kid I used to be, lonely and lost and thrust headfirst into a scary, relentlessly cold world.

  ‘No.’ Firm, resolute tone. ‘What I did is inexcusable.’

  ‘We lost the house. The sheriff actually came and kicked us out. It was devastating.’ I remembered a neighbour helping Momma out. She was bent over with grief, clutching her wedding album and her wedding veil. We had sold anything of even remote value, so there wasn’t much to pack.

  ‘We went through homelessness in different states.’ There. I’d said it. We’d never said it when we were kids. That word was not allowed. Janie had said it once and Momma had slapped her. ‘We’re not homeless,’ Momma had seethed. ‘We’re not losers. We’re not white trash. We are temporarily spending the night in our car until I can figure out what to do, but we are not homeless. Do you have that?’

  I could tell he was dumbfounded, then horrified.

  ‘We went through times when we were starving, especially during the summer when the school wasn’t providing us with free meals.’

  He paled further.

  ‘Henry had health problems, but you knew that when you left, didn’t you?’ I could feel my anger building.

  ‘Yes. I knew that Henry…there was almost always something wrong… I knew that.’

  ‘But you left anyhow. You left. One time Momma had bronchitis for a year because we couldn’t afford the medication. Cecilia kept getting rashes we couldn’t treat. Janie had migraines and the over-the-counter medication didn’t work.’