The Almost Sisters(94)
“Good. Because I already did it,” Rachel said. “I called Dad last night.”
I plunked onto my butt, surprised that I was surprised, because of course she had. That was also Rachel’s style. “Damn it, Rachel—” I started, but she interrupted me, pointing.
“Is that the ships?” From our low position, we could see a couple of tarp-wrapped rectangles leaning on the wall behind a coffee table.
“I think so,” I said, because there was nothing else to say. Mom and Keith knew. Done was done, Rachel was Rachel, and truthfully, it was a relief. Maybe I should give Margot Phan a call and enlist her to spill the news to our Tuesday gamers and my church friends in the same way. They could all chew it over together without me. I’d come home to a not-in-the-least-surprising surprise shower, and my Diaper Genie/onesie problem would have solved itself. “I know you meant well, Rachel, but please talk to me first next time, okay?”
Those exact words had come out of my mouth so often that I ought to have a pull string that would trigger them by now.
Fruitless, too, because even as we carried the paintings down, Rachel was saying, “Since I’m staying at your house, I should start getting your nursery set up. I’m at least going to paint. You can’t be around the fumes.”
I saw my imagined Superman-blue walls disappearing in a wash of Modern Dove Gray or Mint Wisp Green.
“Thanks. That’s nice of you. But Sel may want to help pick out the color and the theme.”
I said it purely as a defense, then realized that it might be true. He’d cared about the name, but did men care about baby bedding? He was a Dark Knight guy, so he probably thought Supe was a prig. Maybe the nursery’s theme should be John Henry Irons? His alter ego, Steel, wore Superman’s colors and shared his ideals, and he looked more like Digby might.
“Oh, of course!” Rachel said, backing off. She looked almost sheepish, and that was such a new look on her face that it had no set, faint lines. She peeked at me from under her lashes and said, “You guys pick, and I’ll paint, if that works? I wouldn’t want to get in the way of . . . whatever’s happening there. With you two.”
It wasn’t quite a question, but I answered anyway.
“Something is. I’m keeping it separate. Like, in my head I’m kinda dating Batman, and that could go any number of ways. Sel Martin, though? He’s in our lives forever. I have to stay on good terms with him, no matter what happens with his alter ego. Does that make sense?” I asked.
“Actually, it does,” she said, which surprised me. Very few sentences that had “Batman” or “alter ego” in them made any kind of sense to Rachel. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and her voice was very stiff, very prim as she added, “I’m having similar feelings about my husband.”
I stopped, too, shocked. Rachel was confiding in me. A little. Eight words, given in the wake of her latest maneuver with my baby news. But still, it was a whole sentence that was vulnerable and reciprocal.
I’d felt guilty for stepping in and calling Jake, but ever since then she’d been more open with me than she’d been in our whole lives. For Rachel, to meddle was to love. Maybe, by interfering, I had finally told her I loved her back in her own language. On impulse I leaned my ship picture against the wall and hugged her, painting and all.
“Oh, goodness!” she said, hugging me back as best she could with her arms full.
“Thanks, Rachel,” I told her, and this time I said it with no qualifiers.
“Thank you, Leia,” she said, such foreign words that it was practically like hearing Rachel speaking Klingon. She added, in her old familiar bossy tone, “Come home soon.”
Her lips to God’s ears, I thought as we went to the dining room and hung the pictures on the same old nails that had once held up Ethan and Ellis. I wanted to go home. Or at least I wanted this part—bones and sorrows dug up sixty years too late—to be over. Even the regular human heartbreak of my grandmother’s aging, her failing mind and memory, would be better than digging in these ancient, moldy secrets. Reading assisted-living brochures and fighting with Birchie and Wattie was shitty, unless the other choice was watching Regina Tackrey send them both to prison.
“Yours is higher,” Rachel said as she stepped back to eyeball the pictures.
Even I could see that she was right. The schooner had a slightly longer wire, but the patches of shiny wallpaper were hidden.
“It’s good enough,” I said.
“It’s going to drive you crazy,” Rachel said, meaning that it would drive her crazy. She was leaving, though, and the schooner listing a half inch lower than the clipper ship was not going to keep me up at night. I shrugged it off, but she said, “Let me fix it.”
Not everything was fixable, even by my stepsister.
“How will you do that? You think Birchie keeps a hammer in the house?” I asked her, and that ended the discussion, fast. Birchie kept no tools at all. Maybe she had banished them superstitiously, like Sleeping Beauty’s mother on a spindle-burning run sixty years after her kid had gone down for the Big Nap.
Birchie and Wattie came in bearing a pot of oatmeal with berries and a platter of biscuits and bacon. Strictly spoon and finger foods, I realized, and sure enough there were no forks on the set table. No knives either, not of any kind. Wattie had even prebuttered the biscuits and put out the honey pot instead of jam.