The Almost Sisters(16)
Now that I was grown, I was glad Birchie had won. I would have been odd girl out by any name, a supernerd who stood five foot nothing and had the Briggses’ pale skin and the Birches’ dark hair and light blue eyes. My tall, wispy mother looked like the mom who would come in the box set with Keith and Rachel. They were all long-boned and honey-colored and slim, and none of them had ever seen a single episode of Xena.
“I got this, Mom,” I told her. My grandmother’s illness was Birch business, and my mother didn’t have a place in it. “And anyway, Rachel is helping me book—”
My stepsister was instantly on her feet, waving her hands back and forth to get my attention, shaking her head no.
I stopped talking, puzzled, and Mom said, “Rachel? I thought she had a stomach bug?” I remembered that Rachel had canceled lunch.
“Yeah, but I called her anyway. You know Rachel. She’s probably finding flights from the bathroom floor.”
Rachel gave me a thumbs-up and sat back down in front of the laptop. I got off the phone, thinking how weird it was to be on this side of Rachel’s wall. Neither of us was ready to spring our life-changing family news on our shared parents, but I knew about Jake, and Rachel did not know about Digby. It was an odd reversal. As I came up behind her, thinking I should encourage her to get some support from Keith and Mom, I saw she’d put a second one-way ticket in her Delta shopping cart. It was made out for Lavender Marie Jacoby.
“Absolutely not,” I said, but Rachel talked over me.
“Leia, you’ll have your hands full there. You’ll need a helper,” she said, as if she were doing me a favor. “It will even be fun for Lavender, that big old attic full of furniture and letters and oh, the clothes! I used to be so jealous, seeing your summer pictures playing dress-up with real flapper gowns, bustles, poodle skirts, and that wedding dress. . . .”
“Yeah, when I was nine,” I said. By the time I was Lavender’s age, the attic seemed like a great place to get heatstroke and spider bites. I missed JJ’s Super Nintendo so much that Birchie drove into Montgomery and bought me one to ensure I stayed through July. Rachel spent her own teen summers with Keith’s parents down in Myrtle Beach, getting blonder and browner in her bikini, decorously French-kissing every cute boy in South Carolina. “No thirteen-year-old girl dreams of a vacation down in Birchville, Alabama. And I need to focus on Birchie.”
“Yes, exactly,” Rachel agreed. “But you also have to decide what to store and what gets packed for Goodwill. You’re awful at that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to close down—” I began, but Rachel interrupted me.
“Yes you do.” As she spoke, she kept right on typing Lavender’s birth date and home address into Delta, as if it were already decided. “I’m sorry, but you do. You have to move Birchie here, to assisted living. You’ve already put it off longer than you should have. She needs more care than she can get in Eastern Jesus, Alabama.”
“Maybe so, but Birchie will have her own opinions,” I said, an understatement so enormous I was surprised it didn’t get stuck and smother me on the way out of my mouth.
“You have to be firm. At a certain point, you have to take charge of things. With your grandmother that point came years ago.” Now she was choosing two side-by-side seats on the plane diagram. First class, which was ridiculous. A thousand extra bucks for a hot towel, some leg room, and free cocktails that Digby wouldn’t let me drink. “Lavender can help you. She’s naturally an organizer.”
It was true that Rachel’s genetic legacy was visible in Lavender’s alphabetized-by-author bookshelves and color-coded sweater drawers. But Rachel had never seen the Birch ancestral home in person. There were a hundred and fifty years of history in that house, most of it in the form of junk that had been stuffed and stacked and piled up in the attic. It would take four strong men a week to make a dent in it. Lavender would no more be useful than would Sergeant Stripes, the feral cat who lived in my backyard. I started to say so, but Rachel talked over me.
“That frees me up to find some places for Birchie to tour here. The nicest facilities all have monstrous waiting lists, I hope you know, but I can get her in almost anywhere she likes. People all over this town owe me favors.” I think she still saw a big fat no on my face, because she stopped typing, looked up at me, and added, “Please, Leia. I need some room to think right now. Please?”
That stopped my refusal cold. Rachel was asking me for help. Unprecedented, though she’d been shoveling her own unstoppable help at me for thirty-five years now. Even back in freaking preschool, she “helped” me color. One of my first memories was Rachel lisping, Pee-poo aren’t green. Pee-poo are like dis, while peeling an Electric Lime Crayola from my fist and replacing it with Flesh.
As an adult, she’d helped me choose everything from cars to Christmas trees to lip gloss. She’d bullied me into surviving after JJ screwed me over, even though she didn’t know what was wrong with me. JJ was so socially beneath her that she’d barely noticed his presence, much less his absence. All she knew was that I’d stopped eating and washing my hair. Even my Wonder Woman comics piled up unread. She’d stepped in, telling me that if I didn’t get out of bed, I would molder. She force-marched me to Soup-N-Salad with her friends and dragged me to watch her current boyfriend do his sportsball things. When I sat blank-eyed through these events, she changed tactics, suffering through Men in Black and The Fifth Element and even a teeny local Star Trek con, anything she thought might spark my interest. She’d done my color chart, too, claiming that going off to college required a makeover, then took Keith’s Visa and bought me a slew of spring-colored scarves to rectify my stark winter wardrobe.