Love You Like a Sister

by Robin Palmer

  Kayley reached into the bowl and picked up a chip. The minute she put it in her mouth, she cringed. That must have been the old bag.

  “Aren’t the salt and vinegar ones good?” Mom asked Kayley.

  “Uh-huh,” Kayley said with her mouth full. I knew that face. It was the I’d do anything for a napkin right now so I can spit this out one.

  “I like that kind!” Sammi said as she reached into the bowl and took not one chip but, like, five. She popped a few in her mouth and started chewing, only to stop quickly. “Ick. They’re stale.”

  “Sammi!” Lana said.

  “Sorry, but they are!” Sammi cried.

  Mom looked super embarrassed. In fact, everyone did. Luckily, right then the doorbell rang.

  “The pizza’s here!” Mom said, relieved. Both she and my dad got up at the same time, bumping into each other as they started toward the door.

  “Let me get it,” my dad said once they had untangled themselves.

  “No way,” Mom said.

  “Please. I want to.”

  “Thanks, but I got this,” Mom said. “It’s the least I can do after burning dinner.” She cringed. “Whoops. I hadn’t mentioned that part until now, had I?”

  “Oh, I burn dinner all the time,” Lana said.

  “You do? When?” Sammi asked, confused.

  “Well, we happen to really love pizza,” my dad said quickly. “So, as good as I bet your meal would’ve been, this will probably be just as delicious.” He walked toward the door. “And it’s my treat. I insist.”

  Mom held up her hands. “Okay, okay.” As she watched my dad pay the pizza guy, she absentmindedly reached for a chip. Once she’d bitten down on it, she grimaced. “Ugh. These are stale.”

  I stood up to go set the table. The good news was that things could only get better after this.

  * * *

  And they did.

  For a while.

  Maybe it was all the warm, gooey cheese, or the way the bubbles in the crust melted in your mouth, but by the time dinner was over, whatever awkwardness there had been (and there had been a lot) had disappeared. It was so relaxed that when Mom said, “Hey, I have an idea—why don’t we play charades?” instead of getting all freaked out, which was what I usually did when anyone suggested charades, I just shrugged and said, “Okay.”

  “Charades? Seriously?” Cassie said under her breath.

  After writing phrases on slips of paper, we put them in my cowboy hat (found at a garage sale for two bucks—yay me) and decided that Sammi would be the first one to choose.

  She looked at the piece of paper and squinted. “I can’t read this—does it say ‘Beauty and the Beast?”

  Kayley looked over her shoulder and rolled her eyes. “Way to give everyone a huge hint.”

  “What? I can’t read it. The handwriting is really messy.”

  “That would be my handwriting,” Mom said, looking a little embarrassed.

  “It’s not even that messy,” Kayley said.

  “It is too!” Sammi cried.

  “Okay. That’s enough,” Lana said. Then she turned to my dad. “Honey, why don’t you pick?”

  My dad might have been really book smart (he’d gone to law school and business school after he graduated from college), but when it came to charades? Not so much. In fact, he might have been one of the worst charades players in the history of charades. He was even worse than Lexi, and that was hard to do.

  “It’s a . . . book!” Sammi yelled.

  He shook his head and pantomimed again.

  “TV show?” Kayley asked.

  He shook his head again.

  “Place?” Mom guessed.

  He shook his head again and turned to Lana. “What’s a good symbol for ‘Don’t Stop Believing’?”

  “Now you just said it!” Lana cried.

  He cringed. “Oh. Hm. I did, didn’t I?”

  That was pretty much how the game went. At least until Cassie was up.

  “TV show!” Kayley yelled.

  She shook her head.

  “Place!” Mom guessed.

  She shook her head again.

  “Movie?” I asked. She nodded, giving me a semigrateful half smile. I think she was just happy someone had finally figured it out. She held up five fingers.

  “Four words!” Sammi yelled.

  Kayley elbowed her. “Don’t you know how to count?”

  Cassie shook her head in frustration.

  “Five words,” I said.

  She nodded and held up five fingers again.

  “Fifth word.”

  She nodded so hard her hair bounced up and down. She pointed to the ceiling and used her finger to draw a figure.

  “Ceiling?” my dad said.

  “Rain?” Lana asked.

  “Water damage from last year’s snow?” Mom piped up.

  We all looked at her like she was nuts.

  “Sorry. I’m still a little obsessed with that,” she said sheepishly.

  “Stars,” I guessed.

  Cassie clapped and nodded.

  “The Fault in Our Stars!”

  “Yes!” she screamed, holding up her hand for a high five.

  I gave her one. Immediately after, we both looked embarrassed that we had done something so . . . friendlike. But while we might have found it awkward, out of the corner of my eye I could see the adults smiling, as if that moment was the whole purpose of this dinner.

  “What a team you two make,” Mom said, smiling.

  “You sure do,” my dad agreed.

  I shrugged. “I just have a lot of experience with charades.”

  “Me too,” Cassie said.

  Mom stood up. “Avery, why don’t you show the girls your room while I put on some coffee and get dessert ready?” We had gone to Kaufman’s Bakery and gotten one of their carrot cakes. I was kind of a carrot cake expert, and theirs was the best by far. Their cream cheese frosting was just the right amount of sweet.

  Even though I had made sure to do a last-minute check to confirm anything potentially embarrassing had been hidden from view (mainly my old stuffed animals that I couldn’t bring myself to put away), as we went up the stairs, my stomach got all wonky.

  “Your house is . . . different,” Kayley said as each step let out its own particular squeak and groan.

  “It’s a hundred and four years old,” I said.

  “That’s old,” Sammi said.

  “Tell me about it,” I replied. I stopped in front of the guest room and pointed to the floor. “Look at how the floor slopes.”

  Cassie wrinkled her nose. “Is this place safe?”

  “Of course it’s safe,” I said, offended. “It just has a lot of experience.” That’s what Mom always said about it. When we got to my room, I stood in front of the doorway and gave it one quick eyeballing before letting them in. “This is my room.”

  As they took it in, I tried to see it through their eyes. The walls were covered with pictures I had cut out from magazines, of clothes I thought were cool and places I wanted to go (Paris was at the top of my list, followed by Sweden). And of course there were photos of jewelry I liked. There were also a bunch of photos of cute animals (I was a sucker for YouTube videos, especially the ones where dogs were nursing kittens and things like that). Instead of hanging curtains on the windows, I had covered them with Indian tapestries that Mom and I had found at a flea market in New York City. (She had washed them, like, five times before she let me hang them up, on account of the fact that she was worried there might be bedbugs in them.) And then there were my mobiles. I had made them myself. Some were made of paper cutouts, but others had stuff I had picked up on my trips to the thrift store: (marbles, Christmas ornaments, beads I had strung together). I’d used fishing wire to hang them, which made it look like they were suspended in space, which was cool. I was really proud of them—almost as much as my jewelry.

  “Where’d you get these mobiles?” Kayley asked, fingering a star made of pearls that I had fo
und for almost nothing at an after-Christmas sale at a drugstore. “Etsy?”

  Having someone compare my stuff to something you could find on Etsy was the biggest compliment I could imagine. “Nope. I made them.”

  All three of them looked at me, surprised. “Really?” Sammi gasped. “Can you make me one?”

  “Sure. I’d love to.”

  Kayley looked impressed. “You’re super crafty.”

  I shrugged. “I just like to do it.”

  Cassie walked over to the vanity table that Mom and I had found on the side of the road and stripped down and painted purple. A bunch of my jewelry was on it. “And you made these, too?”

  I nodded.

  She raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

  I had given what I was about to do a lot of thought and decided it was now or never. I took a deep breath. “I was thinking . . . I might know a way we could do the something-old/something-new thing together.”

  They waited for me to go on.

  “I thought maybe we could make your mom a charm bracelet, with each piece representing someone in the family.” It felt weird to say “family.” I held up the huge plastic tub of charms I had collected over the years. “There might be stuff in here we could use, or, if not, we could go to a thrift store.”

  I waited for them to roll their eyes or give me another clue that they thought it was a stupid idea, but they didn’t.

  “I get that that would be the old part, but what would be new about it?” Cassie asked.

  “The bracelet itself,” I said.

  Kayley nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “So what do you think?” I asked nervously. The question was for all of them, but it was Cassie I was looking at.

  “I like it,” Kayley said.

  “Me too,” Sammi added.

  Kayley turned to her. “It doesn’t matter if you like it—you already got the something-blue part.”

  “I’m still allowed to like it!” she cried.

  We all waited for Cassie’s reaction. I felt like she was purposely taking an extra-long time to answer. Finally she shrugged. “Whatever.”

  It wasn’t the “What a great idea!” answer I had been hoping for, but it would do.

  Nine

  After that I started to get excited. I spent the next few days gathering up different charms. I found a high-heeled shoe that I thought would be fun to represent Cassie, because she was way into shoes. A few blue things for Sammi—a heart, a rose, and a moon. After finding out by reading Kayley’s Facebook page that she liked to write stories, I remembered I had one of those old-fashioned quill pen charms that had come in a bag of charms I found at a thrift store. And for my dad I found a golf club, because he was a big golfer. For me, I was thinking of a paintbrush.

  When he called me randomly on Wednesday afternoon and asked if I wanted to come over for dinner that evening, I didn’t even hesitate—I said yes right away. As much as I loved my mom and we always had a great time together, the idea of having an actual family with a bunch of people in it felt really cool. When he picked me up at five, I spent most of the ride going on about the charm bracelet. When we were a few blocks away, I stopped talking.

  He glanced over at me. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve spent the whole time talking,” I said, surprised. “Sorry about that.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Because you didn’t get to talk.”

  “Well, I’d say that’s a good thing,” he laughed. He grabbed my hand. “Avery, I want to hear about your life, and the stuff you’re interested in and excited about.”

  My face got hot. “You do?”

  “Of course I do!” He sighed. “I’ve missed out on too many years of not hearing about it.”

  I smiled. “Okay. But only if I can hear about you, too. It’s only fair.”

  “Deal,” he said, squeezing my hand.

  * * *

  Before dinner we all gathered in Cassie’s room so I could show them the charms, as well as the sketch I had done of the bracelet. My idea was to use this thin, almost invisible wire so it looked like the charms were just suspended in space. Luckily, they liked the idea and the charms. If they hadn’t, I wasn’t sure what I would have come up with.

  This time we had a real dinner instead of stale chips and pizza. Lana had made a big salad with avocado, which was my favorite fruit (most people mistakenly think it’s a vegetable, but it isn’t—it’s a fruit), and a tomato pie. I had had apple pie before, and blueberry, and banana cream pie, but never a tomato one. When I told her that, she explained that tomato pie was very popular in the South, where she had grown up. I wasn’t a big fan of tomatoes, but I did love cheese, and there was a lot of that in the pie.

  During dinner Lana told us how she and my dad had spent the afternoon with the caterer doing tastings of different hors d’oeuvres and main courses. They hadn’t had enough time to do cake tastings, so Lana said that when it was time for that, we girls could go with her if we wanted. I definitely wanted to, because I loved cake almost as much as I loved Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream. As we were eating dessert (bread pudding with vanilla ice cream), Cassie announced she had an idea.

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?” Lana asked.

  “I was thinking that maybe we could do a girls’ spa day before the wedding,” she said. “You know, facials, mani-pedis, massages . . . that kind of thing.”

  “That sounds terrific!” Lana replied. I think she was so happy that Cassie was finally showing some interest that she would have had the same reaction to her saying “I think we should all go climb a tree!”

  “When we were shopping near Avery’s house, I noticed a spa,” she went on. “I think it was called Serenity something.”

  “Oasis of Serenity,” I said, and nodded.

  Lana turned to me. “Have you been there? Is it nice?”

  “It’s really nice,” I replied. I left out the part about how it was really expensive. A mani-pedi was seventy-five bucks there, when it was only forty at Exceptional Nails near the mall. “A bunch of my mom’s friends pitched in and got her a gift certificate there for her birthday for a day of beauty.”

  “It sounds like your mom has great friends,” said Lana. She sounded a little sad. I realized that she didn’t talk all that much about her own friends. Only two were coming to the wedding. Maybe she didn’t have a lot.

  I nodded. “She does. And she let me have the mani-pedi part because she doesn’t like to get her nails done because she says it’s a waste of money because they chip as soon as she works in the garden.” As soon as I said that, I wished I could take it back. I didn’t know if Mom would appreciate me telling people that. I loved the fact that she was so down-to-earth and didn’t care about things like manicures, or getting her hair colored like Lexi’s mom did, but maybe that stuff was really important to Lana.

  “I think that’s a great idea,” my dad agreed. “You’ve all been working really hard with your bride and bridesmaid duties and could use some pampering.”

  Cassie looked pleased that my dad approved of it. “Awesome. I can stop in there and get a pamphlet that lists all the services. Maybe we could go on Saturday, the day before the wedding.”

  Because it was a small wedding—only twenty people—my dad and Lana had decided to have it on a Sunday afternoon, with the ceremony at a really nice Italian restaurant called Cara Mia, followed by a small reception there.

  “That sounds great,” Lana said. “That way we’ll be nice and relaxed.” She reached over and pushed some hair off of Cassie’s face. “You always have good ideas, Cass, but this one beats them all.” She turned to us. “What do you girls think? You up for being pampered?”

  “Totally,” Kayley said.

  “I don’t know what ‘pampered’ means, but I think my answer is yes!” Sammi cried, and we all laughed.

  Lana looked at me. “Avery, what about you? You don’t look too convinced.”
/>   Cassie’s smile disappeared as she waited for my response.

  “Oh. No, I think a spa day is a great idea . . . .”

  Her regular smug smile returned.

  “Great,” Lana said.

  “It’s just . . .” I shook my head. “Never mind.”

  “What is it, honey?” Dad asked.

  I shook my head again. “Nothing. The more I think about it, it’s probably a dumb idea I have.”

  “There are no dumb ideas around here,” Lana said gently. Cassie, however, did not look convinced about that.

  I felt myself turn red. “It’s just that one night when Lexi was sleeping over, we were looking online for do-it-yourself facial masks, and we found this site that told you how to do an at-home spa night.”

  “That sounds interesting,” my dad said.

  “What was neat about it was that all the recipes used stuff you could find in your kitchen or at the grocery store, so not only was it cheap, but it was healthy, too,” I went on.

  “Ooh—I love that!” Lana exclaimed. “I always get nervous about not knowing what chemicals are in cleansers and things like that.”

  Cassie looked like this was the most disgusting thing she had ever heard.

  “Plus, it sounds like more of an opportunity for you guys to bond than being at a spa,” said my dad.

  “That’s a good point,” Lana agreed.

  “I think Avery’s idea is wonderful,” Cassie said in a sickly sweet voice. “And something that would be a ton of fun to do on a regular Saturday night—you know, a non-special-occasion one.”

  “Cassie’s right,” I said nervously. Why had I brought this up?! All the work I had done to make her like me, and now I was back to square one! “It’s not something you do before an important event. Like a wedding.”

  “To me, that sounds like the best time to do it,” Lana said. She turned to my dad. “What do you think, sweetheart? Do you think you can find some way to amuse yourself while we have a Girls’ Night In a week from Saturday?”

  “Nothing would make me happier,” he said, giving me a big smile.

  I tried to smile back, but I had a feeling it looked pretty wobbly. Especially when I saw Cassie glaring at me out of the corner of my eye.