Sister Mine (6 page)

We all have our own definitions of duty.

Chapter Five

M
Y HOUSE IS A HOMELY HOME.
The barn-red paint job is peeling, and the front porch sags alarmingly. It sits about forty feet from the road and is surrounded by so many trees, including two unruly willows that are twice its height, that it's very difficult to see and if somebody does catch a glimpse of it they usually think it's an abandoned outbuilding belonging to a nearby farm.

The interior consists of two bedrooms, one bath, and a large living room area that extends into a roomy eat-in kitchen.

I don't need much square footage, since I'm only one person and don't plan to become more than one, but I do need a lot of space and that's why I love my house. Even though it's relatively small, it has high ceilings and few walls and hardwood floors. Anything that muffles sound makes me claustrophobic.

As I near my driveway, I'm surprised to see Gimp sitting at the end of it. I could've sworn I left him inside with the door closed this morning.

“Hey, boy,” I call out my window.

He raises his gray muzzle and fixes his copper eyes on mine while slowly swishing his tail back and forth across the gravel.

I got him from a farm twelve years ago when I started working for the Centresburg police and moved back to Jolly Mount.

I called ahead so the farmer knew I was coming. E.J. came with me. We parked near the barn and sat in the car waiting for him. The next thing we knew a German shepherd mutt—who turned out to be the mother of the litter—came loping toward us on three legs. We'd find out later she'd been hit by a car. A few minutes after that a three-legged black Lab appeared. He'd been caught in a thresher.

E.J. turned to me and said, “If the farmer comes out on one leg, we're getting the hell out of here.”

Afterward, Gimp was the only name we could come up with for the puppy.

He doesn't look particularly anxious to get up and walk back down the driveway.

“Give me a break,” I tell him but I go ahead and let the lazy mutt in and give him a lift.

There's a car I've never seen before parked in front of my house. It has a New Mexico license plate.

Gimp won't get out of the car. I have to pick him up and set him back on the ground.

“Have I complimented you lately on your guard dog skills?” I ask him.

At that moment, my front door creaks open and a face peers out.

I head toward her, walking at first, then I'm running.

She meets me on the porch.

I kiss her and touch her hair and nuzzle her neck to see if she still smells like my kin.

I try to hold her, but it's not easy to do since she looks to be about nine months pregnant.

Chapter Six

I
'M COOKING DINNER.
I keep glancing back and forth between the dried beef I'm sizzling in a frying pan with butter, and the extremely pregnant stranger sitting at my table who was my skinny teenaged sister the last time I saw her. Each time I look in her direction, I expect her to be gone.

“I'm really sorry about this,” I say, gesturing at the frying pan with my wooden spoon. “I have no food in the house. Nothing. I really need to get to the grocery store.”

“It's okay,” she says.

I look over at her toying with the stem of her wineglass. She has her feet propped up and her head tilted back with her eyes closed and her hands resting calmly on the hill of her belly.

I've noticed that she's carrying low for a first baby, and she moves fairly carelessly for a first-time mother. No walking on eggshells. No lowering and raising herself in and out of chairs with infinite patience. No cradling or stroking her stomach.

“I haven't had creamed dried beef since we were kids. We practically lived on the stuff. Remember?”

She smiles at the memory. To me it's not a good memory. It reminds me of how poor we were and how the cooking duties in our household fell to me, a child.

I may never have earned an anti-stress badge but by the time I was the age of Pamela Jameson's niece, I could make a dinner for two children and a 200-pound coal miner out of a loaf of Wonder bread, a can of green beans, and some leftover gravy.

“Yeah, I remember,” I say.

“What was it Lib said they called it in the army? Shit on a shingle?” she laughs.

I laugh, too, but I'm not feeling merry. I want to remind her how much she used to hate creamed dried beef, but I don't.

Something's not right with Shannon. During the hour or so she's been here she's chatted happily about our childhood, sugarcoating our lives and our relationship with our father in a hyper-sentimental way usually reserved for bad TV movies about country folk produced by people who've never set foot out of L.A. or New York City.

She even makes the occasional comment about someone outside our family who I'm amazed she can remember, like this reference to Lib who worked with our dad in Beverly back before he became boss of his own crew in Jojo. Shannon would only have known him from company picnics and the times he dropped Dad off at the house when he was too drunk to drive.

To hear her talk, hers was a swell life in a swell place that she remembers vividly and fondly, yet she ran away from all of it and stayed away for eighteen years.

I add some flour to the beef mixture, then the milk.

So far we've managed to completely avoid the topics of why she left, why she never came back, and why she never contacted me, but the questions sit in the room with us, taking up more space and more oxygen than either one of our physical bodies.

She did give me a brief account of her most recent life and the circumstances that brought her to my doorstep. According to her, she's been living in a little town in New Mexico, another one of those towns I've probably never heard of. She had a fairly decent job working at a car rental place until they had to cut their staff in half and she was canned. She not only lost her income but also her health insurance.

That was four months ago. She hasn't been able to find another job—who wants to hire a pregnant woman?—and she had to pay her bills with the little savings she had managed to put away to buy things for the baby. She lost her apartment, and she's two months late on her car payments.

The father of the baby isn't in the picture.

The combination of her dire circumstances and the emotional turmoil of being pregnant with her first child reduced her to a desperate, sentimental wreck, and she decided to drive cross-country into the arms of her big sister in her hour of need, in the hopes that I'd let bygones be bygones and take her in.

I haven't told her that I know there's a New York lawyer looking for her because he has something he wants to “give her,” and there's also a rich woman from Connecticut here claiming she kidnapped her child, or that I've seen a photo taken of her about a week ago in New York City where she's holding a bulging Macy's shopping bag and wearing a pair of expensive-looking, handmade cowboy boots, or that I realize from all my years watching rich D.C. ladies come and go through my security checkpoints that the cut and texture and perfect copper highlights in her auburn hair come from an elite salon where an appointment probably costs more than a week's paycheck working at a car rental agency, or that I've heard she sometimes goes by an alias, and it's the name of a girl she used to hate.

I have to give her credit. She's done a good job of dressing the part of a poor, out-of-work, unwed mother: maternity jeans, a big tent-sized work shirt in pink denim that looks like it's been washed a hundred times, and a pair of old white gym shoes. But she forgot about her purse; it's a soft, brown leather Coach hobo bag. She left it sitting on the end of my couch.

It's not only the lying that's bothering me. My emotions are twisted up in a way I can't explain. Our reunion should fill me with so much relief and joy that I can't feel anything else. Instead those feelings are taking a backseat to a slowly building anger and resentment.

I suppose it's no different than the way parents feel when a child is late coming home and can't be tracked down and all kinds of terrible, panicked thoughts begin to invade their minds. When the child does finally appear unharmed, an immense love swells up inside them and they're willing to forgive everything, then this is quickly followed by a desire to beat the child senseless for being stupid and selfish and worrying them.

I've never experienced this firsthand. Clay was always home on time even though I wasn't always there waiting for him.

“Do you mind shelling these hardboiled eggs for me?” I ask her.

“No problem.”

I hand the bowl to her, pop some bread in the toaster, and go back to stirring the sauce.

While I'm waiting for it to thicken, I listen to the crack of Shannon tapping the eggs against the table and the clink of each tiny piece of shattered shell as she tosses it back into the bowl.

“This is really informal,” I apologize again.

Gimp raises his muzzle and his tail slowly thumps against the floor at the sound of my voice and the sight of me walking to the table with food in my hands.

I set the skillet and a plate of toast in front of Shannon.

“I could have had something great for you if I'd have known you were coming.”

I look her directly in the eyes as I say it. Our eyes are exactly the same: the same shape and the same shade of golden brown, like butter and brown sugar melting together. It's the only feature we share. We shared it with Mom, too. I used to show Shannon photos of Mom and she'd take them and stand in front of the mirror holding them up next to her, comparing herself.

I hold her stare for a moment, willing her to explain the abruptness and the true reason for her visit after all these lost years, but she doesn't take the bait.

“At least you have wine,” she says.

She raises her glass to me, drains it, and reaches for the bottle.

“Are you sure you should do that?” I ask her.

She gives me a smile that borders on patronizing.

“Don't tell me you're going to start lecturing me on prenatal care. Save your breath. I know…”

She stops and looks away from me.

“I know all about it. I've read tons of books, and I had a good doctor up until I lost my health insurance,” she continues. “Two glasses of wine aren't going to hurt anything.”

“This will be your third.”

“I didn't realize. I guess I was all caught up in the celebration.”

She takes her hand off the bottle.

Instead she reaches for the toast and rips it into bite-sized pieces she drops on her plate, then takes an egg and dices it with a knife while holding it cupped in her hand.

I take the bottle and fill my own glass.

“Aren't you going to ask me about Dad?” I wonder aloud.

She dumps the egg on the toast and starts heaping spoonfuls of dried beef on top of it.

“He's dead. What's to ask?”

The bluntness of her response catches me off guard, not to mention that she knew he was dead.

The shock must be showing on my face because she goes on to explain, “It was on the news. The accident in Beverly. It didn't get the kind of crazy coverage Jojo got, but that was because the Jojo miners survived. The media can't dwell on dead miners for more than a day or two. You can't put corpses on
Jay Leno.
”

Her sudden flippancy makes her sound like an entirely different person than the one who was looking forward to creamed dried beef. She was the same way as a kid; she could be sweet and accommodating, then turn hostile and defensive for reasons I never understood.

“So you knew about Jojo, too?”

“How could I not know? It was on every channel, every magazine, every newspaper.”

“So you knew Jimmy was one of the miners who was trapped? And E.J.?”

She nods while she begins shoveling food into her mouth.

I think about her sitting in a nice home somewhere eating a bowl of popcorn, watching the Jolly Mount Mine Disaster unfold on national news along with the rest of the country and never once feeling like she should get in touch with any of us, never once feeling like she should come home.

It's not the life I'd usually imagine for a former teen runaway. Usually when a girl runs away from home she heads for a big city like New York or L.A. She ends up becoming a hooker or a drug addict or both or something equally awful. She ends up dying young or in jail or with some sort of lifestyle that isn't conducive to re-establishing family ties. She spends each day just trying to survive in a world where everyone she meets wants to use and abuse her.

I watch Shannon eat. She's relaxed, clean, sober, healthy, well fed, and carrying a $400 purse.

“Where were you living when you heard about Jojo? New Mexico?” I ask her.

“Yeah, I've been there for awhile. So how's Clay?” she changes the subject.

“He's good. He's here in Jolly Mount, too. He's a Laurel County deputy.”

“No kidding? He was just a little kid the last time I saw him.”

“I know,” I say.

I take a sip of wine and watch her, waiting to see if she has anything more to say on the subject, but the food on her plate holds her attention.

“So I guess it runs in the family,” she says between bites. “Is Sheriff Jack still around? He'd have to be a hundred years old by now.”

“He died about a year ago, and he was only sixty-five. Heart attack. You'll never believe who's the sheriff now.”

“I give up.”

“Do you remember Ivan Z, the hotshot football star at Centresburg High who went on to be the hotshot football star at Penn State and got drafted by the Bears?”

“Of course. He was in the local paper all the time. He was hot.”

“What would you know? You were only nine when he graduated from high school.”

“I was as old as you were when you were mooning over Lib all the time and spending every waking moment doing God knows what with E.J.”

“What are you talking about? I never mooned over Lib, and I definitely never did God knows what with E.J. Never.”

“Too bad for you. He was cute, too. So Ivan's the sheriff now?”

I nod and drink.

“He left town for a long time after he had that accident at Gertie and smashed up his knee and couldn't play pro ball.”

“I remember that. You would have thought the president died. Didn't they even fly the flag at half mast at the high school?”

I nod again and drink some more.

Ivan was definitely a good-looking kid. He had a great body, too, and one of those magnetic personalities that drew people to him whether he wanted the attention or not, yet at the same time there was a kind of tortured haze clouding his baby blues from time to time. It was the same Doomed Adonis quality that JFK Jr. and James Dean had, only instead of being a Rebel Without a Cause, Ivan was more of a Conformist Without a Reason.

Considering our individual promiscuity and our severely limited mating pool, the law of averages predicted we'd end up together one night, and we did.

We had a good romp. Then we drank a few beers and had another one.

Afterward, he said he'd ask me to marry him if he had any intention of ever settling down but he was planning on a lifetime of sleeping with beautiful girls. I told him it was okay: I was hoping for a lifetime of stimulating conversation.

“He came back a couple years ago and Jack gave him a job as a deputy,” I finish telling Shannon.

“Let me guess. Sheriff Jack was a Penn State alum.”

She reaches for the skillet and helps herself to a second serving.

We eat the rest of our dinner in silence. I easily finish the bottle of wine by myself.

“If you don't mind, I'd like to lie down. I'm really tired,” Shannon says to me as we start clearing off the table.

“Sure. There's a pullout bed in the guest room. I'll get some sheets and fix it up for you.”

I glance at her. She does look tired.

“We should probably find you a local doctor, too,” I add.

“Don't worry. I'll take care of all that stuff,” she replies.

I make up the bed for her and return to find her standing in front of one of my bookshelves.

“You still have these stupid books?” she asks me.

She pulls out the National Geographic volume on India and opens it to an aerial photo of a kaleidoscope of women milling around a crowded marketplace in their dazzling saris.

A few years after my mom died, Isabel and Jimmy gave me a membership to the National Geographic Book Club for my birthday, and every month a slim, hardcover volume filled with glossy photos of exotic locales would arrive with the rest of our mail.