Web of Angels (16 page)

At the checkout the lady said, “How are you today?” and she said, “Fine.” That’s what you’re supposed to say. Then she gave the lady lots of money from the wallet and the lady gave her some money, too. She pushed the cart to the car and she put the groceries in the car and she pushed the cart to the cart place. She could do lots of stuff. But in the car she waited for a big because lils was not ever ever allowed to drive. It was a rule. It was number infinity. That’s how big a rule it was. Uh oh. She had the chickie in her pocket. Uh oh. Maybe they was in trouble. Maybe they was going to jail.

Sun flashed through the dust on the windshield. It needed washing. In the spot beside her, a mom juggled her keys, a toddler, the sliding door of a minivan. Sharon looked at the toy in her hand. It was unbelievable. She’d just lifted a ninety-nine-cent toy. If anybody saw her … She put the key in the ignition, opened the window to toss the damning ball of yellow fluff, then paused. A train was moving along the railroad tracks behind the parking lot. It came from the direction of her hometown, bringing goods from west to east. In her grandfather’s day, the trains had supplied parts to the Ford factory at the corner. But now good coffee was served there, and the train carried products made in China, like this tiny toy, which she would never have received as a kid, considered undeserving of even that. She took the key out of the ignition and a dollar from her wallet, and walked back through the parking lot.

When she got home, Dan and Josh were in the living room playing Stratego while in the kitchen Emmie and Cathy—who’d been invited for brunch—were waving their hands in the air, fingernails painted in an assortment of colours. Polish and polish remover, nail hardener and cotton balls were spread across the table. Blowing on her nails, Cathy sat in Sharon’s chair, facing the backyard. Her eyelashes and eyebrows had been subjected to mascara and pencil, her lips shimmering as she blew. Tips for spring: wear bold lipstick with soft eye makeup, or bold eyes with natural lips. The magazine was on the table.

“Where’s Nina?”

“Upstairs,” Cathy said, looking at Emmie and shaking her head because Emmie was giggling. “She’s sleeping.”

“Isn’t she feeling well? I’d better check on her.”

In the girls’ room, Sharon climbed up the ladder to the upper bunk where her daughter was under a hump of blankets, nothing sticking out but the ends of her black hair because she liked to sleep with her head covered, in a cave of warmth. Still, it wasn’t like Nina to nap. Maybe she was coming down with something. Sharon reached out to gently pat her daughter’s back, her other hand pulling the blanket down a bit so she could check Nina’s forehead for fever.

Just as her mother lifted the blanket, Nina popped out from behind the closet door. “April Fool’s!”

“Nina! You scared me.” Sharon laughed, throwing aside the blanket. Under it were pillows, stuffies and Emmie’s Chinese dolly arranged so that just the dark hair showed.

“Did you really get tricked, Mommy? Did you really believe it?”

“I did,” Sharon said, climbing down and putting an arm around her daughter, kissing her definitely cool forehead.

“It worked, it worked,” Nina yelled, pulling away, running down the stairs to the kitchen.

“I helped.” Cathy grinned.

“It was my dolly!” Emmie said.

Nina was in overalls, Emmie with half a dozen hairclips pinning back her curls. A stranger might not even know they were sisters, they looked so different, Nina all chocolate and mochaccino, Emmie a freckled rose. Not like Cathy’s family,
all cut from the same gold cloth. When she was four and Heather six, they used to wear ridiculous matching dresses, the nanny complaining to Sharon about the nuisance of washing and ironing. And the ribbons in their hair! Cathy would lose hers in the sand and more than once Sharon dug it out while Cathy was playing in the sandbox with Josh. Her sister, with the same hair and eyes and chin and hands, would scold her for acting like a boy until Cathy jumped into the sandbox on top of the sand cakes beautifully decorated with twigs carefully selected for leafiness and height, pebbles arranged just so. “My beeuteeful cake. You ruined it! Clumsy oat!” Heather would cry. That was what sisters did. What would one sister not do to another? For the other? Sharon thought of her own sister, how each of them had begged the other, how she had been the one to leave her sister behind.

The first summer she was back from university, Sharon had slept in the bedroom they had always shared. There was no art on the wall, no posters or mementos, just their childhood locked in with the white and gold French provincial furniture that had held her clothes and her books and her schoolwork. They’d never been allowed to put anything on the walls, though an empty birdcage made of red wire still hung from the ceiling. Shelves held a dictionary, a book of quotations, and a thesaurus. There was a globe on her sister’s desk, on hers a radio. When she was little she’d sometimes plug in earphones and listen to the radio at night just to know there
was a world outside her head. The window faced the backyard where a skinny maple tree grew, not much more than the sapling it had been when they’d moved into the house, not big enough to climb. Every backyard had one maple tree in it. Every front lawn had a garden with tulips. The lots were big enough so that nobody could hear their neighbours.

One night, she woke up and saw her sister lying on her side, eyes open. Pauline was five years younger yet fuller in the chest, her breasts round. Sharon could legally drink but she was the one who’d be asked for ID, not Pauline who plucked her eyebrows, shaved her bikini line to make a neat triangle. She sneezed in a genteel and musical
choo
. Her nails never broke.

“Paulie?”

“Yes?”

“How long have I been back?”

“A month,” her sister said as if it was a normal question, as if it was one that Sharon had asked before and she had asked Sharon, a question between sisters losing a battle with sneaky time, which hid and then jumped out at them.

“I thought it was longer.”

Pauline smiled. It was her nighttime smile, sweet, young. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too, sweetie. But I need to leave. When school starts, I’m not coming back again.”

Pauline sat up. “No!”

“Shh. You’ll wake Dad.”

“Please. Don’t go. Can’t you go to school here?” In her cotton nightgown, she looked smaller, shoulders hunched as
she hugged her knees, face bare of makeup. Sharon knew the curve of her sister’s cheeks, the long lashes when her eyes were closed. Sometimes at night she used to watch her sister sleep in moonlight, keeping guard, though she didn’t know from what.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going yet, Paulie.”

When the summer ended and she was packing for school, Sharon asked her sister to come with her and stay for a while. But Pauline wouldn’t, she couldn’t, for she was the good daughter and her parents would never give their permission. She was just starting high school.
Come for a visit
, Sharon said.
If you stay I’ll register you for school. I’ll get another job. I’ll support you. Or come later
, Sharon said.
When you’re eighteen you can do anything you want. They won’t let me
, Pauline said.
Don’t go. Please don’t go. You can’t go. If you go I’ll never speak to you again. That I promise you
. She kept her promise.

And here was another good daughter, touching her thumbnail to her upper lip, pronouncing her nails done. “It’s Emmie’s turn to help with the pancakes. Nina and Cathy, you can get back to your knitting if you want.” Sharon left the sliding doors open, a breeze bringing in the smell of rain-drenched earth as she put away the groceries, setting a small aloe vera on the windowsill above the sink. Franky the kitten, accustomed to the family now, was lapping water while Nina stood on a stool, reaching for popsicles in the freezer. “Not now. You can have one for dessert.”

“Awwwwwwww, Mommmmm.”

Sharon put all the ingredients on the blue table along with measuring cups, measuring spoons and a mixing bowl. Emmie kneeled on a chair while Sharon handed her a cup and said, “Fill that up with flour, honey.” Cathy’s head was bent, her lips puffed out as she concentrated on the yarn. “That scarf will look nice when you’re done. Josh will love it.”

Nina was using small plastic needles and Cathy larger bamboo ones, both of them laboriously digging the point into a knot, wrapping yarn, pulling. Emmie slowly measured more flour, oat bran, baking soda and baking powder. Sharon added vanilla. Emmie cracked eggs. A breeze tinkled the wind chimes on the back deck. Franky chased a stray piece of yarn.

“Is this good, Mom?” Nina held up her knitting.

“Excellent.” She put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Nina had a plan. She was going to knit a scarf for each of her teddy bears. One in each colour of the rainbow. “How’s Madeline?” she asked Cathy.

“Linny’s over her cold.” The older girl rubbed her nose. “I think I’m getting it. You know what Heather wanted to call her?” The girls shook their heads. What? What? Tell us. Cathy rolled her eyes. “Amethyst. Isn’t that so precious?”

“It’s pretty,” Emmie said. “Ammmmthissss.”

“Not Amthis, Amthist!” Nina said. “Don’t you know anything?”

Emmie stuck out her tongue, reaching for Nina’s knitting with her floury hands. Green eyes blazed, dark eyes flashed, Nina was shouting
Mom!
while her mom put an arm across Emmie’s chest, blocking her from leaning forward, threatening no maple syrup or worse—they’d have to go to their room
and make up. They glared at each other as they settled back down in their chairs. There was flour on Emmie’s freckled nose. Nina’s nose, a smaller version of her Chinese grandma’s, was flaring. Cathy kept knitting, head bent, not looking up.

“Madeline was my grandma’s name,” she said as if there had been no interruption. “I guess it’s okay. But it’s too long. Linny is better for a baby.”

She moved the needle with the full row to her left hand, shifting the empty needle to her right, the skein of blue wool on the table. Not dollar-store yarn. Sharon believed in using good wool, even for kids who were learning. It was cobalt blue, like beautiful china, like the kitchen tiles, and soft in the hands. It was the feeling in her hands that she loved about knitting, needles moving faster than the eyes could follow, wrap and lift, wrap and lift, counting stitches, the rhythmic click clack, knit eight from back stitch holder, knit sixteen from front stitch holder, increase four evenly across. That was the hood of the hoodie she’d made for her niece.

“I like that. It makes me think of the Madeline books that I read to Emmie,” Sharon said. “That Madeline is an orphan, too, and she’s got spunk.”

“My grandma had chronic fatigue.” Cathy examined her knitting. “S! I dropped a stitch.”

“Let me have a look.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lewis. I ruined it. I’m so clumsy. I can’t do anything.”

“Mom will fix it,” Nina said. “She always fixes mine.”

Cathy shook her bit of scarf as if the hole was a chasm. “How?”

“Please,” Sharon said. “I’ve dropped a million stitches.” She pulled a crochet hook from the knitting bag. “You see this ladder right here? Just hook it with this and then slip your needle through. There you got it! Now wrap the yarn and it’s just a regular stitch.”

Cathy looked at it critically. “You can still tell.”

“Okay. I want to show you something.” It didn’t take long to run upstairs and come back down wearing the old cashmere sweater and carrying a jacket, which she dropped onto an empty chair next to Cathy. “Ta-da! This is my first sweater. I made it for Dan and he wore it, believe it or not, until it shrunk.”

“But it’s awful!”

“You know what’s worse? I wore it to Eleanor’s house and everyone saw me in it.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.” Sharon smiled. “Thank goodness your mother didn’t. Can you imagine what she’d have thought?”

“What, Mommy?” Emmie asked.

“That it was butt ugly!” Nina crowed.

“She said butt!”

Now the little girls were laughing uproariously, so hard they started to hiccup, their fight forgotten. Cathy laughed with them, everybody laughing so hard, even Sharon, that it wasn’t until Cathy put her hands over her face that they realized her tears weren’t laughing tears anymore. Nina peered at her inquisitively, then said, “She’s crying, Mom.” Emmie picked up the kitten, but her mom motioned her away before she could shove him at Cathy. An arm around
the weeping girl’s shoulders, Sharon made soft sounds, Shhh it’s okay it’s okay, shhh, just as she did with her girls on a night of bad dreams. Nina and Emmie stood close, arms around each other.

“I can’t even hang on to a stick,” Cathy wailed.

“A stick?”

“The stupid flash drive. They took it.”

“You can get another,” Sharon said. “I’ll get you one.”

“No you can’t.” Cathy cried harder. She cried so she could hardly breathe and it was a while until she could speak. “It was my sister’s,” she gasped between sobs. “Now it’s gone.”

“I’m so sorry,” Sharon said.

Cathy was rocking in her chair, hands over her face, multicoloured fingertips spread wide to hide as much as she could. As the sobs subsided, she wiped her eyes, leaving trails of mascara on the back of her hands. Her head was still bent, hair covering her face. “It doesn’t matter. My mom’s got it.” She lifted a thumbnail to her teeth.

“No, no, no,” Sharon said, pulling Cathy’s hand gently down. “Not with that great new polish on it. Your nails are getting so nice now. Did you stop biting them?”

“Uh huh,” Cathy said through the curtain of her hair.

“My nails always split,” Sharon said. “My mother never had any hope of me.”

“I could do your nails. They wouldn’t split.”

“That would be nice,” Sharon said. She stood up and went to the glass doors, sliding them shut. On the other side of the wall, the grandma next door, who still waxed her kitchen floor, was revving up her ancient floor polisher. “You
haven’t seen the other thing I brought down to show you. I found it yesterday at Value Village.” It was the jacket she’d seen in her mind—she must have seen it some other time when she was at the store and forgotten. For here it was, exactly the same, with the bad stitching at the shoulders and the staples as if someone had tried to alter it and, failing, had just stapled it back together. It was only two dollars and so for a lark she’d bought it. An eighties silk jacket with vertical black stripes overlaying a pastel plaid, nipped at the waist and long, like a riding jacket, but who would ride a horse wearing silk? “I’ve got no idea what to do with this. I’d never wear it.”