The Almost Sisters(28)
“Maybe eight?”
I frowned. Had Birchie snuck back out of bed to call him? “Was Wattie with her?”
“Yeah, on speakerphone. You know how they do. Maybe they mean whatever’s in that trunk for a surprise?”
I didn’t think so. Not a nice one anyway, considering our constant clash of wills the last few days. I had a vague but very bad suspicious feeling growing.
“’Scuse me, Miss Leia,” Jeffrey said, and squirted past me, Hugh in his wake. “Dad, can we go down? Smells like the rolls are ready.”
Once he said it, I noticed it, too, the yeasty, sugared smell of Wattie’s cinnamon rolls drifting up from the kitchen. She must have been up way before dawn; they had to rise twice and bake for forty minutes.
“Sure,” Frank said. “But afterward you’re going to help me restack those boxes.”
They clattered down the hall, and Hugh paused at Lav’s door. He gave it a casual knuckle rap. “Yo, Lefty, come have breakfast.”
Lefty?
Lavender, now in a cotton T-shirt dress and tennis shoes, came out, and they galloped downstairs to eat a thousand calories in butter and sugary carbs that would slide right off their adolescent bodies.
“How are you holding up?” I asked Frank once we were alone.
He shook his head as if I’d asked a yes-or-no question, then gave me such a sad, cynical smile that my heart broke for him again. He was such a decent person, so good to my grandmother. In summer he sent his boys down to mow her lawn, and he acted as her man-in-the-house when the porch light went out or the doorbell stopped working. Now he was up in the thousand-degree attic heat before his workday started, moving boxes for two little old ladies who had blown up his marriage in front of his whole church.
“How are the boys doing?” I asked.
Frank didn’t answer for a sec, his tired eyes searching my face, looking for some shade of schadenfreude or gossipy interest. I hoped he wouldn’t imagine it there. I asked because he was our family friend, and because he was fresh broken in a way that I’d felt cracked my whole adult life.
Frank must have read me right, because his guard dropped. His shoulders slumped, and the dark pits of his eyes told me how hard he was working to keep himself together.
He said, “Hugh’s shut down. I have no idea. Jeffrey, he’s young. He can’t hide how hard he’s taking it. Watching him try, it breaks my heart.”
“God, Frank. I’m so sorry,” I said. I knew from Lavender that the boys were staying with him at the house. They’d been to see their mom a couple of times, walking over to their grandma’s house where she was staying, a half mile off the square. “Have you talked to Jeannie Anne at all?”
“Yeah. I’m trying to be civil, even though she’s seeing Campbell. They’re in love, apparently. Martina Mack, God bless her black-hole heart, came by with a burned chicken casserole and that cheery news.”
“Of course she did. She dropped by here with a melted carrot cake to tell me about her aunt’s endless and agonizing death from Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t let her in, but she shouldered into the doorway and gave me every awful detail. No one on any porch on the planet has ever so thoroughly relished a dead aunt.” We shrugged simultaneously, with the weary acceptance of small-towners toward their homegrown horrors. I added, “If it helps, she also told me that the church fired Campbell.” Adultery from the associate pastor was not a big congregational morale builder.
“Yeah. I couldn’t set foot in that church otherwise. But in some ways it’s bad. I’m scared she’ll move away with him. I’m telling everyone who’ll listen that I’m fine, it’s fine. I keep reminding folks that she’s hurting, too, and believe me, those words taste worse than Martina’s casserole. But I have to. I don’t want her driven out of town. I mean, I do. On a rail. Maybe coated in a little tar, some feathers.” He smiled, wry and weary. “But if she goes, she’ll try to take the boys, and the law leans toward the mother. I’m not letting that happen. I can’t. I have to think about them now and not strangle her.”
I swallowed, the lump in my throat grown even thicker. So this was what fatherhood looked like when it was done right from the beginning.
I wouldn’t know. The Birch line had bad luck with fathers. Birchie was the last of us to have one all the way through adulthood.
I’d had Keith, and he’d been a great stepdad. He loved me, a lot, but I still called him Keith. Once, when Rachel and I were very little, still in preschool, Keith had been playing dollhouse with us in the den. I said, “No, rocka-chair goes here, Daddy.” I didn’t even notice I’d said it.
In the next breath, Rachel launched herself at me, punching and screaming. She bit my shoulder hard enough to make me bleed. Keith had to drag her off, still flailing. Mom came running as Rachel and I both burst into tears. She stopped in the doorway, fluttering and flapping, saying, “What happened, what happened?” I stopped crying first. Rachel sobbed and heaved in Mom’s arms the whole time Keith was dressing the bite. Hard, racking sobs that ended only when Keith finished and went to hold her. I never called my stepdad anything but Keith again. Remembering, my hands moved to cover Digby, now the third fatherless Birch generation.
“You’re doing the right thing,” I told Frank.
“Yeah. And thanks for listening. I can’t say this stuff to most people, you know? It will get around.” Frank straightened, manually moving his shoulders back and down, as if they were relifting a burden. “I need to get home. Lois Gainey’s coming by at nine to write her nephew out of her will again. That’s why we came to get your trunk so early. Sorry we woke you.”