“Listen up, you braided mental case and you wacko, tea-slurping crime writer, I have spent years, years , handling her and Henry and Grandma while you two indulged your weirdness and forced me to handle everything.”
“That is not true.” I wanted to smash that mouth of hers shut. “When the house needed a new roof, I paid for it. Janie paid for a remodeled kitchen. I paid for Momma and Grandma and Henry to stay at a beach house last summer. Janie sent them to the mountains because she knows that Henry loves the snow—”
“You’ve sent money. Big deal. You’re both swimming in it. Janie, you’ve got so much money you could buy France. Neither one of you has hardly been home since you left for college and you live only an hour away. You know Momma reopened the bakery and you’ve done nothing to help!”
“Cecilia,” I snapped. “Janie and I paid for a live-in caregiver for Grandma and Henry. In fact, we interviewed a bunch of them, hired one, and sent her over.”
“It didn’t work, did it?” she shrieked, stomping her feet. “I told you it wouldn’t. I told you! Grandma thought she was an ancient tribesman she met on an island during her final trip around the world as Amelia Earhart.”
“Why did Grandma think the caregiver was a tribesman?” Janie asked. She tapped the tips of her fingers together. “There were no feather hats, no tribal war paint…”
“How the hell should I know?” Cecilia said, doughnut sugar spewing out of her mouth. “She’s got dementia. Henry didn’t like the caregiver because he said she resembled a gecko. He ran away and hid in the shed under a trash can and the police had to come. Momma said the woman smelled like mothballs and death.”
“She didn’t smell,” I protested. “She was a nice lady. She was from Maine.”
“Maine Schmaine. They hated her. Momma told her she reminded her of Jack the Ripper, only with boobs. The caregiver asked me if Momma was insane, too.” Cecilia flung her head back, stared at the ceiling, and threw her arms up as if asking for deliverance.
Momma wasn’t crazy. She was, however, a nutcase.
“Jack the Ripper?” Janie moaned. “There is no correlation, none. Jack the Ripper was a killer in England who tore out—”
“We know who Jack the Ripper was,” Cecilia fumed. She picked up another doughnut. “Let me lay it on the line, you two. I’m exhausted. I’ve had it. I’m not sleeping at night.” Tears filled her blueberry eyes, then started soaking her red face. “I go from teaching kindergarteners, to the girls—they both have problems I haven’t told you about—I help her out, handle Henry and Grandma…”
She put her hands over her face and started making these choking, gasping, snorting sounds as great gobs of tears rolled down. It about ripped my heart in two. “I can’t take it anymore. The lawyers are fighting, and Parker and that…that… slut …”
Janie started crying, too. She always cries when one of us cries. Gentle, innocent heart. Killer on the keyboard, but she hates to see anyone in pain. I got up and put an arm around Cecilia.
“I can’t take her anymore.” She sniffled and coughed and snorted again and I pulled her in close for a hug. “And I can’t…I can’t…”
“You can’t what?” we asked.
“I can’t…”
She waved the doughnut. “I can’t stop eating.” She mumbled. “I hate myself for it. I’m getting so fat, I can hardly walk. I can’t tie my shoes. My blood pressure is as high as Venus and my cholesterol reading shows I have butter in my veins. The other day I was in my car and a boy oinked at me.”
I wanted to tie the boy up by his heels, attach him to a boom on a crane, and swing him around until his intestines slid out.
“Oh, oh! Bommarito hug!” Janie weeped out.
We did a three-way hug, our foreheads together. Cecilia smelled like doughnut. Janie smelled like fear. I smelled like a person who had too many regrets.
“Okay,” I whispered, feeling myself spiraling into a deep chasm of doom. “Okay. I’ll come.”
Janie leaned against me and whimpered, “Me, too, Cecilia.”
Cecilia abruptly snapped her head up, away from our forehead powwow; wiped the tears from her face; and left our warm, snuggly, sisterly hug. Her face entirely composed, she grabbed her purse on her way out, waddling quite quickly.
“Good. Glad to hear it. See you two at the house,” she ordered, no sign of the tears or unhappiness in her voice at all. She grabbed another doughnut. “I’ll let her know you’re coming. She’ll be frickin’ delighted.”
The door slammed behind her.
I sank to the ground. So did Janie. She put her head on my stomach.
“She duped us again, didn’t she?” I asked. “Duped us.”
“She manipulated our vulnerability. Our compassion and our womanhood. And we rehearsed this, Isabelle,” Janie whimpered. “Our answer was no.”
“No, no, no—that was our answer.”
“I need my embroidery,” Janie whined, “I need my embroidery.”
Shit. Double shit.
On the way home I got stuck in a traffic jam. Since I was on my motorcycle, I was happy it had stopped raining. When we were near the accident, we came to a complete halt to let the oncoming traffic go by. There were a couple of police cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance. An old blue truck had smashed into a light post and the beat-up camper trailer the driver was hauling was on its side. The light post now resembled the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
“What happened?” I asked a police officer who wandered over to chat about what a great motorcycle I had.
“The driver was high. Probably meth. He’s going to court next week for distributing the stuff. His truck flew through the air with the greatest of ease. Like a bird. Like a torpedo. Like an idiot.” He shook his head. “What an idiot.”
The driver was not strapped in, so he went through his windshield. Because he was high as a kite and relaxed, he would live, which was somewhat unfortunate considering the long criminal record he had. He was the oldest son of an old, snobby family in the city.
“Spoiled brat,” the police officer muttered. “Grow kids up rich and they never turn out. Make ’em work, and you’ll teach ’em how to live and respect other people.”
As the tow trucks came, I stared at that trailer and shuddered.
It was a carbon copy of the one we’d lived in years ago.
The darkness pulled at me again, inch by inch, the hole waiting nearby. I had to stare at the trees on the side of the road and breathe.
She had been beyond desperate. But it was the trailer that had caused all the screaming. And the blood. All that blood.
Blood everywhere.
Once I got past the accident, I rode so fast on my bike I got a ticket.
“Nice bike,” the red-haired officer told me who pulled me over. “Who you running from so fast?”
Myself, I wanted to say.
I’m running from myself.
But I’m not quick enough to get rid of me.
3
M omma lives in the Queen Anne Victorian home she grew up in before she rebelled and left right after high school but not before smashing my grandma Stella’s mother’s crystal punch bowl. She lives there with Grandma Stella, and our younger brother, Henry. Cecilia lives up the road on several acres about five minutes away.
The Queen