The Good Sister (3 page)

“I don’t want to stay alone with her.”

“I’ve got a job, Roxanne. Mr. Brickman depends on me.”

Mr. Brickman, the manager, called Mommy all the time and sometimes at night he drove her to meetings
about serious dealership business. She got dressed up for her job as his secretary and was always excited when the day began;
but by the time she fetched Roxanne from Mrs. Edison in the afternoon, her mood had soured and she couldn’t wait to pop open
a beer, sit on the couch, and watch television.

“What about my toys?” There hadn’t been room for much in her pink backpack. “And my books?”

“Your grandmother’s got a whole roomful of books.”

This was the first good news Roxanne had heard.

“What kind of books?”

“Book-books. How should I know?”

She had seen her mother read only magazines and sometimes the newspaper. “You don’t like books.”

“What I don’t like is being told I have to read them or else I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid, Mommy.”

“Well, thank you very much.” Her mother looked at her for so long that Roxanne started to worry she would crash the car. “Sometimes
I’m not so sure.”

Mommy said, “Watch for the signs to Visalia.”

“Is that where we’re going? Are we going to Visalia?”

“Jesus, Rox. I told you we’re going to Daneville. The turnoff’s near Visalia.”

Mommy put her foot on the gas and passed a truck driven by a man in a white straw hat. Roxanne smiled at him and waved her
silver pinwheel and he waved back.

She risked another question.

“How come you don’t like her?”

“Did I say that?”

“Is she your mother?”

“No. She’s Jackie Kennedy’s mother. What do you think, Roxanne? Jesus.”

Mommy muttered something else. Roxanne saw her lips move, but the only sounds she heard were clicks and puffs. Back in wintertime
Roxanne had had an earache and now she didn’t hear very well in her left ear.

Mommy jerked the wheel, turning onto an exit.

“Is this Visalia?”

“If I don’t get a Coke soon, I’m going to pass out.”

Four cars awaited their turn at the take-out window at Jack in the Box. Four plus the Buick made five. Roxanne figured that
without counting on her fingers. Adding and take-away were simple if the numbers weren’t too big, but she worried about multiplication.
Even the name was hard to say.

“What about school?”

“Oh, believe me, the old lady’ll get you to school. She’s big on school.”

The words sounded good, but Mommy’s tone said otherwise.

“Does Daddy know I’m going to Gran’s?”

Mommy’s face went suddenly scarlet. “Do you think that’s funny?”

“What’s funny?”

“He’s dead, Roxanne. Remember? You must have a hole in your head.”

She didn’t want to remember Mommy crying, throwing kitchen pans into the wall and screaming,
What the fuck am I supposed to do now?
Later Mrs. Edison had come over, and she and Mommy drank whiskey. Mrs. Edison said, “They always leave. One way or another.”

“How did he die?”

“He was a Marine. Marines die.” Ellen took her right hand off the wheel and reached behind her head, lifting her long hair
off the back of her neck. “Judas Priest, I hate this fucking valley.”

Roxanne stared at the shiny car radio and read the name written across the top:
MOTOROLA
. In books and on television if a girl’s father died, there was a funeral and a lot of food, and the girl cried and everyone
was nice to her. But nothing like that had happened as far as Roxanne knew.

“Did Daddy have a funeral?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Just forget about it.”

Roxanne pulled her legs up onto the seat and wrapped her arms around her knees. Her daddy was dead but she didn’t feel sad,
not even a little bit. She just wanted to forget about it.

Back on the highway, Roxanne fell asleep; when she awoke they were driving on a two-lane road, and on both sides rows of trees
lined up at attention. She tried to count
them but they went by too fast and made her go cross-eyed. Through the car’s open window the air smelled like fruit and wine
mixed up together. Weeds stood stiff and brown at the edge of the road, but beyond them the trees were dark green and cast
pools of deep shade.

“Does my grandmother have a hammock?”

“How should I know? I haven’t seen her since before you were born.”

There was a world of lonely meaning in her mother’s response, and Roxanne knew better than to ask about it.

“Will she like me?”

“If you behave yourself.”

“How do I behave myself?”

“Goddamn it, Roxanne, you’ve gotta give me some room here, some air. I can’t breathe with all these questions. She’s okay,
you might even like her. She’s… orderly, like you.”

Orderly and books and big on school.

“Tell me what day you’ll come back.”

“You think I have a calendar in my head?”

Roxanne liked calendars.

“I’m starting in first grade.”

“And you’re gonna be dynamite.”

“I saw my teacher. Her name is Mrs. Enos and she has orange hair.”

“Roxanne, please—”

“I told her I could read recipes. I know the words for milk and butter and eggs and—”

“Don’t do this to me, Rox.” Her mother’s voice cracked like the sidewalk in front of the house. “I’m warning you, don’t push
your luck.”

They drove past a house with a water tower beside it, a field where people were picking something, a fruit stand with boards
nailed across the front, and Roxanne waved at a boy riding a fat horse beside the road. All the questions she had been wanting
to ask had joined up into one huge thing she had to know, right then and immediately.

“Will you come back?”

Her mother hunched over the wheel, scowling at the road.

“Promise?”

“What?”

“Promise you’ll come back so I can go to first grade.”

Her mother slammed her foot on the brake and turned the car left, across the pavement and into a driveway lined with thick-trunked
palm trees like huge dusty-green toadstools. Ahead Roxanne saw a two-story house built of stone and wood with a pointed roof
and a wide porch, surrounded by so many trees that she could see only three or four windows. On one side there was a water
tower, on the other a long, low shed that extended the depth of the house. An old truck and a pile of rusty machinery stood
off to one side of it.

Nothing looked ordinary or familiar, nothing looked absolutely safe.

“Promise, Mommy?”

July 2009

R
oxanne finished her second cup of coffee as she scanned the to-do list sharing space on the refrigerator door with pictures
of her sister, Simone, and her family. On the to-do list more than half the items were circled—done, accomplished—but she
fixed on those that weren’t. There were similar lists in the bedroom and stuck to the bathroom mirror, a world of things to
do before she and her husband, Ty, were due at the airport. Lists, calendars, clocks: she relied on these to navigate her
world, and if Ty got this job in Chicago it would mean lists on top of lists; even the lists would have lists to keep her
from getting lost.

A turquoise enamel bowl piled with nectarines sat on a counter in the kitchen of the bungalow on Little Goldfinch Street.
They’d be ready in a day or two, but she and Ty wouldn’t be there to enjoy them. She would take
the fruit to school when she went to her meeting. They would spoil if left on the counter over the weekend and be tasteless
if she refrigerated them. Roxanne never wasted anything if she could help it.

Though it was barely eight a.m., the July day was already hot and the air carried a hint of the humidity that would come in
August. Roxanne was still in her dressing gown, barefoot, a pencil stuck behind her ear. Chowder, the family layabout, sprawled
on the kitchen floor, panting and pleased with himself after a good run.

Roxanne was mildly irritated that Ty had taken time for a run that morning when they both had so much to do. He wore his old
shorts and an MIT T-shirt thinned by a thousand washings and smelled pleasantly of clean sweat. His beat-up running shoes
were only four months old but had already traveled hundreds of miles. He had a tall, lean runner’s body and looks that were
both homely and handsome at the same time; his was the kind of large-featured face that got better-looking with age. After
she met him, Elizabeth, Roxanne’s best friend, had said that by the time Ty was fifty Roxanne would have to beat off the competition
with a stick.

He gestured her over to the kitchen window. “Our friend’s back.” He pointed to an iridescent green hummingbird dipping its
spike beak into the cup of a red trumpet flower, emerging with a crown of gold dust. For half a moment Roxanne tried to see
them living in an apartment in the Windy City, in what would always be to
her—thanks to her grandmother’s leatherbound edition of Carl Sandburg’s poems—the hog butcher to the world. No trumpet vines
there, no pollen-crowned hummingbirds.

It was not a happy thought so she put it aside in a part of her mind labeled
LATER
. In a few hours she and Ty would board a plane for Chicago, where he was interviewing for a senior position at the University
of Chicago. She’d been trying for a month to accept the possibility of a major move, but she hadn’t had much luck so far.
He was sure to get the job and when he did,
LATER
would become
NOW
and
NOW
meant
TROUBLE.

“Shall we eat at the airport?” Ty asked. “I know you never like to miss a chance for fast food.”

That morning she wasn’t amused by jokes made at her expense. So what if “fast” was her cuisine of choice? Not everyone had
been fortunate enough to have a mother who made dinner every night, all food groups present and accounted for.

“Can you take Chowder to the pet sitter?” She heard her voice—crisp, efficient, a little chilly—and wanted to take the question
back, start again. She knew she was being a pain but the closer they got to takeoff, the harder it was to pretend away her
apprehension. Common sense told her that Ty hadn’t meant his food crack as criticism, but they’d been married less than a
year; she wasn’t used to being teased, however lovingly.

She laid her hand on his forearm. “I’m sorry, honey, I’m just feeling the pressure. I should be out of the meeting by
one but a roomful of teachers… it could go on way past that. There might not be time for dinner at all.”

Roxanne had taught at Balboa Middle School for more than ten years; she knew that Mitch Stoddard, the principal, would understand
if she no-showed, but she never liked to miss a meeting, especially not one where new hires would be introduced, first impressions
made, and a pile of new rules and regulations presented.

Ty said, “No problem, I’ll take Chow to the lab and drop him off after. Don’t be nervous, Roxy. It’ll all get done.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Chicago will love me, love you, they’ll beg us to join their elite faculty, and we’ll be the belles of the ball.” He put
his arms around her. “Trust me, even if they hate us, it doesn’t really matter.”

“But it does. You want this job.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not like I’m unhappy at the Salk.”

Roxanne wanted to ask,
If you’re not unhappy, why are we flying halfway across the country for an interview?
Ty had been a research biologist at the Salk Institute for eight years, loved the work and was good at it; but he said he
was ready for a change. The Chicago job would mean a full professorship and a chance to continue his research into new antibiotics
with the full weight and influence of the University of Chicago behind him. He could trivialize the outcome of this weekend’s
interviews and meetings, the dinner parties Roxanne particularly
dreaded, but she wasn’t fooled. He would be disappointed if he didn’t ace the interviews and get an offer. As she told Elizabeth,
she would go with him to Mars if he asked; but that didn’t mean she had any enthusiasm for leaving San Diego, her job, her
friends. And her sister. Mostly she didn’t want to leave Simone.

“What am I going to say to these people, Ty? They’re going to think you married an airhead. I don’t know anything about biology—”

“Holy shit! Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

He could make her laugh, make her doubts and anxieties seem unimportant.

“Just be yourself, Roxy. The only thing I worry about is you’ll forget to breathe. You’re like our friend the hummingbird
out there. You don’t dare relax.”

She didn’t like being compared to a bird.

Until Roxanne heard her sister’s name, the radio had been background noise, muttering to itself from the top of the refrigerator.

She turned up the volume as the announcer said, “About now Simone and Johnny Duran are probably asking themselves why they
decided to have kids.”

“Cue screaming brats,” said the cackling sidekick, and the recorded wails of half a dozen children filled the kitchen.

“God, that man is irritating,” Ty said and turned down the volume slightly.

“Yesterday, San Diego police responded to a 911 call
from a girl who said her mother was trying to drown her sister in the swimming pool. At the Duran residence.”

“I have to get over there!” Roxanne cried.

“Cue screaming sirens.”

Chowder’s head came up and he looked around. Another two seconds of this and he’d start howling.

“Seems the kiddies had learned all about the emergency call number 911 the day before—”

Roxanne was on her way to the bedroom, shrugging off her dressing gown as she went. She opened her closet and pulled pants
and a shirt off their hangers. “It’s probably nothing, but I’ve got to check. Simone’ll be in a state.”

“What about the meeting?” Ty stood in the bedroom doorway and watched her dress. “You want me to call Mitch?”

“Just tell him I’m at Simone’s. He’ll get it.” By now half of San Diego would have heard the news.

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