The Space Between Sisters

by Mary McNear

  She waited for the disappointment to register with him, but he only shrugged. “I know that.”

  “And you’re . . . okay with it?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I mean, I’m not going to throw myself off this roof or anything,” he added, feinting a movement towards the lake.

  She laughed. “You’d only get wet if you did.”

  “I’m still not going to do it,” he said, smiling.

  He was taking it well, she thought, with relief. But still, it couldn’t be easy on his ego. “It’s nothing personal, really,” she said. “It has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with Poppy. She . . .” Win struggled here. “She’s not a bad person . . .”

  “I never thought that she was. Honestly, when I used to see her at the coffeehouse, I used to feel sorry for her.”

  “You did?” Win said, looking at him sharply.

  He nodded.

  “That’s a first,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, of all the feelings she’s inspired in people, I don’t think pity has ever been one of them.”

  “Pity’s too strong a word. It’s more like . . .” Everett paused. “It’s more like I’ve seen the downside, for her, of the way she looks. It gets her a lot of attention, yes. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the kind of attention she wants, do you?”

  Win hesitated. Everett was right, in a way. Poppy could feel self-conscious about attracting attention, and she could get tired, too, of having to deflect that attention. At the same time, though, Win had never felt sorry for her because of this. She’d assumed it just came with the territory. It was an inconvenience, yes, but an inconvenience that Win, when she was younger, would gladly have tolerated if she could have been as beautiful as Poppy.

  Now, the breeze that had been blowing off the lake all day strengthened, sending little waves scudding over the dark water and breaking against the sandy shore. Win shivered, a little, though the wind was keeping the mosquitos away, and its coolness felt good on her sunburned skin.

  “Do you want to go inside?” Everett asked.

  “Not yet,” Win said, glad that the subject of Poppy seemed to be closed for now. “Let’s stay here a little longer.”

  He pointed at the opposite shore, where there were flashes of light and muted crackling sounds. “I guess you’re going to see some fireworks after all,” he said, as a small-scale rocket shot up above the tree line, leaving a trail of sparks behind it.

  “It looks like it,” Win agreed, over a distant volley of firecrackers.

  “You don’t mind?” Everett asked.

  She looked at him quizzically.

  “When your sister texted me back today,” he explained, “she said you were staying home tonight because you hate fireworks.”

  “Oh, no. Not these do-it-yourself ones. I don’t mind them. And I love sparklers,” she added. “But the professional fireworks display they have at the fairgrounds every year? Yeah, I straight up hate that. I haven’t been to it in years.”

  “Is it the noise?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s . . . it’s complicated,” she said.

  “In what way?”

  “In every way.” She chuckled. But then she turned serious. “When I was kid, we used to come up here for the Fourth of July. I mean, my parents used to come up here. Poppy and I were already up here. We spent the whole summer with my grandparents, who were both, just . . . salt of the earth kind of people. I still think, to this day, that whatever is good in my life and Poppy’s life, we have them to thank for it. Anyway, my grandparents took the Fourth of July very seriously. If they could have wrapped this entire cabin in red-white-and-blue bunting, they would have. So when my parents would come for the holiday it was understood they would both be on their best behavior. Whatever else my grandparents tolerated from them for the rest of the year, there was an unspoken understanding that they wouldn’t tolerate any of it over the Fourth. This meant my dad was sober, or reasonably sober, anyway, and my mom was . . . well, my mom was still my mom, but she tried, at least, to put a good face on their marriage, even if it was only for a couple of days.

  “The night of the Fourth,” she continued, “We’d go to the fairgrounds, and my grandfather would spread blankets out on the grass, and my grandmother would unpack this amazing picnic, and my dad would light sparkers for Poppy and me, and . . . and there we were, the six of us, like any ordinary family, any happy family. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, the fireworks would start. For the first five minutes, I’d enjoy them, I’d think how wonderful they were, how wonderful we were, and then I’d start thinking about them ending, and all of us going back to our real lives. You know, with my dad drinking, and disappearing for weeks at a time, and fighting with my mom when he came home, and my mom . . . well, again, just being my mom: flighty, self-absorbed, and generally unreliable. And watching those fireworks, I started to get anxious, very anxious. I wanted them to last longer, so we could all stay the way we were right then, but that’s the problem with fireworks, they last, what, fifteen or twenty minutes? They never last long enough. And that’s why I stopped going to see them. As soon as they start, I think ‘Oh, they’re so pretty,’ and ‘This is so much fun.’ And then, it never fails, a few minutes later I start getting anxious about them ending. In the end, it just isn’t worth it.”

  She looked down at the dark water and felt her face get warm, but not from her sunburn. What was it about Everett that made her reveal so much about herself, and her life, when she knew so little about him? “Okay,” she said, looking up again. “It’s your turn. Tell me something about you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . why do you look tired all the time?”

  “Oh. You mean, why are my eyes like this?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. They just came that way. Ever since I can remember, people have been asking me if I’m tired. Or worse. In high school . . . well, you can imagine what my teachers thought. My locker was always being subjected to ‘random’ drug searches.”

  “But . . . it didn’t have drugs in it, did it?” Win asked, not sure why it was suddenly so important to her that it didn’t.

  “No.” He smiled. “I think the worst they ever found was a moldy ham sandwich.”

  “Well, that’s good. At the high school in Minneapolis I was a student teacher at, they used to bring drug-sniffing dogs in, but that doesn’t happen here, not at the K–8, anyway.”

  “That must have been a big change, to go from teaching in a city to a small town.”

  “It was. It is. I didn’t plan it, though. I didn’t plan on moving up here, either, at least not year-round. My dad, of all people, was the one who gave me the idea for it.” And she told Everett another story, a story that began the day of Kyle’s memorial service. She hadn’t seen her father at the first part of the service—the part that took place in the church. He’d probably sat in the back. He’d never been comfortable with organized religion. But she’d seen him afterwards, at a reception friends of hers had hosted at their house, and she’d been both touched and surprised by his appearance. He was clean-shaven, and he’d bought (or maybe borrowed) a jacket and a tie. What was more, he wasn’t drinking anything stronger than coffee. As things were winding down that afternoon, and the other guests were leaving, he’d asked Win if he could speak to her alone.

  They’d gone into another room, and he’d taken an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to her. She hadn’t wanted to read it then, but he’d insisted that she at least look at it, and when she did, she realized that it was a quitclaim signing her grandparents’ cabin over to her. He father had inherited it a year earlier when Win’s grandmother had died. She’d tried to argue with him, she’d told him that his parents had left it to him, that he should keep it. But he’d said no. That he’d only sell it, or lose it. That he couldn’t hold on to anything. Not his wife, not his daughters, not even his guitar. And when Win had pointed out that if he was going to leave it to her, he should leave it
to her and Poppy, he’d disagreed again. Poppy, he’d told her, was like him. She wouldn’t know the value of something until it was too late, until it was already gone.

  He’d said some other things, too. Things like he knew he’d never been a good father, but this was one thing he could do for her. He could give her the cabin and maybe, sometime, she’d go up there, to visit or to live. And maybe it would help her. Help her find some peace again.

  “He was right,” Everett said, quietly, when she finished telling him this.

  “Right about what?”

  “Right about your living here one day.”

  She nodded. “It didn’t happen right away, though,” she said. Nothing, it turned out, had happened right away. She’d been so overwhelmed by loss then that there were times when just leaving her apartment felt like a major accomplishment. Poppy had been wonderful, coming over every day, bullying her into eating, dragging her out to the movies, and just generally insisting that she not give up on her life. It was during this same time that Win first met with Kyle’s lawyer, and first saw a copy of Kyle’s will. She wasn’t surprised he’d left her money. He’d told her he was going to do this. She was only surprised at how much it was: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or a small fortune to Win. At the time, she’d felt so desperate in her grief that she’d considered doing something crazy with it. Giving it all, in cash, to a homeless man in her neighborhood, or leaving on a trip around the world and not coming home until the money was gone. In the end, though, she’d done what Kyle would have wanted her to do: she’d made a generous donation to a cancer research organization, and another one to a hospice where Kyle had stayed before he died, and then she’d invested the rest of it in a conservative portfolio of stocks and bonds, and left it there, untouched, for some future day she could never quite imagine.

  But she didn’t tell any of this to Everett. She told him instead about how, a year after Kyle had died, she was still living in the same apartment they’d lived in together, still going to all the same places they’d gone to together, and still seeing all the same friends they’d seen together. And she’d thought, This is crazy. No wonder I’m depressed all the time. So she’d made some calls, found out that there was an opening for a middle school social studies teacher in Butternut, and came up to interview for the job. “I got it, obviously,” she said now, “and that fall, two years ago, right before school started, I moved up here. And the rest, I guess, is history.”

  “Your subject,” Everett pointed out, and she smiled. He had an easy way about him, she thought, a way of lightening even the heaviest moments. It was a gift that not many people had.

  She looked out over at the water now in time to see another rocket shoot into the air and explode in a shower of multi-colored sparks. “That must be the finale,” she said, glancing at her watch. It was getting late, late enough for Everett to be leaving. Except for one thing . . .

  “Everett,” she said. “You shouldn’t drive. We split that first bottle of wine.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re welcome to sleep on the couch. If it’s not too uncomfortable.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his eyes looking especially sleepy. “And I’ve met your couch before. It’s very comfortable.”

  CHAPTER 11

  A few weeks after the Fourth of July, Sam was shut up in his office—a converted, windowless storage room barely large enough to hold a desk, two chairs, and a file cabinet—and was trying to get some work done. He hated being in here. It reminded him of why he’d bought Birch Tree Bait in the first place; he hadn’t wanted to work in an office. But business was good now, so good that the only way Sam could get anything done was to hole up in here for a couple of hours every morning before things got too busy. The only trouble was that his employees, his friends, and his regular customers insisted on interrupting him at regular intervals. Like right now, for instance.

  “Come in,” Sam said, in response to the light but insistent tapping on the door. But he kept his eyes focused on the purchase order on his laptop screen in the hopes of discouraging his visitor from staying any longer than was absolutely necessary.

  “Sam?”

  “Yes, Justine?” he answered, not looking up.

  “Can I ask you a favor?”

  He sighed. He looked up. “What?”

  “Can you cover the register? Just for a minute? I have to make a phone call.”

  “Can Byron do it?”

  “No. He’s . . .”

  “Taking a bet?” Sam said, exasperated. “He knows he’s not supposed to be doing that here.”

  “I know, but there’s a big game tonight. Plus, Haley Grey is getting her ultrasound today, and a lot of people are betting on whether it’s going to be a boy or a girl.”

  Sam closed his eyes and blew out a long, slow breath. He tried to ignore the sensation of a metal band tightening around his head, the hallmark of the tension headache that had been coming on all morning. When he opened his eyes, though, Justine’s expression was so plaintive that he stood up, immediately, and said, “All right. I’ll take over. Make it quick, though, okay?”

  “Okay. And Sam? Thanks. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t an emergency.”

  “It’s not . . . it’s not your mom, is it?” Sam asked, thinking that, even by her own standards, Justine looked pale today.

  “My mom?”

  “Weren’t you worried that she had some kind of . . . disease?” he reminded her, coming around to the front of his desk and leaning on its edge.

  “Oh, that. No. That was nothing. She’s fine. This time it’s my dad.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He will be,” Justine said. “It’s just, right now, he’s going through a divorce.”

  “So, he and your mom . . . ?”

  “No. Not them. They got divorced a long time ago. This is, let me see, his fifth divorce.”

  “Fifth?” Sam said.

  “I’m pretty sure,” she said, looking a little less than sure.

  Still, he shook his head in disbelief. “Justine, I got divorced once. And I can tell you, it was a very time consuming process. I’ve never understood this. Where does someone find the time to get married and divorced multiple times?”

  Justine considered her chipped black finger nail polish. “He just made it a priority, I guess,” she said finally, looking up. Her eyes, ringed with their usual heavy black makeup, were completely serious.

  “Riiight,” Sam said, reaching up to massage his temples. Yes, there was definitely going to be a headache, and sooner rather than later.

  Justine started to leave his office, but Sam called her back. “Hey, um, how’s Poppy doing? I mean, is everything working out there? Is she . . . catching on quickly?”

  “She’s fine.” Justine shrugged. “I have her setting up the s’mores display now.”

  “Good,” Sam said, casually. “That’s . . . that’s good.” And he was glad, for once, that Justine was so obtuse. “If you want some privacy, you can make your phone call in here,” he told her, and he left her in his office to console her father, the serial divorcer. There was more aggravation, though, waiting for him at the front counter, where several customers were already milling around impatiently. But as Sam ducked behind the register he still found time to scan the two rooms of the business, taking stock of where everyone was, and what everyone was doing.

  There was Byron, sitting at the coffee counter, and writing in the notebook in which he kept meticulous track of all the bets he took. There was Linc, in the next room, supervising a group of vacationers filling out kayak rental forms. And there, at the end of aisle three, was Poppy, her brilliant blond hair seeming to generate its own light as she patiently stacked boxes of graham crackers, bags of marshmallows, and slabs of Hershey’s chocolate bars. His eyes lingered on her for a moment, and he was reminded of the other reason he’d sequestered himself in his office. His newest employee was proving to be a distraction, a major distraction. She
was beautiful, it turned out, but at the same time, she wore her beauty as casually as she might wear a pair of favorite blue jeans. Sam found this captivating. More captivating still was the way she seemed to flirt with him, though he wasn’t always sure about this. He could have been misreading her. Either way, though, it added up to the same thing: more distraction.

  “Is that it?” Sam asked, reaching for the six-pack of beer a customer had placed on the counter in front of him.

  “That’s it,” a young man’s voice said, and something about that voice, its highness, perhaps, made Sam look up at him skeptically. He didn’t look old enough to shave, Sam thought, of the short, skinny, curly haired kid in front of him. He didn’t even look old enough to grow peach fuzz.

  “Can I see your ID?” he asked him.

  The kid sighed, as if he had more important things to do, and extracted his license from his wallet. He slid it across the counter to Sam.

  Sam glanced at it. “Hawaii, huh? You’re a long way from home.”

  “I like to travel,” he mumbled.

  “It says here you’re thirty,” Sam said, almost conversationally.

  “I am. I look young for my age,” he said, careful not to meet Sam’s eyes.

  “Nobody looks that young for their age,” Sam said, reaching for the scissors he kept in a nearby drawer.

  “Hey!” the kid yelped, when he realized what Sam was doing. “Stop!” But it was too late. Sam was already cutting up the fake ID.

  “That cost me a lot of money,” he said, accusingly, to Sam.

  “Well, then you got ripped off,” Sam said, sweeping the shards into the trash. “Now get out of here, before I figure out which of the rental cabins you’re staying in and I tell your parents.”

  He glared at Sam, but then something inside him seemed to waver and then break. “Look,” he said quietly, glancing nervously back at the line and then leaning closer to Sam. “I got invited to a party tonight. And there are going to be girls there. Actual girls.” Sam took a closer look at him. Judging from his concave chest, and his acne-riddled face, he probably didn’t see a lot of action, unless of course it was video game action.