The Almost Sisters(53)
“And you didn’t think Birchie should go!” I argued.
Wattie fixed me with an exasperated look. “Child, I did not think I should go.”
I was instantly ashamed. I was thinking only of what the people at the white Baptist church would be saying about my grandmother. Wattie, the widow of Redemption’s longtime, most beloved pastor, was that church’s Birchie. And she had stolen a car and wrecked it while attempting to abscond with human bones found in the attic of the very house she lived in. Her oldest, dearest friend’s house. Of course her church community was reeling.
Birchville still lived mostly segregated, especially in the churches. There were parallel versions of Baptists and Methodists and a small, all-white Presby church balanced by an equally tiny AME congregation. The streets and neighborhoods were divided up, too. I lived in Birchie’s version of the town when I was visiting, just like Wattie’s children lived in hers. I knew this intellectually, but it was easy to forget. These worlds seldom overlapped. The greatest overlap was here, right inside this house, where the matriarchs of both Birchvilles lived together. I was growing another kind of overlap inside me. If Digby were already born, we would have to be back-and-forth members at two churches, as Birchie and Wattie were. Or we’d have to choose a church where one of us belonged less than the other.
“I’m sorry, Wattie, that was thoughtless,” I said. “But I think that going over there is downright crazy.”
Wattie shrugged. “Well, it’s not what I might do, but this is Birchie’s church. Birchie’s decision.”
“Morning, Leia,” Rachel said from behind me, startling me. In her pencil skirt and striped blouse, she looked as church-ready as the rest of them. I was the only one who’d somehow missed the rally call. Her hair was limp and oily, though, and her eyes had a Valium glaze. This wasn’t the full Rachel. This was the depression-drowsing version that had been on the sofa all week, now stuffed into kitten heels and propped upright, with just enough energy left to be kind of a bitch to me.
“You’re going, too?”
“It’s the least I can do,” she said, so tremble-voiced brave that I felt a sour trickle of vinegar cut into my blood, thinning it.
“We don’t want to walk in late,” Wattie said, sweeping her eyes pointedly from my hair, tufting up in cowlicks, down to my bare feet.
I made myself step away from Rachel, saying, “I’ll be ready.”
Birchie and Wattie briefly shone their approval beams on me. I snatched a couple of biscuits out of the basket as I turned to go.
Rachel said, “You know those are a mass of simple carbs.”
I wheeled back in a surge of Rachel rage so clear and blue and bright that I was about to make my breakfast protein-rich by means of biting her whole head off. But she wasn’t even looking at me. She sat slumped with her own biscuit untouched in front of her. Her phone was beside her on the table, waiting for a deciding text from JJ that was never going to come.
Across the table Lavender was staring at her mother with fear and a heartbreaking kind of pleading in her eyes. In that look I could almost hear the lost and piping voice of three-year-old Lavender, calling from her dark bedroom, Mumma, halp! Dere a munstras in my closet.
Lav’s phone buzzed, and instantly the scared child with MIA Ken and Walking-Dead Barbie for parents was gone. Instead there was a disaffected teen, sneak-checking texts from boys under the breakfast table. A teen whose father still hadn’t called me back, though I’d left him three more messages, each meaner and more insistent than the last.
It was one thing to decide that I was going to help Lav, but another to figure out how to actually do it. Rachel-style commando assistance—armed, invasive, and permission-free—was an art form, but it was not my medium. Watching Lav sneak-text, I had a new idea.
“Hey, kid,” I said. “No phones at the breakfast table.” I held my hand out.
She looked up, startled and busted.
“You know better,” Rachel said mildly.
Lavender rolled her eyes and passed the phone to me across the table.
“Come and get it after breakfast,” I said.
“Let’s make it after lunch,” Rachel was saying as I hurried away.
I got the phone back to my room, fast. It would lock itself up in a minute or two, and I didn’t know Lav’s passcode. Jake hadn’t taken my calls, but he might well take one from this number. I closed my door and sat down on the sofa.
It took me a sec to find him, because I went looking in the J’s out of habit. In Lav’s world Jake’s number was stored up in the D’s. I touched that word, “Daddy,” and saw that my hands were trembling. It wasn’t a word that had ever been lucky for me.
He answered, though. And fast, picking up on the second ring.
“Lav?” he said, his voice breathy and grainy.
“Guess again,” I said.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Strike two,” I said, downright bitchy.
It was mean, but for the first time since Jake had cut me out of his life like I was a tumor, I had the option to be mean to him. When he’d reappeared at my family’s drop-in Christmas party, thrusting wine at me as he sauntered by to charm my stepsister, I’d been knocked for such a loop. I’d avoided him that evening, then fled back to art school in Savannah. Rachel was courting distance from Norfolk at U Richmond, but I’d been sure that it would come to nothing. He wasn’t good enough for Rachel, and my stepsister had a rigorous belief that she deserved the best. I hoped she’d see past the new money and the newer nose. When they got engaged, I’d taken refuge in good manners, hyperpolite and horrified. Once he’d fathered my niece, I was committed to that politeness. But now? I had cosmic permission to tear him a new one, and I had a lot of mean saved up.