The Almost Sisters(21)
Emily hadn’t been seen as an old maid, though. Her money and her name kept her separate from the ranks of the Perennial Hopefuls who sat aging in a clot of sad pastel at church socials. But if the money were gone? If she were just an impoverished lady of a certain age with an ever-rounding figure and no family to speak of?
Neighbors flocked to the big white Victorian with misty eyes and casseroles, but they found my grandmother packing, sharp tongued and sharper eyed, decidedly uninterested in pity. She boarded a train for the coast that very day. Folks assumed she was going to bring her father’s body home, place it reverently in the crypt behind First Baptist, and sink into a life of genteel poverty and mourning.
They had underestimated her. She stayed, burying her father in Charleston in order to finish the fiscal rescue mission he had started. She took his meetings with lawyers and investment bankers, and she didn’t come home until both she and the bulk of the Birch money had weathered the crisis.
How could mortality touch her? She’d kept a whole town alive, seen nearly a hundred years of history, survived her own early widowhood and the loss of her only son. Old age should not be allowed to grind her down.
“Do you know what ‘syncope’ means?” Rachel asked.
“Is it part of this? Of these Lewy bodies growing in her brain?” I asked. I didn’t know that word, so it hadn’t leaped out at me from the website.
“Yes, and it means fainting. Sudden fainting. It’s in a list of physical problems that she has or will have soon. Also shaking, dizziness, loss of balance.”
I had noticed that last one myself. That last one was already here.
Under my hand the boogery shape in front of Violence had grown spindly arms with claw tips. I gave it the suggestion of a thick-necked head with taut, blind bulges where the eyes should be. Added high, slitted nostrils.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” I said. “I’m only saying it’s complicated.”
“No it isn’t. You have to take charge for her now. It’s time. Ask yourself, how many sets of stairs are in that house? Do you want her to spend the last year or two of her life in traction? In miserable pain from a broken hip? She can’t stay there. It’s simple if you ask yourself the right questions.” I’d thought I wanted Rachel’s certainty, but she was as hard and sharp as those black letters on the website. She advanced inexorably, too. My pencil scratched across the paper, shading. “Are you still there?” she asked.
“I’m here, but I don’t think family things get simpler if you ask the right questions,” I said. I made sure there was no snipe or snark in my voice as I added, “Could the right question simplify what’s happening with Jake?”
Now it was Rachel’s turn for silence. I started drawing a second eyeless boogery monster. Violence Versus the Lewy Bodies.
“Point taken,” Rachel said at last, her voice tight. “Just promise me you’ll keep your eyes open. Those little old ladies have been lying to you. They’ll fool you if you let them. The way you’re talking, I think you really, really want to get fooled.”
“I promise, but how are things with you? Have you heard from Jake?”
“No,” Rachel said, suddenly brisk. “I need to go start dinner.”
Which was code for, Mind your own damn business, Leia, because she was just going to nuke a Lean Cuisine. Lav was with me, Jake was in the wind, and she never cooked for only herself.
I unpacked and took a shower, trying to wash the road and a little of my mingled grief and anger off me. Rachel had a point, but was it wrong to want a single, peaceful evening? The smell of roasting hens, peppery and succulent, wafted up the stairs as I got dressed, like a sensory argument for respite. Birchie would serve them with fat slices of the summer’s first heirloom tomatoes from the back garden and her famous cornbread. To make it, she saved bacon drippings in a coffee can by the stove, and she’d put some of that grease into the cast-iron skillet and set it in the oven. She’d make batter while the rendered fat got so hot that it was close to smoking. The sizzle of the batter landing in that pan was the kitchen soundtrack of my youth.
I didn’t know if the urge for peace came from sweetness or from being scared, though. Was it cowardice to enjoy one dinner in the company of my favorite niece, my only living Birch relative, and my much-loved Wattie? Surely it was my best self that was saying I could start spying and deciding tomorrow.
But the voice of Rachel in my head was asking, could Birchie still make her cornbread? There was no written recipe. Did she remember? Maybe she was standing in the kitchen as blank as a sheet of brand-new paper while Wattie made it as part of their ongoing little-old-lady conspiracy.
I was too disheartened for any more conversations, so I sent brief updating e-mails to Mom and Keith and my friend Margot, who was feeding my feral cat. At six I tapped on the adjoining door that linked my bedroom to Lav’s room in the turret. She was sprawled on the daybed, deeply immersed in the mysteries of her cell phone. There was no dresser in the round room, but I saw Lavender’s shorts and T-shirts stacked neatly, color-coded, in the shelving. Four pairs of shoes and her rain boots stood in a tidy row on the floor.
“Dinnertime,” I said, and she got up and followed me out and down the stairs, texting and talking to me at the same time.
“How long do you think we’re going to be here?”