She took my diary, Markie thought with a familiar sickness of heart. For heaven’s sake, Mother, what were you going to do? Blackmail me?
“Fess up.” Again, Robbie’s voice made Markie jump. “Whose is it?” Robbie was smiling pleasantly.
“Nobody’s. I mean, it’s nothing. Really.” Markie knew she sounded guilty, probably looked it, too.
Markie could see Marynell’s thin back stiffen high up on the ladder. The woman slowly turned her head and squinted down at her youngest daughter with an expression that was equal parts hostility and suspicion. “Margaret,” she demanded, “where did you get that box?”
Funny. Marynell never called Frankie “Frances,” or Robbie “Roberta.” And although Marynell had coined her daughter’s tomboy nicknames, she reserved the use of Markie’s full name for the times she was working herself into a slow-burning rage at her daughter.
“From under the bed.” Markie fixed challenging eyes on her mother’s face, willing her, daring her, to press the issue, especially here in front of Robbie, especially now.
Robbie, sensing the sudden shift in the atmosphere, frowned. As she stood and crossed the room, the taut silence seemed amplified by the scuffing of her house slippers and the measured ticking of their father’s antique mantel clock.
Markie turned her eyes from her mother’s scowl to her sister’s pallid face. Robbie didn’t look like herself these days. Instead of the family’s slender Irish rose, she looked like a puffy, used-up, freckled hag. Her long ginger-colored hair, usually bound in a neat French braid, was shoved behind her ears, limp and unbrushed. At ten o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t dressed, unthinkable for a farm wife. Her frayed pink terry-cloth robe accentuated her pale complexion and the girth of her expanding middle. As she waddled across the bare floorboards of the long attic room, Markie thought how Robbie even moved like an old woman now. So unlike the energetic sprite that had kept pace with a robust husband and three growing boys on their huge farm. But Robbie was doing a lot of uncharacteristic things lately—understandable under the circumstances—like now, for example, poking her nose in where it didn’t belong.
“It is one of the diaries.” Robbie’s teasing smile returned as she advanced, having no idea what she was about to do. “Nothing else could make you blush like that.” Her hand snaked out to grab at Markie’s, still submerged in the box, now sweating on the cloth covering that encased the most damaging secret of her life.
When Robbie’s hand tugged on her wrist, Markie pushed her sister away. “Stop it!” she snapped. “I said it’s nothing!”
“Ah, now,” Robbie wheedled, “we could use a little entertainment. Couldn’t we, Mother?”
“That box wasn’t supposed to go in this room.” Marynell acted as if Robbie hadn’t even spoken. Her brow was creased and her voice grew vehement as she started to descend the ladder. “I told P.J. to put it across the hall with my things. I swear, that man never does anything right.”
The McBride farmhouse had a high converted attic, cleaved in two by a dark hallway illuminated by a single bare bulb at one end and a tiny window at the other. Right now, at midmorning, a thin shaft of light poured down the steep-pitched stairs that led to the kitchen. On either side of the hall, two enormous rooms stretched the length of the Victorian-era frame structure, with dormers poking out along the front and back planes of the roof.
Those two rooms had been rigidly appointed when the sisters were growing up. Their bedroom was at the front of the house, arranged like a dormitory with three twin beds evenly spaced between the two dormers and three scratched and dented dressers standing at attention on the opposite wall. The mantel clock on top of the center dresser had been the only decoration allowed during their childhoods. The long room on the other side of the hall was the playroom, later the study. Three identical desks, three plain bookshelves, three metal footlockers. No rugs. No curtains. No pictures. Marynell was nothing if not tidy. She despised clutter, her husband P.J.’s most especially.
Both attic rooms had grown fallow and musty since the girls had grown and gone. The one they were cleaning now had devolved into a repository for P.J.’s projects and memorabilia. Tucked in among the three beds were boxes of old photos and papers, childhood keepsakes from his daughters, magazines, sheet music, hunting and fishing equipment, anything that “offended” Marynell’s aseptic sense of order.
The other room, dedicated to Marynell’s sewing and paperwork, remained as bleak and sterile as an operating room. Marynell liked it that way—their belongings strictly divided.
Today the three women had been mucking out this room so Robbie’s three boys could stay here until she could get her life sorted out. The move back to the McBride farm had been Marynell’s idea. She adored her grandsons—the sons she never had.
Marynell was scrambling down the ladder faster than a spider backing down its web. “I’ll take that box across the hall myself.”
“I’d like to look through it first,” Markie said evenly while she kept one hand on the cardboard edge and the other inside…on the diary.
“Those are my things,” Marynell protested.
“Not exactly, Mother. This is my letter jacket, these are my yearbooks, and this is my diary.” Markie flipped her hand.
“Ha! So it is one of yours.” Robbie succeeded in snatching it from Markie’s grip. “Full of dreadful teenage secrets, I bet.” In fact, except for the one hidden in these pages, Markie couldn’t think of a single secret between the sisters. Her heart hammered and her stomach sank as her sister started flipping pages.
“Anything about me and Danny in here?” Robbie flopped on the nearest bed as she skimmed page after page of Markie’s teenage scrawl. In recent days Robbie’s whole world had come down to this obsessive quest—the desire for one more word, one more photograph, one more memory of Danny.
Robbie’s face lit with an expectant smile as she scanned the early pages, the first genuine smile Markie had seen in days. For the moment, her beleaguered sister looked vaguely like a teenager in love, instead of a devastated widow. “Here we go.” She read aloud with obvious delight, “Ohmigosh!!!! Robbie and Danny are getting married. With four exclamation points—isn’t that cute?”
Markie’s heart contracted. This diary contained precious few entries about Robbie’s youthful romance with Danny. In only a few pages Robbie would see the secret Markie was in no mood to reveal, certainly not now.
“There’s nothing else. Now, give it back to me.” Markie grabbed at her sister’s arm, but Robbie swung away saucily as Marynell inserted her tall frame between the girls.
Markie’s mother’s thin face had turned as gray as the cleaning rag compressed in her bony fingers. “This is my house,” she said to Markie quietly, ominously, “and you have no right to go through my things.”
“Your things?” Markie spun to face her mother squarely.
In these last few days since she’d returned to the farm, she had finally given up hope of even the pretense of a decent relationship with Marynell, even for Robbie’s sake. Truth be told, Markie had given up that hope a long time ago. Truth be told, she was never going to please her mother no matter what she did. And truth be told, if it weren’t for her father and Robbie, she would never have set foot in this house again, not after… It was certainly too late now. Recently, fate—kindly or not, Markie couldn’t decide—had engineered it so that she now knew exactly how much her long-ago decision had cost. It had cost her the beautiful young man who was her son, or rather, the son of a very fortunate family in Dallas.
“I will not be disrespected this way.” Marynell’s crepe-paper cheeks grew mottled, but for once her mother’s distress inspired no mercy in her youngest daughter. “This is my home and I… I…” Marynell stammered before her lips clamped shut and