Love You Like a Sister

by Robin Palmer

  Mom blushed. “Well, that’s very nice to hear.”

  It was nice to hear. My dad got extra points for that. Which I had a feeling he’d need to use once we got to the soon-to-be-stepsisters part.

  “And these are my girls,” Lana said. She pointed to the youngest one. “This is Samantha—she goes by Sammi—”

  “Not all the time,” Samantha/Sammi replied. “Just sometimes.”

  “Right. Just sometimes,” Lana corrected. “And next to her is Kayley,” she went on, pointing to the middle one. “She’s twelve, like you—in fact, you’re just a month apart!” The way she said it made it sound like that meant we should be best friends or something.

  “Neat,” I replied.

  Kayley, on the other hand, did not look like it was all that neat. Kayley looked like her mom was nuts for thinking it was all that exciting.

  “And that one,” she said, pointing at the oldest one, “is Cassie. She’s fourteen.”

  I waited for Cassie to look up from her phone, but it wasn’t happening. “Hi,” I finally said.

  “Hey,” she said, her head still down.

  Lana looked embarrassed. “She’s just . . . fourteen, I guess,” she laughed nervously, before turning toward her and glaring. “Cassie. Put that away,” she hissed.

  With a sigh Cassie put her phone in her bag and tried to look somewhat interested in what was going on, but failed.

  I gave Mom the look I usually reserved for when the dentist said, “This isn’t going to hurt but a bit.”

  She put her arm around me. “I don’t think Avery was aware that this was going to be a group thing.”

  “Did I not mention that in the e-mail?” my dad replied, surprised. “I just thought it would be a more economical use of our time to do it all at once.”

  “No, I don’t think you did mention it,” she replied.

  He looked at me. “Sorry about that. I guess I was just so excited for you to meet everyone.”

  At least one of us was. I shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Even without looking at her, I knew that my mom was probably giving me a Don’t “whatever” me look. She hated that word. She said it was way too teenagery for her liking, and she had one more year to tell me not to use it.

  “Okay, then. I guess I should get going so you guys can eat.” She turned to me. “Have fun,” she said, pushing my bangs out of my eyes.

  I pushed them back in. Yeah right, my eyes said, even though “Sure” was what came out of my mouth.

  “We’ll drop her off after we eat,” my dad said.

  “Great. See you then,” she replied as she walked away.

  “I’ll have the blueberry pancakes and an orange juice, please,” I said when the waitress asked for my order.

  “Small or large?” she asked.

  “Large, please,” I replied.

  Cassie’s eyebrow shot up.

  “What?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Nothing. I’m just not used to seeing someone order so much food,” she replied. “Things are just different in California, I guess.”

  Before I could say anything, the waitress asked for her order. “I’ll have the egg white omelet, please,” she said. “No toast. No hash browns.”

  From the look on her face, the waitress was as surprised as I was that someone would willingly order something so boring. “Extra fruit?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” Cassie said.

  “Juice?”

  “Just water, please.”

  Now it was the waitress’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Okay, then. I’ll put that right in,” she said as she walked away.

  Cassie and I flashed each other a fake smile.

  This was going to be a long brunch.

  * * *

  Over the next hour and ten minutes, this was what I learned:

  1. Girls from California didn’t use butter.

  2. Girls from California didn’t have much interest in hearing about the hobbies of girls from New York.

  3. My father smiled a lot more now that he was with Lana.

  4. And he smiled a lot at her girls.

  5. Which made me kind of jealous.

  “I was so looking forward to this,” he said, patting me on the arm while I finished my last bite of pancake. I wasn’t even hungry anymore—I did it just to make Cassie squirm.

  Maybe I would have been too. If, you know, I had known it was going to happen.

  Lana and the girls were busy talking about where to go shopping to decorate their new house. It wasn’t surprising that garage sales didn’t come up.

  “Isn’t Lana great?” he asked with a smile.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. That wasn’t a lie—she was actually very nice. She had made a point all through brunch to ask me lots of questions about my life and seemed genuinely interested in the answers. Unlike her daughters. Well, two of her daughters—Sammi kind of paid attention. That is, when she wasn’t busy spilling food on herself and scrubbing the stains, often making them worse.

  “And I just knew you and the girls would hit it off.”

  I looked over at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.

  The waitress brought the check over. After he gave her his credit card, he turned to me. “Before we leave, Lana has something she wants to ask you.”

  It probably wasn’t where I got my clothes. With her completely unwrinkled red-striped sundress (I had never seen my mother iron; I wasn’t even sure we owned one), she looked like she had stepped out of a magazine.

  Lana took my dad’s hand. “I was wondering if you’d be one of my bridesmaids,” she said shyly.

  What?! Being asked to be a bridesmaid was a huge deal. And I had known her for only an hour and ten minutes. “Oh. Wow. I’ve never been a bridesmaid before,” I replied.

  Cassie gave a quick eye roll. She was great at a fast eye roll too—I had to give her that. It was so quick that you couldn’t even really call her on it. It was too bad we’d probably never be friends, because I would have loved for her to teach me.

  “So you’ll do it?” Lana asked.

  “Sure. I’d love to.” Okay, “love” was stretching it a bit, but what else were you supposed to say when someone asked you to be a bridesmaid in her wedding? Especially when that person looked so hopeful.

  “Great! That’s wonderful!” my dad said, pulling me toward him and giving me a side hug. I couldn’t remember seeing him this excited . . . ever. It was a nice feeling—the idea that I could make him happy like this.

  Maybe my mother was right—maybe things would be different now.

  For the first time since I sat down at the table, I felt good.

  Until I looked across and saw three faces staring back at me. Three faces that, unlike their mother’s, did not look excited about my answer.

  * * *

  They had come in two cars so that, according to my dad, he and I could have some “alone time” on the fifteen-minute drive back to my house. Usually when we were in the car, there was a lot of uncomfortable silence. To the point where I’d turn on the radio and start fiddling with it, and because I wasn’t sure what kind of music he liked because I spent so little time with him, I’d keep switching stations in hopes that he’d finally say, “Go back—I really like that song.” But instead what he usually ended up saying was “Avery, please just settle on one station, okay? I’m getting a headache.” Which would make me feel worse and result in all sorts of babbling about whatever song was playing on whatever station I settled on. But this time there wasn’t silence. In fact, my dad was so talkative that I felt like if he didn’t stop, I’d be the one with the headache. He told me all about the house they had bought (“At first I thought it would be nice for you and Sammi to share a room, because I know how much I enjoyed sharing a room with my brother when I was growing up, even if I didn’t like it at the time, but Lana said there’d be no reason for it, seeing that the house has five bedrooms”). And how he and Lana had met (“One of the guys I work with finally convince
d me to sign up for one of those online dating sites, and when I read her profile and she mentioned she was a huge basketball fan, I was already in love”). And how he had proposed (“I had planned this whole romantic weekend in Santa Cruz, but I was so nervous that I ended up asking her while we were in line at Starbucks”).

  He even looked different than the last time I had seen him. The circles were gone from under his eyes, and his shoulders weren’t hunched up near his ears, and his mouth seemed to be stuck in a permanent smile. He looked happy, which, I realized as he hummed along with the radio, was something I hadn’t seen much of before.

  Usually when he pulled up in front of my house, he was in such a hurry to get going that he left the engine running as we said good-bye. But this time he turned it off.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, confused.

  “Just spending some time with my daughter,” he said with a smile. “Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” I said as I smiled back, hoping it looked genuine. Which is hard to do when you’re really confused because your dad has been body-snatched and replaced with some happy, chatty guy.

  “Aren’t Lana’s girls great?”

  I could feel my smile flicker. “Uh-huh.”

  “I like that they’re from California,” he went on. “Not like it’s a different country or anything, but I like that they’ll be able to share their experience with you.”

  “Yeah. That’ll be cool.”

  “Sammi’s a riot,” he laughed. “Always spilling stuff on herself. Did you notice that?”

  “I did.”

  “And Kayley is very smart. She got all As on her report card last year.”

  “So did I,” I shot back. Well, all A minuses. Which was kind of the same.

  “You did?” he said, surprised. “I had no idea.”

  Maybe you would have if you read my e-mails, I wanted to say. I knew I had mentioned it in one of them.

  “That’s really great, Avery. I’m very proud of you.”

  I kind of hated how I could go from being so mad at him to being happy that I had made him happy. “Thanks. When school starts this year, I think—”

  “And Cassie is a real force of nature. She was president of her class last year. And captain of the lacrosse team.”

  “Well, I started an art club at school last year,” I said. “We have only ten members right now, but I bet it’s going to grow this year. And I sold three pieces of jewelry last month without even planning to. People saw it on me and said they liked it, and when I said I’d made it, they said they wished they could buy something just like that, and I sold it to them on the spot.”

  “Wow. That’s very impressive.” But the look on his face made it seem like the lacrosse team was more impressive.

  “Thanks.” I took out my phone. “Do you want to see some pictures?”

  “I’m glad you’re going to have an older sister,” he continued. “It’s nice to have someone to look up to.”

  I put down my phone. This was not cool. It was like all he wanted to do was sit there and brag to me about these girls who weren’t even related to him, and everything that his real daughter had done came up short!

  “I think you’ll learn a lot from her.”

  Like what? How to make people feel small and stupid?

  He squeezed my hand. “I’m so glad we had this talk,” he said as he started to open his door.

  If what he meant was him going on and on about how great Lana’s girls were and totally ignoring everything I said, then, sure, I guess it was a talk.

  “This is going to be great,” he said with a smile.

  Really? In what universe?

  Four

  “Maybe they were just nervous,” Mom said as we poked around the bead store later that day. “People show their nervousness in different ways.” When I told her how brunch had gone, and about the conversation with my dad, she had suggested we take a field trip to the store and then get ice cream. And she’d let me invite Lexi.

  “That’s true,” Lexi agreed from the floor, where she was picking up a box of silver beads that she had knocked over. Lexi was a bit on the klutzy side. “Take me, for example: When I get nervous, I knock things over.”

  “Are you nervous now?” Mom asked.

  “No. This was just a miscellaneous knockover,” she replied.

  Mom laughed. “You’re one of a kind, Lexi.”

  “That’s what my mom says too.”

  I fingered the tiger beads I was thinking of buying. They would look great with this black butterfly I had found at a thrift store when we visited my grandparents while they were in Florida a few months back. “Or maybe they were just stuck up,” I said.

  “Or maybe they were just stuck up,” Mom agreed. “But even if that’s the case, you might have to be the bigger person and just keep being extra nice even when it’s the last thing you want to do.”

  The “bigger person” thing. That was a favorite saying of Mom’s. I felt like I was always being asked to do it. I sighed. “Why do I always have to be the bigger person?”

  “You’re really good at it, you know,” Lexi pointed out. “Remember fourth-grade science class, with that weird kid Jimmy Pagano? The one who used to glue his fingers together on purpose? And he kept kicking your chair, and Mrs. Olson told you to be the bigger person and move because he obviously had issues and wasn’t going to stop?”

  “Yeah. And he smelled like bologna that had been left in a hot car for hours.” I shuddered.

  Lexi wrinkled her nose. “Right. I forgot that part. Ew.”

  “Sweetie, they’re going to be your family,” Mom said. “That’s why.”

  “Well, maybe I won’t have to do much for the wedding,” I said.

  “You’re a bridesmaid,” she replied. “That’s a big honor. And a lot of responsibility.”

  “Well, maybe it’s the kind of wedding where I’ll just have to show up, like, the day of the wedding,” I said hopefully. “And everything else can be done, like, online.”

  Just as I said that, my phone beeped with a text.

  Hey Avery! It’s Lana. I was wondering if you were free on Tuesday afternoon to get together to talk about the wedding. We’ve got a lot to do in the next month! xo Lana

  Or maybe not.

  * * *

  Lana texted me that Monday to ask if I wouldn’t mind coming over to their new house the next day because she had to wait around for the cable guy to come install their cable.

  okay, I texted back.

  Wonderful! Thank you so much! was her response. I so appreciate it!

  “Lana’s really big on exclamation points,” I told Mom as we drove over there on Tuesday. I couldn’t help but notice that she had changed out of her cutoff jean shorts and tank top into one of her nicer sundresses. Not that I was one to talk—I had tried on four outfits before I finally settled on a denim miniskirt and a lilac gauze shirt with bell sleeves.

  “Is that such a bad thing? Maybe she’s really excited about getting to know you.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. But I thought you didn’t like overexclamators.”

  “I never said I didn’t like them. I said . . . they were awfully loud on the page,” she replied.

  We smiled at each other. And then mine faded.

  “What’s the matter?” Mom asked.

  “I was just thinking about Cassie,” I replied. “I took your advice. You know, about sending her a friend request on Facebook? She wouldn’t even accept it!”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Mom said. “She probably just hasn’t seen it yet.”

  “She deleted it.”

  I knew my mom well enough to catch the Oh boy, that’s not good look that flashed across her face. “Well, maybe she’s more of an Instagram person.”

  That was my mom—definitely a (coffee) cup-half-full person. She grabbed my hand. “Honey—we talked about this. She’s probably having her own feelings about the wedding. People deal with their anxiety in lots of different way
s. But as long as you continue—”

  “Are you going to say ‘to be the bigger person’?” I interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  As we turned onto my dad’s street, I sighed. “Yeah, well, if I get any bigger, I’m not going to fit through the car door.”

  “Wow. This is . . . wow,” Mom murmured as we drove through the development, each house bigger than the next. Unlike our neighborhood, which was full of funky little cottages that were painted different colors and had, as Mom liked to say, “a lot of history that they like to show off” (code for they were old and the owners didn’t have the money to fix them up because most of the people who lived in the neighborhood were artists or professors), this neighborhood had perfect houses. Perfectly cut lawns. Perfect flower beds. Perfect cars in the driveways that didn’t have any dings and looked to have been washed that morning. The houses also all looked exactly alike. So much so that if you were coming home after work and it was dark, it would be easy enough to pull into the wrong driveway.

  A few houses later Beatrice (that was the name we’d given the GPS lady) announced we were at our destination, and I saw Lana’s shiny black SUV in the driveway. As we pulled up, the front door opened and she came bounding out, also in a sundress. Hers, unlike Mom’s, looked like it had been ironed.

  When we got out of the car, Lana gave me a hug. “Hey, Avery. It’s great to see you again!” She had a really nice smile. A very white one.

  “You, too,” I replied. She smelled good. Perfumy, but not the sickly sweet kind that made me gag.

  She walked over to Mom. “And you, too, Monica!”

  Before Mom could reply, Lana pulled her in for a hug.

  “Oh. Wow. Look at that. We’re hugging,” Mom said, a little surprised. “That’s so nice.”

  “Would you like to come in for something to drink?” Lana asked.

  “I’d love to, but I’m off to yoga.”

  “So you’re a yogi!” Lana exclaimed. “I had no idea.”

  “Yeah. I’ve been practicing for a while.” Mom was trying to sound casual about it, but I knew she was proud of the fact that she had been going for five years. And I was proud of her. She wasn’t great at committing to things, especially exercise-related things.