The Almost Sisters(52)

This was more than flirting. I recognized it in the pauses and the sudden husky shyness in his voice. He was inviting me into something.

I hesitated, guilt nibbling at my sleepy edges. I was under no illusions that I knew him. Not well. Not at all. All I knew was that I liked his spit-polished, second-date self, enough to say that if I weren’t pregnant, I would have been way up for a third. I wasn’t ready to invite him into Digby’s life based on a fun evening. Still, the more time I spent with him, the nicer he seemed and the worse I felt.

“I think you’ll probably need your ass kicked again by then,” I said, trying to keep it light, and let him go.

That night I dreamed the bones. They rested, patient, in a sharp-edged metal box in a sterile lab, bathed in light as hard and yellow as an egg yolk. They knew that their time was coming. A pair of gloved hands turned and sorted them, rearranging them into the shape of the person they had once been. The hands re-created the intricate fan of the phalanges, placed the long shins, the pelvis, a cage of ribs containing nothing.

Last of all they placed the skull. I saw the telltale fissure, cracked and gaping, set high on its domed back. The hands began to pick up the bones, cracking them in two. They were long hands, I realized, with preternaturally long fingers. Jagged nails split open the glove tips, poking out, shiny with deep purple lacquer. The hands lifted the rib bones from the tray, out of my sight. I could still hear, though. The sound of Violence, chewing and snapping, guzzling at the marrow, woke me up.

My subconscious mind was clearly not as fervent in its faith that the bones were ancient history, a sad story too old to matter.

It was already after nine. I got up, creaky and sour-mouthed, and went to check on Birchie. Every step out of my private nest in the sewing room brought me farther into the part of the house that felt so very off.

I found her sitting at her formal dining-room table, eating her egg and watching her town wake up through the big bay window, as if this were any given Sunday. On the wall behind her, her grandfather beamed with lofty benevolence from his portrait to her right, while her father’s portrait on her left was much the same. Maybe a little sterner, a little prouder. I hurried around the table to drop a protective kiss onto her fluffy white bun. She smelled like her rose-scented powder and mint, as always. It was the smell of home, of love and goodness.

“Morning, Birchie,” I said. Lavender was right beside her, not looking at all kissable. She gave me the stink-eye from my own chair. “Hey, Lav. You sleep okay?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. She was dressed up awfully pretty, in lip gloss and her peacock-blue swing dress.

“Morning, sugar,” Birchie said, reaching up to pat my cheek.

Birchie’s face was powdered, and her hair was primped. She didn’t look like a person who was seriously ill. Much less like a person who’d kept human bones tucked away in the back of her attic. It heartened me to see her so put together. She looked more fully herself than I had seen her since I arrived and found her planting orange candies in the pansy bed. In fact, she looked company-ready, as if she were about to engage in one of her usual lady-type activities: a baby shower, a book club, a lecture about horticulture. . . .

I looked from her nice dress to Lavender’s with dawning horror.

“Are we going to church?”

“Is it Sunday,” Birchie said, not at all in the form of a question.

“Frank said we should lie low and not answer any questions.” I didn’t even want them asked. Birchie and her Lewy bodies might say anything.

Excepting for Lavender, we’d spent the week indoors or working in the back garden. We could pretend that we weren’t hiding—the kitchen had been so loaded up with curious-neighbor casseroles and salads that we hadn’t needed to so much as hit the Piggly Wiggly—but I knew we were avoiding both the pity pats of worried friends and the accusing stares of the less friendly. And the questions. Questions I was trying hard not to ask silently inside myself. I didn’t want them coming at me from other mouths this morning, ringing up toward God under His holy rafters.

“Oh, come on, Aunt Leia!” Lavender chimed in. Everyone looked at her, and she put on her pious face. “I don’t like missing church.”

“That’s a good baby,” Birchie said, giving her arm an approving pat. I rolled my eyes, under no illusions that Lavender had recognized an abiding need for corporate worship in herself. Church was where the boys were. Birchie went on, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. The Ten Commandments don’t change, no matter how poorly your own week is going.”

I had to clamp my lips together to keep from asking, What about that sixth one? Did you break that sixth one, Birchie? Half the people at church were probably asking the same question of the other half right now. My hands were getting sweaty.

Wattie came in with her own egg and a basket heaped full of biscuits that she set down on the table. Lavender was already reaching. Wattie sat and helped herself to her own homemade blackberry jam. She was in a church dress, too, field daisies and spring green leaves.

“Do you think we should go to church?” I appealed to Wattie.

“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Wattie said, which wasn’t the same as saying that she thought it was a good idea.

“We didn’t go to Redemption last week,” I said.

“That was my church,” Wattie said, setting me straight.