Staying Together (8 page)

“I'm so proud of you,” said Mrs. Hamilton, and she smoothed Willow's hair back from her forehead. “Proud of you and Cole both. You've turned out just fine.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Mrs. Hamilton kissed Willow's cheek, switched off her reading light, and moved quietly across the room. As she passed the closet she hesitated. Then she turned the knob, swung the door open, and left it at an exact ninety-degree angle to the wall.

“Good night, darling,” she said.

Flora's alarm went off shrilly and she lay in her bed, trying to keep her eyes open. If she closed them, she knew she would fall asleep again, even with the alarm blaring in her ear. She opened her eyes wide, actually held them apart with her fingers for a few moments, and then raised the window shade. Only then did she turn off the alarm. She sat on the edge of her bed before finally getting to her feet and stepping into the hall. The door to Ruby's room was open and she heard her sister say, “Rabbit, rabbit.”

Flora frowned. “It isn't May first,” she whispered loudly. “There's, like, eight more days of April.”

Ruby rolled over in her bed. “I know. I just wanted to see if I could get you to talk to me. You really are terrible at the silent treatment.”

Flora blushed and was glad Ruby couldn't see her face in the semidarkness. “Well, at least I'm not a liar.”

“What? I couldn't hear you.”

“I said, ‘At least I'm not a liar.'”

“What?”

“I'm not a liar!”

“You're going to have to speak up,” said Ruby.

Flora stomped off to the bathroom.

A few minutes later, on her way back to her room, she passed Ruby in the hallway and whipped her head around so that she was facing the wall.

Ruby whipped her head in the other direction.

“Liar,” whispered Flora to the wall.

“I heard that.”

At breakfast that morning, Flora sat next to Ruby instead of across from her. It was easier not to look at her that way. She speared her scrambled eggs ferociously, causing them to skid across her plate and onto the table.

Ruby giggled.

Flora scooped them into her napkin and emptied the napkin onto Ruby's plate.

“Flora!” exclaimed Min.

“Well, would you want someone to laugh at you if you made a mistake?”

Min looked thoughtful. “I might try to have a sense of humor about it. Flora, please get Ruby another plate and give her some more eggs.”

“Thank you, Min. I appreciate that,” Ruby replied meekly. She said nothing, however, when Flora set the clean plate in front of her.

“You're welcome,” said Flora loudly.

Min eyed Flora over her reading glasses. “Anything wrong?”

“Nope.”

“Ruby? Anything wrong at your end?”

“Nope.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“Actually,” Flora replied, “there is a slight problem. I think there's something Ruby wants to tell you.”

“No! No, there isn't!” yelped Ruby. “Everything's fine, Min. I promise. Sorry, Flora. Sorry for teasing you. I shouldn't have done that.”

“Thank you for apologizing, Ruby. That's very nice of you,” said Min.

“Um, I'm sorry, too,” Flora said, managing a glance in Ruby's direction.

“You know, your mother and Aunt Allie used to fight,” commented Min.

“Really?” said Flora with interest.

“Like cats and dogs.”

Ruby glanced down at King Comma and Daisy, who were seated side by side, patiently waiting for someone to be clumsy enough to drop food onto the floor. Every now and then King would glance at Daisy or vice versa. It was as if they were holding a conversation with their eyes.

I thought those eggs were going to land on the floor
.

Me, too. Bad luck. Remember that time a whole muffin fell down?

Like it was yesterday
.

“King and Daisy don't fight,” Ruby pointed out. “Not anymore, anyway.”

“It's just an expression,” replied Min. “The point is that your mother and Aunt Allie used to have big fights. Once they didn't speak for nearly two months.”

“Why not?” asked Flora.

“Something about a boy.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “Boys,” she said, “are not worth fighting about.”

It was on the tip of Flora's tongue to say that lying
was
worth fighting about, but Min went on, “It's usually better to get things out in the open.”

“Usually,” echoed Flora, and now she looked pointedly at Ruby, but Ruby was suddenly very busy opening a jar of jam.

Flora took great pride in the fact that she had recently become a working girl. She volunteered at Three Oaks, where her old Row House neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Willet, now lived. Once a week, Mr. Pennington drove Flora to the retirement community, and while Flora donned her Helping Hand apron and delivered flowers and pushed wheelchairs and re-shelved books in the library, Mr. Pennington visited with Mr. Willet.

“See you in two hours!” Flora called to Mr. Pennington one afternoon as he stepped into the elevator. She wound her way through the corridors to the front desk at Three Oaks and greeted Dee, who was typing at a computer. “Hi,” Flora said. “What do you want me to do today?”

Dee smiled at her. “We're busy. And we're shorthanded. Could you help set up chairs in the auditorium? We're having a speaker tonight.”

“Sure,” Flora replied. She spent the next half hour happily arranging rows of chairs in the auditorium. After that, she stapled together two hundred copies of Three Oaks's weekly bulletin; read to Mr. Cooke, who was ninety-nine years old, completely blind, and said he couldn't live without a daily dose of Shakespeare (Flora was pretty sure she had mispronounced quite a few words, but Mr. Cooke didn't complain); and finally decided to visit Mrs. Willet in her room in the wing for people with Alzheimer's disease.

Flora let herself into the wing by punching in a code on a keypad. She didn't know how Mr. Willet could bear to visit his wife in a locked wing every day, but when she had once asked Min about this, her grandmother had replied that you would be surprised what you can get used to.

“But she's locked in!” Flora had exclaimed.

“She's safe.”

“She's Mr. Willet's
wife
. How can he stand it?”

“What's his choice?”

“She could live with him in his apartment.”

Min had shaken her head. “No. She needs full-time care. Mr. Willet can't manage that.”

“I know,” Flora had said. But every time she punched in the code and waited for the door to click open, she felt a pang like a jolt of electricity delivered to the core of her body.

Flora greeted the nurses at their station and walked along the quiet corridor to a door with a wreath of dried roses on it. She had made the wreath herself and given it to Mrs. Willet on her birthday. She hadn't wrapped it, since Mrs. Willet didn't understand about opening presents. And she hadn't expected a thank-you, since Mrs. Willet rarely spoke. But she had been surprised and pleased when Mrs. Willet had looked at the wreath and smiled broadly. Later, Mr. Willet had hung it on her door.

Flora peeked into the room. “Mrs. Willet?” she said softly, and saw that the old woman was snoozing in her armchair. She hesitated and stepped back into the hallway, then changed her mind and entered the room anyway. She stood for nearly a minute watching Mrs. Willet sleep. Mrs. Willet's face was peaceful, but her hands, fingers interlaced, bounced up and down in her lap. Her eyes remained closed, though, so finally Flora whispered, “See you next week,” and tiptoed away.

She made her way to Mr. Willet's apartment then and found Mr. Willet and Mr. Pennington deep in conversation.

“Am I interrupting something?” asked Flora.

“Not at all,” said Mr. Pennington.

Mr. Willet added, “We're just a couple of old geezers.” He held up a T-shirt. “Look what my niece sent me.”

Flora peered at the writing on the front of the shirt. “‘Old Geezer,'” she read, and personally thought that the shirt was not a very nice gift but refrained from saying so.

Ten minutes later, Flora and Mr. Pennington and Mr. Willet said their good-byes, and soon Flora was on her way home. One of the nice things, she thought, about being a working girl was that it kept her mind off of herself. And off of Ruby and their fight.

Min had not returned from Needle and Thread when Flora stepped into the Row House, so Flora checked her assignments, realized she could do all her homework after dinner, and set about preparing the meal. She chopped vegetables for a salad, decided to bake potatoes, and put one of Min's casseroles in the oven. She was feeding King Comma and Daisy when Ruby came home. Wordlessly, Ruby began to set the table, and she was just finishing up when the front door opened. Moments later, Min appeared in the kitchen.

“Oh, wonderful, Ruby. Thank you for setting the table.”

“You're welcome.”

“Hi, honey,” Min said to Flora, and kissed her cheek. “How was Three Oaks?”

“It was fine.” Flora waited for Min to comment on dinner, which everyone could smell. When she didn't, Flora finally said, “I started dinner.” The problem with having been responsible and helpful your entire life, Flora reflected, was that eventually people took you for granted. On the other hand, if Ruby so much as blotted up a spot on the counter, Min practically bought her a ticket to Disney World.

“Well, dinner,” said Ruby dismissively. “I think that's a casserole
you
made, isn't it, Min?”

Flora fumed but held her tongue until dinner had been eaten and the kitchen tidied. The moment Min stepped out for an evening visit with Mr. Pennington, Flora raged up the stairs to her sister's room. The door was ajar, and Flora pushed it open with a bang. “Okay, that's
it
!” she exclaimed.

Ruby was sitting on her bed, her math book open beside her, a comic book spread across her knees. When the door flew open, she jumped and the comic slid to the floor. “Hey!” cried Ruby. “What are you
do
ing?”

“Listen, Little Miss Perfect, you have to tell Min about the owl. Now.”

“What?
Why?
”

“Because I can't take one more second of what you're doing to Min.”

“What am I doing to her?”

“You're going out of your way to make her think you've changed —”

“I
have
changed.”

“But you haven't told her the reason you've changed. I think she might like to know the reason, don't you?”

Ruby glared at Flora. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that you have to tell Min the truth. You can't keep covering this up. It's too big.”

Ruby shrugged at her sister, popped her gum, and retrieved her comic book.

“I'm not kidding, Ruby. Tell her the truth. Or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I'll tell her myself.”

Ruby's eyes widened. “You're not going to do that! You'd just be a tattletale.”

It was Flora's turn to shrug. “It's up to you. Either you tell her or I will.” She looked at her watch. “Min said she'll be back in half an hour.”

“Wait, Flora. Don't tell her. Please. I'll do it. I promise. Only … I need time to figure out what I'm going to say to her. And not half an hour. More than that.”

“How much more?”

“A month?” said Ruby in a small voice.

“I'll give you two weeks. Period. The end.”

Bill Willet sat in an armchair in the living room of his apartment at Three Oaks. He stared across the room at the couch where he had tossed the loathsome Old Geezer T-shirt. He couldn't imagine what had possessed his niece to send it to him. She must have thought it was funny. But there really wasn't anything funny about old geezers, particularly when you were eighty years old and had no hair and lived in … Well, let's face it, as nice as Three Oaks was, and no matter what you called it, it was still an old people's home.