The Space Between Sisters (9 page)

“Did
that
lead to a lawsuit?” Everett asked, an amused expression on his face.

“No. The school principal came to my rescue. He's a big supporter of mine, and he calmed the mother down. He told her that ‘all great art comes at a price.'”

“He's right, you know,” Everett said. “I once went two days without sleep designing a website for a pest control company.”

Win laughed and reached for the bottle of wine. It was almost empty. “We drank the whole bottle?” she asked him in amazement.

“We did,” Everett said, with a seriousness that made her laugh again. “Actually,” he amended, “you drank most of it.”

“That's not like me
at all,
” she said.

“Well, if it's any consolation, I ate most of the lasagna. But that
is
like me.”

Outside the dining room windows the sun had set, and the
sky had shaded from pale pink to deep lavender. It was dusk, Win's favorite time of day in the summer and, as far as she was concerned, there was only one place to be as evening turned into night at the cabin. “Are you afraid of heights?” she asked Everett.

T
his is so cool,” he murmured. They were sitting on the edge of the boathouse roof, their feet dangling over the lake, which was twelve feet below them. In another half an hour, the sky and the water would be dark, but for now they both held the last vestiges of daylight within them, the sky a dark purple, the water a cobalt blue. A breeze blew then. It had the first hint of the night's coolness in it, and it stirred the branches of the great northern pines, and sent diamond points of light dancing over the water.

“It
is
pretty cool,” Win agreed. “You're not nervous about being up here, are you?”

“No. Should I be?”

She shook her head. “The water's deep enough here to jump into. I used to do it, too, when I was little, but only when my grandmother wasn't watching.” She'd had to jump alone, though; Poppy was afraid of heights.

And, as if on cue, her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She slid it out. It was a text from Poppy.

       
Poppy:
What's going on???

       
Win
: Everett and I are on the boathouse roof.

       
Poppy
: He's been here forever. What have you been doing?

       
Win
: Eating. And talking.

       
Poppy:
I hope you saved me some lasagna.

       
Win:
Yep. It's on the kitchen counter.

       
Poppy:
Good. I'm going to take some of it to my room. I'm so hungry I almost ate my slipper!!!

       
Win:
Maybe you still should.

       
Poppy:
???

       
Win:
For being such a jerk to Everett, who, btw, is a really nice guy.

Win put her phone back in her pocket. “Poppy,” she said, by way of explanation.

Everett nodded, but he didn't ask her when Poppy would be home, and she felt relieved. She hated lying. She hated playing games. And, right now, she hated Poppy,
just a little,
for putting her in a position tonight where she'd felt compelled to do both of these things. She didn't know Everett very well, obviously, but she couldn't help but feel he deserved better than being treated like this. She tried to think, now, of a tactful way of warning him off, or of giving him her own version of Poppy's “speech,” but she decided against it. They were having too nice of an evening. Besides, he didn't seem like an unintelligent person. He seemed, in fact, quite the opposite. He'd figure it out. To know Poppy, after all, was to know that, in some very fundamental way, she was unavailable. Out of reach. And not just out of reach to Everett, but to most of the people in her life. Even, sometimes, to Win.

“How well do you know my sister?” she asked, casually.

He shrugged. “Not that well. I used to see her every morning, though, at this coffeehouse in our neighborhood. She'd be there to get a latte; I'd be there to work. On my laptop, I mean. It was great. For the price of a cup of coffee, and all of the ones I could stuff in the tip jar, I'd have an office for the day.”

She smiled. “I worked at a coffeehouse once, near the university. We used to call customers like you ‘squatters' or, sometimes, ‘campers.'”

He laughed. “That sounds about right. Did we drive you crazy?”

“No, I didn't mind people who stayed all day. In fact, on a slow
day, it was nice to have them around. What I minded were those people who took their coffee so seriously you wanted to grab them and shake them and say, ‘It's coffee. It's hot and brown and caffeinated. Just drink it!' But no, I had to answer questions like ‘Is this coffee shade grown?' Or ‘Is it small batch roasted?' Or, my personal favorite, ‘Were these beans harvested by indigenous peoples?' I told them, honestly, ‘I have no idea; being a barista is not my calling in life. I'm just trying to earn enough money to get through school.'

“Then there were those customers who were absolutely obsessive about the way you made their drinks,” she said, shaking her head at the memory. “And you knew, no matter how perfectly you made it, they were never going to be satisfied. This one guy, for instance . . .” But she caught herself, stopped, and looked away.

“Was he a jerk?” he asked her.

“He
was
a jerk. But he was also . . . he was also how I met my husband. My
late
husband,” she amended. “I'd just started working at this place, and this man—this jerk—came in and . . .” She stopped, suddenly self-conscious. “Do you really . . . want to hear this story?” she asked, unsure of herself.

“I really do,” he said, with an easy smile.

“Okay, well, as I said, I'd just started working at this place, and I'd had, like, fifteen minutes of training, and this guy comes in and orders something very complicated. You know, something with at least five qualifying adjectives, like ‘a decaf nonfat double vanilla latte with extra foam.' Something like that. But when I make it for him, he's not happy. The foam is wrong. It's not . . .
foamy
enough. So I make it again. But now there's something
else
wrong with it. So I make it one more time. And the line is getting longer, and he's getting angrier, and I'm getting more flustered, and
no one
is helping me. It's like everyone else who
worked there has simultaneously gone on break. Finally, this guy says to me, ‘You know what? Forget it. You're obviously incompetent. Just give me a cup of coffee. And I'm
not
paying for it.' I give him the coffee, even though by now I'm practically crying, and he takes it and sits down at a table and starts having this really loud, really obnoxious cell phone conversation about what an idiot this woman who just served him a cup of coffee is. In the meantime, the guy who was in line
behind
him orders a drink, and I can tell he feels sorry for me. He orders something really easy to make, and he puts a five-dollar bill in the tip jar.

“On his way out, though,” Win continued, “he trips, and he spills his drink all over the jerk, and all over the jerk's designer suit and five-hundred-dollar shoes. How do I know they were five-hundred-dollar shoes? Because he starts screaming about them being ruined and, honestly, I thought he was going to throttle the guy who spilled the coffee on them. That guy keeps his cool, though. He apologizes, he offers to buy him a new cup of coffee, he offers to pay to have his suit dry-cleaned. But the other guy, the jerk, isn't having any of it, and finally he just storms out of there. And the nice guy watches him go, and then he turns to me, and he winks at me, and he leaves. Just like that. So, the next day, when he comes back to see me, you know what I did?”

“You married him?” Everett offered.

She laughed. “Well, yes,
eventually,
but not that day.
That day,
I gave him my phone number. I mean, wouldn't you have done the same thing?”

“Um, no. Not as myself, but as you? Yeah. Probably.”

She smiled, a little, and swung her dangling feet. “The thing I like so much about that story,” she said, softly, “is that when I got to know Kyle—that was his name, Kyle—I realized that what he'd done that day was totally out of character for him. He
wasn't some guy who went around spilling coffee on strangers. He wasn't some . . . hothead. He was the opposite of that. He was logical. Rational. But he told me, later, that even though he didn't know me yet that day, he couldn't stand watching me be bullied.”

They lapsed into a comfortable silence, until Everett said, quietly, “I'm guessing it was a happy marriage.”

Win had been looking out over the dark water, but she turned to him and said, a little wistfully, “It was. It really was. There were a few skeptics, though, when we first got engaged. My sister was one of them.”

He raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

She shrugged. “Poppy thought that, at twenty-two, I was too young to get married. And even though she liked Kyle, a lot, she thought he was too serious. Too . . .
settled
. He was only twenty-seven when I met him, but he was already a certified public accountant. He already owned his own condominium. Already had a 401K plan, and life insurance, and a diversified stock portfolio. But Poppy, Poppy was not impressed. I remember once, she said, ‘Win, he's such a
grown-up,
' as if that was a bad thing. Which to her, it was. I mean, he was probably one of the first real grown-ups she'd ever met. God knows our parents didn't act like grown-ups. They acted like a couple of kids.”
A couple of spoiled, badly behaved kids,
she almost added. “When we were growing up, they had no concept of how to provide stability, or anything even
close
to it. And for me, I think, that was part of the attraction of Kyle. When Poppy asked me, right before the wedding, ‘Aren't you afraid you're going to be bored?' I said, ‘Poppy, don't you get it? I
want
to be bored. I want to be bored
out of my mind
.'” She smiled now, remembering this conversation.

“But you weren't bored, were you?” Everett asked, bringing her back to herself.

She smiled and shook her head. “No, of course not. Kyle wasn't boring. He was just . . . stable. Steady.” Her voice trailed off and, in the silence, she felt it, that ache deep in her chest, somewhere behind her breastbone. It was a dull, empty, endless ache, an ache that was her missing Kyle, and everything that they had had together.

“You know the rest of the story,” she said, when she felt like she couldn't stand the ache anymore; when she felt like it was actually taking up the space she needed to breathe.

He nodded. “Poppy told me. I hope that was all right.”

She didn't answer. She looked back out over the lake, and tried to pick out the lights from the cabins she knew were on the opposite shore.

“It was . . . cancer, right?” he asked, gently.

“Right. One spring—we'd just celebrated our second anniversary—he got this cough he just couldn't shake, even after a couple of rounds of antibiotics. But we thought . . . well, it was tax season. He was overworked. He needed a vacation. His doctor, though, thought he needed a chest X-ray. And that was it. Well, that wasn't
it
. There was a lot more after that. But that set everything in motion. That X-ray. And almost a year later . . .” She shook her head, still amazed by how fast, and at the same time how slowly, that year had gone. “It was lung cancer. He was only thirty. He'd never smoked a cigarette in his life. Go figure, huh?” She said this as an attempt at a bleak kind of humor she used sometimes to relieve the tension after she told people.

Everett, though, didn't say anything. Not even the two words people invariably said when she told them about her husband's death. Instead, he looked at her, with his sleepy eyes, and shook his head, almost imperceptibly. And something moved across his face then, a shadow that might have been pain.

“Have you ever . . . lost someone?” she asked him.

But before he could answer her, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She sighed, pulled it out, and resisted the urge to throw it into the lake. Instead she read the text from Poppy.

       
Poppy:
Is he ever leaving???

“I should probably get going,” Everett said, as if in response to the text, though there was no way he could have read it.

“Okay. Come on. I'll walk you to your car.”

When she knocked on Poppy's bedroom door, five minutes later, she heard a tentative “Come in.”

“The coast is clear,” Win said, opening the door. Poppy was curled up on her bed with Sasquatch, eating lasagna.

“Second piece,” Poppy said, indicating the plate. “I swear, Win, this is even better cold than it is hot.”

Win came into the room holding the box Everett had left and stepped over the clothes that littered the floor.

“Poppy, you didn't need to barricade yourself in here,” she said, reaching her bed and sitting down on the edge of it. “Really. You would have had a nice time with us tonight. He's . . . he's easy to talk to.”

Poppy eyed the box warily.

“He brought this,” Win said, holding it out to her. “You left it in his car.”

Poppy put her plate down and reached for it. She opened it up and poked around in it a little.

“Love letters?” Win asked wryly.

Poppy shook her head. “Unpaid bills,” she said with a sigh. And it was only then that Win remembered the talk they were supposed to have had that night.

P
oppy?”

“Yes, Cassie?”

“Can we take a break?”

“Of course,” Poppy said, though their last “break” had ended only five minutes before. Being Cassie's baton twirling tutor, she was quickly learning, involved remarkably little twirling. Mainly, their sessions were spent talking. Or, rather,
Cassie
spent them talking; Poppy spent them listening to Cassie talk.

She didn't mind, though. In fact, this was the third afternoon this week she'd driven over to Birch Tree Bait and spent a pleasant hour with Cassie on its wide, well shaded front porch, practicing arm rolls, chin rolls, and figure eights, and watching the activity ebb and flow around them. There was a mother buying a Fudgesicle for an already sticky toddler, a cranky older man coming in to replace a lost fishing license, and two boy scouts, in uniform, stocking up on flashlight batteries for an overnight camping trip. And now, in the lead up to the Fourth of July weekend, there was a change in tempo. Suddenly, it seemed as if everyone on the lake had their own list of urgently needed
supplies: marshmallows, safety matches, paper cups, sparklers, fishing line, insect repellant, and, for one disappointed woman, a beach umbrella. (She was sent to the Butternut Variety Store for this.) Poppy couldn't help but get caught up in the excitement, especially since everyone was talking about the upcoming fireworks display at the fairgrounds. This year, they claimed, would be the best year ever.

Being here was a nice break from being at the cabin, Poppy thought, sitting down on the porch swing with Cassie. At the cabin, she was growing bored with her sunbathing regimen, and Win was increasingly irritated by her sloppiness. Well,
that
and something else. Win had finally figured out that Poppy was broke.
Flat
broke. And she'd reacted to this discovery with something less than sisterly understanding. And
Poppy
had reacted to
Win's
reaction with a defensiveness that quickly gave way to contrition; all in all, a familiar cycle in their relationship.

“I'm exhausted,” Cassie said now, with an exaggerated sigh, coming to sit on the porch swing beside Poppy. “I mean, my
wrist
is exhausted,” she corrected herself, and she held this pale, slender wrist out to Poppy for inspection.

“It looks very tired,” Poppy said seriously. “Remember, Cassie, before you go to bed tonight, do the wrist exercises I showed you.” She did one of them now for Cassie's benefit. “They'll help with flexibility and strength.”

“Uh-huh,” Cassie said, but she wasn't really paying attention to her. She was using her small, sandaled feet to push off from the porch floor and set the swing in motion. Poppy lifted her feet up and held on to one of its chains, and when Cassie was satisfied that they were swinging high enough, she looked up at Poppy and said, with only a trace of her old shyness, “Guess what Janelle said yesterday?”

“What?” Poppy asked, with genuine interest.

And they were off. Or
Cassie
, rather
,
was off, since Poppy was only occasionally called upon to ask a question, or offer an opinion, or give advice. Cassie talked a little bit about her parents, and a little bit more about her brothers, but mainly, she talked about Janelle, her best friend, about Gia and Riley, the mean girls in her baton twirling class, and about Jackson, a boy in her kindergarten class who used to throw little rolled up bits of paper at her head during circle time. Janelle, especially, was a subject of unending fascination to Cassie. She
might
have seen a real ghost, her father kept tortoises for pets, and her mother had once thrown her bra on stage at a Trace Adkins concert. This last piece of information, Poppy thought, was not entirely appropriate for a six-year-old to know, but Cassie didn't invest it with any lascivious intention, she merely presented it as a statement of fact.

Today, though, Cassie skipped quickly over Janelle, Riley, and Gia, and wanted to talk, instead, about Jackson. “Why does he throw paper balls at me? Does he hate me?” she asked Poppy.

“No, he doesn't hate you,” Poppy said, neutrally. She was trying not to overstep any boundaries here. “It's . . . more complicated than that.”

Poppy waited for her to reject an answer that was really no answer at all, but instead she asked another question. “Why do grown-ups always use the word
complicated
?”

Poppy laughed. This time, though, Cassie didn't wait for an answer. “I'm thirsty,” she said, hopping off the swing and jogging over to the business's front doors. “I'm going to get a Snapple. Do you want one, too?”

“No, thank you,” Poppy said. Cassie ran into the store and Poppy gave the swing a little push of her own. She was surprised, once again, by how much she enjoyed spending time with Cassie.
She was adorable, of course, but it was more than that. She had an innocence about her, a sweetness, and a quality of being almost entirely unencumbered by the problems of the adult world. Whereas Poppy, at her age, was already worried about whether her parents would be able to pay the rent. Cassie's dad, of course, was not even remotely like either of Poppy's parents. And as she was thinking this, Birch Tree Bait's front door swung open and Sam came out onto the porch.

“That is one enthusiastic pupil you have there,” he said to Poppy.

She smiled. She'd been wrong about Sam. He didn't hold a grudge, and the initial iciness between them had thawed out nicely. In fact, the brief conversations they had before and after these tutoring sessions were the other reason why she liked coming here. “Actually, I think I'm having just as much fun as she is,” she told Sam now. “And her thumb toss is really progressing.”

He looked at her blankly.

“You have no idea what that is, do you?”

“No.”

“Well, you don't need to know. But the thumb toss is one of the building blocks of twirling.”

“I'll take your word for it,” he said, with another smile, and Poppy had to admit that Win was right. Sam
was
good-looking; good-looking in a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and work boots kind of way. Oh, hell, whom was she kidding? He was good-looking in
every
kind of way. Tall and athletically built, he had a tan that, unlike hers, was not the kind you got from sunbathing, but from just being outside. It suited him, too. It made his eyes look bluer, and brought out the glints of copper in his brown hair.

“I hope you know that you don't have to come here this often,” he said, sitting down on the front porch's railing. “Because as
much as Cassie loves bragging to all of her friends about her new tutor, she'll understand if you have other commitments.”

“But I don't,” Poppy said. “At least, not right now. That . . . that could change, though,” she added.
No, that has to change,
she reminded herself
, because yesterday you had to
borrow money from Win to buy hair elastics.
“I think, actually, I'm going to start looking for a job,” she said, with more confidence than she actually felt. “Something just for the summer,” she added, quickly. “Something just to tide me over until . . .”
Until what?
She had no idea.

Sam looked at her, speculatively. He seemed to be considering saying something, but then he changed his mind and looked away.

“What?” Poppy asked, sitting up straighter on the swing.

“Well, I might . . . I might have something here.”

“Really?” And then, with a raised eyebrow, Poppy asked, “It doesn't have anything to do with the worms, does it?”

He laughed. “No, but it's not much better. I need someone to help on the grocery side of the store. Justine—do you know who she is?”

“The goth?”

“Yes, that's her. She usually covers the register, and when she has time, she does the stocking, too. But when we're this busy, she can't handle both. So this is the point in the summer when I hire someone else. It's usually a college student, or even a responsible high school student, but it could be . . .” His voice trailed off. He seemed embarrassed.

“Are you . . . are you offering me a job?”

“Sort of. I mean, I don't think it's what you're looking for,” he said, almost apologetically. “For one thing, it pays minimum wage.”

“I'll take it,” she said.

He looked surprised. “There are no benefits,” he warned.

“I'm your girl.”

“There's no security, either. As soon as things slow down, I'll have to let you go.”

“Don't look any further than right here,” she said, pointing to herself.

He seemed to consider this, then shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Why don't you come in when we open tomorrow and we can take care of the paperwork, and then Justine can get you started before things get too crazy.”

“Great,” she said brightly, giving the swing another little push. “One quick question, though.”

“Yes?” Sam said, standing up to go.

“I noticed you sell Red Vines.”

“The licorice?”

She nodded. “Do I get a discount on it?”

“Well, that depends. How much of it are you planning on eating?” He looked amused.

“Oh, only one package a day, at the most.”

“Well, you can have that for free, then.”

“And you said this job didn't have any benefits,” Poppy said. But to herself, she wondered about taking a job that paid less than half what her last job had. This would seem to suggest her life was
not
moving in the right direction. On the other hand, she reasoned, she didn't exactly have a lot of other options; a sad, but true fact of her life at the moment.

Cassie reappeared now, sipping her Snapple. “Daddy, we're practicing,” she said pointedly, sitting down on the swing beside Poppy.

Sam smiled. “I'll let you get to it then,” he said, and with a quick nod to Poppy, he left them on the porch.

“Are you ready?” Poppy asked Cassie, indicating her baton.

“I'm
almost
ready,” Cassie said, with the leisurely air of someone who still had another fourteen ounces of Snapple to consume. She smiled then, an impish smile. “Did I tell you that Janelle's grandmother wears a wig?” she asked, leaning on the swing.

“You did not,” Poppy said.

“Well, do you know what happened to it the last time she visited Janelle's family?”

“No. I can't wait to find out, though,” Poppy said. And she meant it.

A
ll right, Linc, back to work,” Sam said, stopping by the coffee counter where Linc was talking to Byron. “And Byron, back to doing whatever it is you do here all day.”

“But there's a lull now,” Linc protested lazily.

“There won't be for long,” Sam said, pouring himself an iced coffee. “In fact,” he said, “I just hired someone else to help out around here.”

“Who?” Linc asked.

“Poppy,” he said, casually, sloshing milk into his coffee. “You know who she is, right? The woman who's been helping Cassie with her baton twirling.” He concentrated on stirring his coffee, but he still felt the look Byron and Linc exchanged with each other.

“Uh, we know who she is, Sam,” Linc said, obviously amused.

Sam looked at him sharply. “
What?
She needs a job, and we have one here.”

“And you couldn't find anyone less attractive to fill it?” Byron said, obviously working hard to keep a straight face.

“Look, the point is not her attractiveness. The point is whether or not she can do the work, and I think she can.”

There was another look between Linc and Byron.

“Come on, there's nothing happening here,” Sam said.

“Well then,” Byron said, settling back on his stool and shaking out his newspaper. “We'll have a front row seat to nothing happening, won't we, Linc?”