Blood Sisters

by Jo Barney

  She doesn’t need an answer. I swallow a little wine, am able to ask my own question. “And now, Patsy, do you still want to control your death?”

  Her eyes close. “No. Death is now in control. Hospice helps with the pain, you help with your friendship and Mom, who is the mother I remember from my childhood, who straightens my sheets, and feeds me pudding with a steady spoon.”

  Sarah calls, promises dinner, but is caught in court until then. I leave to pick up Izzy from her day care. When we return, I hear a male voice. Ray. I see suitcases in the hall. He has graduated from Serenity Lane, and he is home, in time. I will not interrupt them. Izzy and I go for a walk and an ice cream cone.

  Ray opens the door as we walk up the porch steps an hour later. “Hello, Eleanor.” He remembers my name; he and Patsy have been talking. He grins at me, and he picks up his daughter and swings her up to his shoulder. Her eyes widen. She doesn’t know this person.

  “It’s your papa, Izzy,” I say.

  “Pa?” She brings her nose close to his neck, brushes against his whiskers. She pulls back, then tries it again. Ray returns her nuzzle.

  “Izzy,” he says.

  He plays with her until the visiting nurse arrives to give Patsy a bath. We linger in the bedroom as the woman prepares a pan of warm water. “A spit bath,” Patsy says.

  Ray corrects her. “My grandmother had a water pump in the backyard. Every drop counted, she said. She warmed the family’s weekly communal bathwater on the wood range. She called them PPPs. Pits, piss, poop. She had a feisty mind.”

  “Funnier than spit,” Patsy murmurs. “I would have liked her.” I carry Izzy to the living room, and as I give her a newspaper to tear up, her second-favorite thing after blocks, I hear the sweet sounds of laughter from the next room.

  When Sarah arrives with Chinese takeout cartons, I know it’s time for me to go to Hank, to return to my own life. It might be time to tell him about a faulty plastic bag plan.

  47

  Hank is becoming more comfortable in Amy’s office and in her client chair, leather with wide arms and a soft back. She asks him, as she always does, how things are going. This time he has something new to tell her, to ask her about.

  “Eleanor tried to cover up a blackmail attempt by lying about someone she had known years ago. However, the true story was that she had been in contact with a man she met while I was in Korea. In fact, she had been intimate with him; the affair ended when I came home. She never spoke of him, and she told me a few weeks after I got back that she was pregnant. I was going to be a father. The problem was that my injuries had made me sterile. I hadn’t told her because I could hardly believe it myself.”

  “You each had a secret, then. When did the secrets reveal themselves?”

  “Not until the man she had known twenty years ago came back for money. He would keep this a secret for a monthly payment. She agreed at first. She said she didn’t want to upset Jim or me with this old news. We had gotten this far; perhaps we could continue on.”

  “So she paid him?”

  “Yes. Once. Then he apparently came around demanding more. She said no, that she could live with the truth, whatever it might bring, but not with a blackmailer.”

  “You know this because?”

  “I was in the yard when he came the last time. I heard them talking. I realized what she had been living with, and me, too. Our secrets had made our lives miserable. Even though at the beginning I wanted a child and thought I was ready for a stranger’s son, I couldn’t accept Jim and his shortcomings. For years Eleanor spent much of her energy defending her son against me and my rejection of him and his weaknesses.”

  “So you were out in the backyard and…”

  “Our neighbor’s mother, a police officer, entered the house and took out her gun and arrested him. He had broken his parole restrictions, including registering as a sex offender. She took him to jail and, we heard later, to the prison he had left a few months before.”

  Amy sighs. “How handy to have a policewoman nearby.”

  “Her daughter called after she noticed someone in our backyard. She didn’t know that the someone was me, but when she mentioned the name Eleanor had given her, she caught the attention of the sergeant working at the desk. The car arrived and Sarah and her partner got out, went around the side of the house. I heard, ‘This one’s mine,’ as Sarah entered the back door. I was the other officer’s capture. But not someone whose picture was pinned on a bulletin board.”

  “When it was all over, her secret out in the open, then what?”

  “Then I knew I had to come clean, too. If I wanted to save my marriage, make amends for the years I’d been an asshole.”

  “I’m assuming you did this. And Eleanor…?”

  “She said if we wanted to, we might begin again. Is it possible to forgive and forget?”

  “Maybe not to forget. You’ve both learned something about your marriage, but you won’t forget the past. Your job is to forgive yourself first, then each other when you need to.”

  “That’s what Eleanor said. We are working on it. I want to keep talking with you. Can I bring Eleanor along, if she wants to come?”

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  No, Hank thinks as he drives home, I’ll never forget. That memory is part of me now.

  “It’s time for me to step up to my job as a dad,” he says to himself as he pulls into his driveway.

  Pot roast. That’s the satisfying scent he breathes in as he opens the front door. Eleanor has her hands in a salad and she laughs an apology as she holds them up in front of her bowl. “Consider these hands as your greeting. I won’t touch you just yet.”

  “I don’t need your hands to give you this.” Hank kisses her forehead. When had he last kissed her like that, without thinking?

  “Hey! Must have been a good session with Amy.” She wipes her fingers on a towel. “Let’s try that again, this time with hands.”

  Hank wraps his arms around her, his kiss landing on her lips this time, and he realizes it has been a long time since he has been ready for what might come next.

  “Amy is a miracle worker,” he murmurs.

  “The roast still has an hour to go.” She leads him to the bedroom, unbuckles him, drops her apron and the jeans under it. “Just enough time for us.”

  Over dinner, he asks Eleanor to go to counseling with him. “We need to do what you suggested, start over.”

  “I think we’ve already started,” Eleanor answers, “but yes, I want to talk with Amy. I have some things to go over. With her, with you.”

  48

  We are gathered at her bed, Izzy in my arms, the others standing or sitting, silent guardians of the last moments of Patsy’s life, watching as she passes into a place we cannot go yet. Her breath comes noisily, in harsh snorts and sighs. She doesn’t know we are near as she moves away from us. Later, we’ll praise her life, her goodness, her involvement in our lives, but for now we wait and mourn.

  The hospice nurse moves quietly, brushing Patsy’s dry lips with a small wet sponge, adjusting her head against her pillow, rubbing her hands. Ray touches his lips to her cheek and steps aside as Sarah holds her hand for a long moment, then retreats to the back of the room and weeps. Hank’s fingers are warm on my shoulder. I place Izzy on the bed, next to her mother, and the little girl seems puzzled. Her mother doesn’t reach out to her as she used to. “Ma?” she says. “Ma?”

  Patsy’s lips open. Her words, “I love you,” spread like a blessing over all of us. She breathes, and then the breaths stop. I pick up the child who will forever be in my life and a reminder of the best friend I have ever had. “She will always love you, Izzy.” Izzy reaches to her father, and he gathers her in his arms. She nuzzles into his neck, touches the wetness she finds there. “Pa?”

  “It’s okay, Izzy. I’m here.”

  49

  Three years later, a six-year-old girl, a first-grader in her school, opens the gate in the hedge. It’s a bit of a
chore because we haven’t gotten around to clipping the bushes lately. Ray is working hard and long at his job; Sarah and I are volunteering at the school, me tutoring, Sarah running the ditto machine for the busy teachers; and the both of us supporting Ray and his sitter as we move Izzy through her days. And, of course, there’s Jack, a happy mixture of dachshund and spaniel, who has joined their household, and who now barges through the open gate and sits in front of me, waiting for treats.

  “Good dog,” Izzy says as she reaches in her pocket and takes out a biscuit. Jack smiles, and Izzy giggles.

  Hank has been watching both the struggle with the gate and the waving branches above it. “We have to do something before it starts raining again.” He returns with the clippers and the saw, both dusty after several years of hanging in the garage. “Got the black bags, too,” he adds. “It’s Saturday. Yard day. Call Ray and Sarah. I’m going to need some help to get this monster back in shape.” Hank gets a little bossy when he gets revved up. I like him revved up.

  I make the calls. Ray says he’ll be there in a half hour. “Can I bring my friend? And is Izzy there? We’ve sort of lost her for a bit.” Jim and Janey will bring Cokes and their group’s clippers. Sarah says she’ll come shortly, but she’ll be the bagger. She’s not up to ladders or saws, only cleanups. “And wait till you hear the news,” she says. “I am happy and worried and a little sad, all at the same time.”

  Hank climbs the ladder a few times and then relinquishes the electric saw to Jim, who knows how to run the tool. “I do this at our house,” he says.

  “When he’s not at school, which is most of the time lately,” Janey adds.

  Jim is learning to be a computer technician; he has a special talent for focusing on the intricate mechanics of both the machines and programs, according to his instructor at the community college. He beams when he talks of his classes and what they will lead to. And also when he talks of Janey. They seem very close. Not my business.

  Sarah arrives, and when she sees the activity in our backyards, she whispers, “Later.”

  A few hours later, the hedge is trimmed and neat. We distribute the black bags between Ray’s garbage man and ours. Then we relax on the back deck, sit in the old deckchairs, and admire our efforts, Cokes in hand, catching up on everyone’s news.

  “What?” I mouth to Sarah, who is fanning herself with her purse.

  “Wait. I think we’ll be hearing all about it in a moment.”

  Ray and his friend, Reba, a woman with dark glowing skin and wonderfully large green eyes, lounge on an afghan on the lawn in front of us. They whisper, seem about to burst. Then they do. “We have an announcement,” Ray calls through the chatter and stands. We watch as he takes Reba’s hand and brings her to his side. “We’re getting married next month.” He smiles when Izzy climbs off Sarah’s knees and runs to them, hugs Reba’s knees. “Reb! You here too.” Jack the dog settles against Izzy’s legs and smiles.

  We get off our chairs, cheer, hug, but not without mixed feelings.

  “We sure made a lot of holes in that hedge, didn’t we?” Hank says, scratching his chin like a wise man.

  Sarah answers, “It’ll grow back. You can’t kill a laurel hedge.”

  THE END

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my first readers, Nancy Hogarth and Peggy Bird, who encouraged me to continue to revive my memories and make a story out of them, and to Jessica Gadsden who told me, just at the right moment, “We love your writing, Jo. Send it to us.”

  About the Author

  After graduating from Willamette University, Jo spent most of the next thirty years teaching, counseling, mothering, wifing, and of course, writing.

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  Her first efforts appeared in small literary magazines and professional publications. Since retirement, she has concentrated on longer fiction and screen plays. Her work has always reflected her observations of women’s lives and the people who inhabit them: the children, husbands, parents, friends, and the strangers who happen by and change everything.

  Also by Jo Barney

  Never Too Late

  Decades ago, a shotgun wedding locked Edith into a life with a husband she’s not sure she ever loved. Now, at a ‘certain age,’ she feels like a ghost in her own life, wondering where all this came from: the scornful husband, the mercenary brood of grandchildren, the well-meaning but controlling daughter-in-law. Then one Christmas morning Edith wakes to find her husband dead, and the role she played for so long crumbling.

  Soon questions arise about her husband’s death, and papers discovered in his pockets send Edith unraveling secrets of the man she thought she knew. Edith’s son Brian is the focus of her life, but he may not be as perfect as she thought. Revelations that he might be cheating shock her. As Edith investigates the mysteries of her family, she may just find who she truly is.

  Also by Jo Barney

  Her Last Words

  Every summer four old friends flock together at Madge’s seaside house to swap stories and sip wine. Throughout divorces, children, and new marriages, only the beach house and the sisterhood that comes with it, hold constant. This

  time, though, something is different

  Madge, the writer friend who brought them all together, is acting strange. She asks them for a risky, unthinkable favor. And then one morning, she disappears.

  In Madge’s absence, her friends discover the unfinished manuscript to what will be her final novel. It is the story of forty years of their lives, a story that may reshape their futures.

  Also by Jo Barney

  The Runaway

  Ellie is older, gruff and independent. She doesn’t expect much from life; it’s broken enough promises to her.

  The only ugliness in the world Ellie can truly clean up is the graffiti marring mailboxes in her neighborhood, and she centers her days around this as one of the few acts that gives her a little peace.

  When a fifteen-year-old Goth girl appears offering to help, Ellie is surprised—and suspicious. Sarah has been shunted from house to house in the foster care system. Now she’s run away from a forest camp managed by a tyrannical, enigmatic man.... But escape is not that easy, and soon Sarah finds her life in danger. Can Sarah and Ellie put aside their differences to keep truly horrific danger at bay?

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