What's Mine and Yours(54)
“At the theater,” Margarita said, affecting a rarefied accent. “I don’t need pointers from you, Noelle. Atlanta independent theater isn’t exactly the big leagues.”
“I’m just trying to be supportive.”
“How could I forget?” Margarita was shouting now. “My big sister, my greatest champion. What were your last words of encouragement?” She scrolled through her phone. “Nice to see you’re not answering your phone because you’re busy doing big, important—”
“We didn’t know if you were coming. I was pissed.”
“How about ‘I’m sorry’? You think you could try that? I’d wait for you to come around, but I’m not Diane.”
“Leave me out of this,” Diane said and turned off the music. “Can you all behave yourselves for just one day? This isn’t about us. It’s about Mama.”
Margarita laughed. “Of course it is, manzanita. Even after all these years.”
The girls arrived after lunch, and Lacey May couldn’t remember ever having seen them like that, all grown up together. It would have been the perfect time to take a picture if not for how worn she looked in her threadbare robe, her body bloated from all the machines whirring and pouring fluid into her.
Margarita looked like a star, her hair streaked an artificial caramel color, her breasts larger than Lacey May remembered. Yet somehow, she was all Robbie. Diane seemed homely beside her, stocky and dark, her hair curling around her ears. The only pretty thing on her was the emerald charm around her neck, the one her father had given her when she was a girl. And Noelle was a great beauty wasted; she seemed so much older than thirty-two. Her body was soft and dimpled in strange places—her arms, her knees—and thin and brittle in others—her hands, her neck. She looked like a woman who had been changed by the swells and vacancies of pregnancies, one after another, and never enough time in between to put herself back together. But Noelle had no reason. She should have remained intact. Lacey May said none of this out loud.
“My girls!” she said. “Come here, my girls!”
There was a round of hellos and kisses as they descended on Lacey May. Hank stood at the foot of the bed, nodding at the girls, waiting to be embraced. Her poor man. He still acted like an extra in their lives, a man so happy to have been cast, he tried mostly not to be a bother. The girls hugged him limply, and Lacey May squeezed his hand. Any lives they had, they’d had because of Hank, whether the girls saw it that way or not. She would be eternally grateful.
Within a few minutes, the commotion subsided, and the girls assumed their places: Noelle slumped into her usual chair in the corner; Margarita climbed onto the windowsill and tapped at her phone. Diane stayed beside Lacey May and fussed with the hospital bed, cranking it so she could sit upright.
Lacey May wondered how to snap them into awareness of one another. They were all unmarried except for Noelle, who seemed unhusbanded. One day Lacey May would be gone, and they’d only have each other. How could she make them see?
The doctors didn’t know yet whether she’d need radiation or chemo or surgery. They were holding off on promising treatments until they brought down the swelling in her brain. They had warned her she might feel confused, and there might be pain. The worst of it, so far, was the nausea, which reminded her of labor. She had thrown up with all her girls. She imagined dying would be something like childbirth. A splitting open. A transfiguration she couldn’t fully believe in, until she was in it, crossing over from one state of being into another, with no say in the matter at all.
Lacey May cleared her throat. “The doctor came by this morning. He said the swelling isn’t coming down the way they want it to, but the good news is I haven’t had another seizure.”
Noelle snapped to attention. “What do you mean seizure? I thought you fell off the porch and hit your head.”
“Well, they think it was a seizure, and I can’t say any different cause I don’t remember.”
“Maybe the way you described it led them to the wrong conclusion. You’ve always had a tendency to blow things out of proportion.”
Margarita burst out laughing from the windowsill. “I ought to just record Noelle. Point my phone right at her. Her grudges are pure entertainment. Better than reality TV.”
“If it’ll help your failing career, go right ahead.”
“At least I work. What do you do? After all your big talk about getting out, it must kill you to be where you are.”
“Where I am? What about you? You had to ask Papi for money. Who do you think is using more these days, you or him?”
“My God!” Lacey May roared. “The way you girls talk! I didn’t raise you to talk like that.”
“Sure you did,” said Noelle. “Has anybody even heard a prognosis? We’re all gathered here like they’ve given Mama a death sentence, and we don’t even know the facts.”
“Mama’s sick,” said Diane.
“I know she’s sick, but we can’t take her word about how serious it is.”
“This girl thinks I made up my cancer!”
“I’m not saying that—”
“Don’t you all see this may be it?” Lacey May slammed her wired hands down on the bed. “This may be the last time we’re all together, and we’re wasting it. We’ve got to get a hold of your father. If we wait for him to turn up, it might be too late.”