As if waiting for a cue, Isobel agreed, noting that her day was wide open as well. “We should do something together to celebrate our birthday month. I never see you.”
“We live together. I see you every day,” Elyse said, feeling as if she were in the middle of a scripted sales pitch—at any moment her cousins would lead her to the inevitable conclusion that she needed a $1,200 vacuum or a new set of Japanese knives. She figured it had to do with the invitation. They were worried about her.
Lizzie suggested going to the Metal Museum and then to lunch. “You always liked the small stuff—the miniatures over the murals. There wasn’t ever anything worth seeing when I lived here and now there are as many museums as churches.”
“Not even close,” Elyse said, thinking of the number of churches she’d seen in her aimless walking around the city on days when she couldn’t stand the sight of her cousins or herself. Seems all it took in Memphis to start a church was to hang a sign on your front door and convince your friends that you knew the word of God better than the man or woman at the last pulpit they’d been to.
“Then it’s settled,” Isobel said, stripping off her shirt and heading upstairs. “I need a cold shower if I’m ever going to stop sweating. Leave in an hour?”
“Better not let Benny see you in that sports bra,” Elyse said. “He’ll have a heart attack trying to get enough blood to his—”
“Don’t be crass,” Lizzie said, twisting her high ponytail into a bun and securing it with the rubber band that had held the morning paper closed. She set her phone on the table face side down. “There’s mail for you. Must have gotten dropped on the way into the house yesterday. Benny found it in the monkey grass.”
“Right,” Elyse said, picking up the invitation and examining it as if she’d never seen it before. “It’s got your name on it too, and Isobel’s for that matter.”
“It’s not for us.”
“She should have sent three invitations. I mean, as it is, sending it this way means that none of us can bring a date. No T. J., no fling of the month for Isobel.”
“That’s not news. Your mother told you it was going to be a small wedding. Family only. Besides, you make a much better date than T. J., and Isobel won’t be with that bartender much longer—you know she only likes the beginning of a relationship.”
“Don’t we all?” Elyse said, even as she thought that what she was most familiar with was the end of other people’s relationships.
“Open it,” Lizzie said.
“I thought maybe it wouldn’t happen,” Elyse said, pushing back from the table.
“You want a list of all the stuff I didn’t think would happen?” Lizzie asked, tapping the floor with her right foot. She took the envelope from Elyse’s hand and ripped it open before handing it back to her.
“Knowing you, there’s a list of all that stuff somewhere.”
“Nobody ever needs to keep tabs on their failures. All the stuff that doesn’t happen gets written in that part of your brain that never forgets.”
Elyse slipped her finger inside the envelope and edged out the invitation. Lizzie was right. The brain filed its grievances against life and stored them, waiting for another situation to come up to compare it against. She had to leave her failures alone—playing what-if games never made anyone happy. What if, she thought and pulled the thick packet of invitation components from the envelope.
“Looks like Mom and Dad got Daphne the invitations she wanted despite the fact that they’re crazy expensive. When they started all of this, there was a budget.” Elyse let the envelope fall to the floor.
Lizzie reached down and picked it up. “Maybe they’re saving elsewhere, you know, because it’s a small ceremony?”
“Nope. Daddy assured his little girl that she could have whatever she wanted. Besides it’s only small because there’s this church tucked away on a side street by our house that has room for seventy-six people. Daphne’s wanted to get married there since I showed it to her when we were kids and liked to make believe we were saints.”
“Sounds lovely,” Lizzie said, describing a similar chapel she’d seen in Florida. Elyse half-listened while she separated the parts of the invitation, dropping bits of tissue paper on the floor as she flipped through the pieces. Lizzie continued to reach down and pick them up.
“If you’d wait a minute, I’ll pick them up all at once,” Elyse said, letting out a short breath. “Frickin A.” Her hands had stopped moving when she reached the photograph of Landon and Daphne. She held the photo back and pushed the other papers into Lizzie’s hands. “We should room together. The hotel information and stuff is there.”
“Or we could stay at Gram’s house,” Lizzie said.
Her cousin continued to talk and, without thinking about it, Elyse put her thumb over her sister’s face and considered what it would be like to be in that photo. It had been taken at their grandparents’ beach house, the one where they’d all spent summers over the years. Landon and her sister stood on the beach, wrapped around each other in a way that made it look like he had both arms. He was too tall for Daphne. Hell, he was too tall for Elyse too, but what did that matter to people in love? They were barefoot. Behind them, the surf lapped at a heart someone had drawn in the sand. Their jeans matched and both wore flowing white shirts. Instead of facing the camera, they stared at each other. Landon’s lovely jaw line was in profile. He had what Elyse had always thought of as a King Arthur jaw—strong and square. When he’d first been able to grow a full beard, she’d talked him into shaving it into a thin line that traced the architecture of his face.
“We’re not walking to that museum, are we?” Isobel asked as she thumped down the hallway in an impossibly high pair of wedges.
Lizzie shook her head, fanning herself with the invitation. “Too far in this heat. We got little cousin’s wedding invitation though.”
“Can’t wait,” Isobel said, holding the beads of the curtain carefully to the side before passing through them.
“You guys coming? Going to fly out to Boston and everything?” Elyse asked, looking up from the photograph.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Lizzie said. “You going to get dressed so we can go out and celebrate our birthdays?”
Elyse looked at her bunny slippers and then back to the photo, not able to stop herself from staring at the picture and considering what her life would have been like if she were marrying Landon. Isobel stepped behind her and peered over her shoulder.
“I always thought you were the better-looking sister,” she said, taking up the photograph.
Elyse swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. “She favors our mother—one of the reasons she’s the darling of the family. Mom loves her because they’re alike. Dad loves her because he loves Mom.”
Lizzie started to speak, but Isobel interrupted her and held the picture up, her thumb covering most of Landon. “Can you believe Sissy Daphne is all grown up and getting married?”
Elyse forced herself to look at the photo again. Daphne had the body of an adult, but her face held the same wide-open expression of a child. Elyse remembered that feeling—the way time opened up in front of you and the pull of the adult-run world with its obligations and expectations seemed as distant as the first snowfall of the season.
“I wish we were closer. There’s such a vast chasm between twenty-seven and twenty-two,” Elyse said.
“Twenty-eight,” Lizzie said, twisting her lips into a rueful smile.
Isobel returned the photograph. “It gets better. My brothers didn’t speak to each other for, like, five years, but then they got married and had kids and I’m the one they don’t speak to. Sometimes it takes that long to work through what happened to you as a kid.”
“Nothing happened to you,” Lizzie said. “You have to give it time. Distance narrows with age—at least that’s what my parents are always saying.”
Isobel exchanged a quick look with Elyse and shrugged. At the very beginning of getting to know
Lizzie, she’d planted her flag in the territory of hardship childhood, and she never let anyone else even get a foot in. Mention how much you hated your parents and she was right there to remind you that at least you knew who your parents were. Complain about a sibling, and she’d bring up that her mother and stepfather had the nerve to prove they were sleeping together by bringing her half-siblings into the world when she was a teenager.
“Are we going to do this?” Isobel asked, pushing Elyse toward the hallway. “Put on something other than shorts. It doesn’t hurt to look a little fancy now and then. Besides, I know this guy who works at the bar that overlooks the river and you’re exactly his type.”
Elyse left the room as Isobel continued to talk about the chef she’d met a few days earlier. She kicked off her bunny slippers at the landing to the second floor. They’d finally finished the work on the third floor last week. Although tiny, the bathroom now had a shower and gleaming white porcelain tile. She’d moved her things from the small room on the second floor to the small room on the third floor. The newness of the flooring and the paint made what few possessions she had look used up. She sat on the twin bed, which still needed a frame, and took another look at the photograph. Bending it in half, she separated her sister from Landon and then ran her fingernail down the crease until the photo lay flat. She slipped it into the frame of the oval mirror she’d hung on the back of the bedroom door. Landon’s face looked back at her while her sister pointed that wide-open smile toward an infinite reflection of itself. Lizzie had said to give it time, but she didn’t have time. She had eight weeks to find a way to separate the two of them.
In an effort to distract herself from the agony of her sister’s wedding (and to lose a little weight), Elyse had agreed to serve as an assistant coach for Lizzie’s soccer team. The farther the Olympics slipped from her cousin’s grasp, the more tightly she held onto her dream. The day before, Elyse had overheard Lizzie on the phone with someone from the team—a friend or maybe the trainer—and they hadn’t told Lizzie what she wanted to hear.
As they drove, Lizzie kept up a steady stream of chatter about the girls she coached and what she knew of their families. “You can do them so much good,” she said.
“I don’t know.” Elyse unzipped and then rezipped her recently purchased athletic jacket. “I’m not exactly qualified to coach soccer.”
“But you can be the good cop,” Lizzie said. “Besides, it’s like Rosa May is always telling me. These girls have a way of making you exactly what they need.”
“And what is that?”
“A backup.”
Elyse made a stab at confronting her cousin about her plans. “For if you leave?”
“I’m not leaving yet.”
“But you might?” Elyse knew she was being disingenuous, letting her cousin think that she’d still be here after the wedding, but she couldn’t risk sharing her plans. She understood that trying to stop her sister’s wedding with the idea that she and Landon would ride off into the sunset together was a little like telling someone you were abducted by aliens.
“We all might.” Lizzie pulled into the turning lane. She seemed to be considering adding to her response. Or maybe not. Elyse tended to read too much into people’s actions. “I keep thinking about that wedding invitation and how fancy they’ve gotten. How much do you think it costs to get that gold-embossed lettering and then seal the whole thing with wax?”
“A shitload,” Elyse said. Lizzie was acting for all the world as if this conversation she were having about the wedding and the invitations were normal, but Elyse couldn’t shake the feeling that she was up to something.
She continued to talk about weddings as they neared the school. “Did your sister do the postmark thing?”
“Huh?”
“You know, send it off to Bridal Veil, Oregon, or Loving, Texas, and get them to do the postmark?”
Elyse shook her head, and as Lizzie looked for a parking spot, she explained that a bride could for some nominal fee send all the invitations to some other post office in a better-named place and instead of being postmarked Memphis or Boston, the envelopes got a special stamp and an appropriate postmark. “People do it for valentines too, and secret admirers. Although I’m not sure those exist anymore. How can you keep who you are a secret these days with Facebook and Twitter and Google?” Lizzie squeezed the Datsun into a spot and put her hand to her heart and then mock collapsed back into her seat. “Curse you, technology.”
Elyse couldn’t keep herself from smiling. “Surely somewhere in America there are still second-graders slipping anonymous valentines into shoebox mailboxes.”
Lizzie cleared her throat. “You’re okay aren’t you?” she asked with a timidity that signaled an acknowledgment that the subjects they’d danced around were difficult.
“I’m fine,” Elyse said.
The reflexive response didn’t satisfy her. “You’ve been so angry lately. Letting little things like that picture—”
“I’m not angry.” She fumbled with her door.
“I’m good with body language. You know that. And right now, yours says you’re angry as hell and maybe a little bit sad.”
“I’m tired,” she said, finally opening the door.
“You’re not the only one.”
Elyse hesitated, realizing that her cousin hadn’t been picking up on her own insecurities but had been wanting to confess her own secrets. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve got to have another surgery.”
“Shit,” Elyse said.
“Scar tissue.” Lizzie rubbed the top of her knee.
“When?”
Lizzie opened her own door and stepped out into the summer heat. “After the wedding.”
“What does it mean for your plans?” Elyse couldn’t bring herself to say Olympics.
“It isn’t good. I think.”
Elyse didn’t let her cousin stop talking. “You think what?”
“That I never had a chance. One of the girls told me last week that the coach is already set on the team and plans to make the announcement early—at the end of this month.”
“But she might not?”
“She doesn’t have to until July, but nobody thinks she’s going to wait and nobody thinks I should keep pushing myself to try to be ready.”
“And now surgery,” Elyse said, a wave of shame creeping up her neck. She’d been so consumed by her problems.
“I’ll need help then. That’s where you come in.”
“Or Isobel could help,” Elyse said, and then realizing that what she’d said could give away her own secrets, she amended the statement. “I mean I’m happy to. But, you know, Isobel’s been there before for you after surgery, so she knows what to expect.”
“We’re late.” Lizzie put her arm around Elyse and they walked to the field, which looked like more dirt than grass. She hugged her. “You ready?”
Elyse wiped at the sweat on her forehead, glad her cousin hadn’t followed up with any more questions. “Bring it on.”
“Take these,” Lizzie pushed the keys to the car into Elyse’s hand. “T. J.’s picking me up afterward and he can bring me home.”
Elyse smiled. It gave her hope that Lizzie had found someone like T. J. She put the keys into her purse.
“You coming, coach?”
Elyse looked up to see a tall girl with heavy eyeliner waving at them. Lizzie waved back.
“How does she play in that?”
“At least I convinced her to stop wearing foundation.”
“What does a sixteen-year-old girl need foundation for? That’s the only time in your life when your skin looks as good as airbrushed.”
“Boys,” Lizzie said.
“Boys,” Elyse echoed.
Lizzie leaned in close. “You’ll be fine,” she whispered. For a moment, Elyse wavered, thinking she should come clean with her cousin, but she knew she’d hold her accountable, lead her toward the moral choice, the decision that might make her miserabl
e in the short run but that would at least open the door to future happiness.
“I will,” she said and followed Lizzie as she took off in a slow run.
By the end of practice, Elyse’s ponytail had come undone and her bangs were plastered to her face. The new jacket, which had looked so crisp in the store, lay abandoned by the chain-link fence. She’d gulped down all of her water and had resorted to putting her mouth dangerously close to a spigot on the side of the community center to quench her thirst. Driving home, Elyse made promises she wouldn’t keep. At a red light, she pulled her phone from her purse and dialed her sister. It rang until the next light and then before the voicemail could make demands of Elyse, she hung up the phone, dropping it back into her tote. As she neared Spite House, which was tucked away at the very edge of downtown, her eyes lingered on the small storefronts that populated South Main Street—the only bright spot in the city’s failed attempt at urban renewal. A bunch of balloons tied to a sandwich board caught her eye. Post Perfect the sign read in bright pink letters. Without fully considering her motives, she pulled into a parking spot and walked toward the store.
A bell rang as she entered.
“My first real customer,” the woman behind the counter said.
Elyse nodded at the girl, who continued talking.
“I mean you can’t count my mom or sorority sisters, they were coming because it’s the right thing to do, but here you are. In off the street as they say. What caught your eye? The window display? Those are all my own designs, but I have more traditional stuff, you know fancy pens and invitations you can custom order.”
“The balloons,” Elyse said faintly, gesturing outside. She wondered how the girl could talk so much without pausing for air. She must be a swimmer—the only explanation for her lung capacity. “What kind of store is this?”
“Oh,” the girl said, finally drawing a deep breath.
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