The Almost Sisters(83)
“Okay,” I said, puzzled. He hadn’t stuttered when we played Words with Friends or at FanCon.
His beautiful, quick smile flashed, and he said, as if he’d read my mind, “Beer helps, and it’s wuh-wah . . . it intensifies when I’m under stress. I’m fff-mm . . . stressed now. I’m surprised I’ve muh-managed to say anything.” That all came out with only a few blips, as though his telling me he stuttered had relaxed him enough to make it less true.
Rachel was tucking her hair back behind her ears, embarrassed for him. I knew her so well; she wasn’t sure it was politically correct to continue on with righteous fury now that he’d announced a minor disability. Lavender looked flat dismayed. She’d found him for me, brought him here like he was a present, and already he was turning out to be imperfect.
“Okay,” I said again, and the main thing I was feeling was relief. It came over me in a wave so intense that a foolish grin spread across my face. It was overwide, but I couldn’t help it. He stuttered! That was why he “couldn’t talk” when I told him about Digby. He hadn’t burst into silent hatred, and he hadn’t had female company. He quite literally had not been able to get words out. “This is pretty stressful, for all of us.”
He smiled back, and for a second it was like we were the only two people in the room. “I wanted to show up. I wanted you to know, I will show up.”
It came out perfect, right to me, and this was what we needed. To be the only two people in a room. I dug a twenty from my pocket and held it out to Lavender. “Lav? Run go catch your dad before he gets here. Tell him to take you for ice cream and take any Darians that are headed this way, too.”
“Oh, come on!” Lav protested, but Rachel backed me up.
“That is an excellent idea. Go.” It was spoken in Unbrookable Mother, and Lord, but I would have to learn that language. It was so effective. Lav rolled her eyes, but she took the money.
“Rachel, best if you go with Lavender,” Wattie said, calm and quiet. It wasn’t only to help me, though. Birchie was swaying to some internal rhythm, staring into the dining room. “I think Birchie needs some quiet in the house right now.”
“Do you need help?” Rachel said, refocusing.
“I don’t think so, hmm, Birchie?” Wattie said. “We need a cool drink and a bite of something and to have a little lie-down. We will do much better on our own.”
“We’re never going to be on our own,” Birchie said darkly, staring into the dining room. She shook an angry finger at her own seat near the head of the table. “Get out of there.”
She wasn’t talking to us, though. She was talking to bad rabbits or whatever animal she saw defiling her table by Lavender’s dirty breakfast dishes.
Rachel shot me a speaking glance, but she took Lavender’s shoulders and steered her out the front door.
“Sorry,” Lav whispered again as she went, and I said, “S’okay, kid.”
Wattie was back in profile, whispering to Birchie, coaxing her to come and sit down and rest, promising a cool drink of lemonade.
Birchie looked on the verge of angry tears. “It should be champagne. Floyd teetotaled, you know. His whole life. I didn’t. Daddy didn’t either, but that’s not what’s going to put us both in hell.”
Even with the front door closed, I heard Lav calling to her dad as she clattered like a pony down the porch stairs, which meant that in another thirty seconds we would have had Jake here, on top of everything. So that was a small mercy.
Wattie’s whispers were so soft now that they were for Birchie alone, and she eased her along toward the table.
“We are having lemonade. You are not,” Birchie told all the nothings that were not in the empty chairs, still angry, but also cold and flat, as if she were reciting facts. The sun’s a yellow star, gravity works, and silly rabbits, lemonade is only for old ladies.
Wattie made a shooing hand at me behind her back.
“Come on,” I whispered to Sel Martin.
I led him silently down the hall, back to the sewing room. I opened the door for him, and he went in. All the way in, walking to the far side to stand in front of the rainbow of quilt squares stacked in the shelves, his gym bag held awkwardly in front of him. I closed the door behind me, and I stayed right there, by the door.
I wished I had a bag to hold. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands. Everything possible felt fake and posed and full of silent messages. Clasped in front was judgey, behind my back turned me into a naughty child, and crossing my arms felt defensive or, worse, angry. I hung them by my sides, where they felt obvious and unwieldy.
This is what I’d wanted, but now, with the door closed, I was remembering that the last time I’d been alone in a room with him, we’d made Digby. I knew that this near stranger had a hairline scar on his abdomen. Appendix, he’d told me as I ran my tongue along it. This was the same man who had kissed the tiny birthmark I kept hidden high up on the inside of my left thigh, now fully clothed and on the opposite end of the room.
“So we should talk,” I said, and instantly blushed. World’s worst opening for a conversation with a man who’d just told me he stuttered. I corrected, “I mean, I want to apologize. I shouldn’t have called you at the butt crack of dawn and sprung Digby on you.”
“Dih . . . Dih . . . D . . .” he said, trying to repeat the name, and I had done it again—given him vital information in a casual side spill, like when I’d told him I was having a boy via a pronoun slip.