The Other Sister, page 7
“What are you…” I begin, but I interrupt myself. “Oh, of course, it’s Monday.” On Monday, Grandma Millicent has breakfast with her club ladies. There’s some formal name for their association, but I don’t think they even remember what it is anymore.
“What a treat to see Geraldine last night.” Aunt June leans in. She smells of Chanel and Bloody Marys. She’s not an official member of Grandma’s club, but she gets to sit in and drink. “I thought she looked really good, all things considered. And writing a book!”
“Yes, it’s all very exciting.”
“How are you holding up? So much to do and, you poor thing, nothing to look forward to but that empty nest time.”
“Oh, I’ll manage. I think I’ll enjoy having some time to myself.”
“As if the lord of the manor will permit that!” June laughs brightly so I’ll know she’s joking. “I know you, Marie. You’d never be happy without someone to take care of.”
“Well, now there’ll be Geraldine,” says Grandma Millicent.
“Assuming she stays,” adds June. “Do you think she’ll stay?”
“I think so,” I say, although it’s not entirely clear which of us she’s asking. “I hope so.”
“Time will tell,” says Grandma Millicent.
“We should invite her to dinner!” cries Aunt June. “Wouldn’t that be nice, Mother? I can’t remember the last time we had Geraldine for a family supper.”
Geraldine would certainly have a great deal to say about that. Now, however, is not the time to bring this up.
“I’m sure that would be lovely.” Grandma smiles. “Oh, by the way, June, didn’t you say you wanted to pick up that new Anne Tyler novel while we were out?”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I? Where is my head? You know my weakness for weepy books, Marie.”
“Well, why don’t you go ahead? I’ll just wait in the car. Marie can keep me company.”
Of course June agrees and heads off down Main Street without questioning. June knows her mother as well as anyone and has learned it is best to comply with her little ways.
I open the door on the blue Town Car and help Grandma inside. I climb in after her and shut the door on us both. The car windows are all tinted, so it’s dim in here, but it’s quickly heating up. It’s going to be in the high eighties today, even though we’re barely halfway through June. Even Grandma has a little sheen of perspiration on her lip.
“I’m so glad we ran into you, Marie. I wanted to talk to you at the barbecue last night, but there simply wasn’t any opportunity.”
Grandma’s hard gaze digs beneath my skin, rooting around among the veins and nerves to find the one that’s the teeniest bit frayed. If I’m being honest, we’ve never had an entirely easy relationship. Grandma Millicent never quite forgave Dad for marrying our mother. At least, not until he laid the title for the Rose House on her table. Until he began making real money buying and leasing the other properties around town. That his first acquisition once housed his own now-deceased brother is something we never mention.
“And where on earth did Geraldine vanish to?” my grandmother asks. “I didn’t have a chance to say good-bye.”
“She left early. I guess she was tired from the drive.”
“She left? I assumed she was staying with you.”
“We hoped she would, but…she decided she’d rather stay down at the old house.”
“Ridiculous. That house is not safe.”
“I know. I told her that.”
“And she didn’t listen.” Grandma presses her lips together in a thin, pale line. “You would think just once she might try to go a day without raising a ruckus.”
I drop my gaze. My left hand is on top of my right, hiding my bandage, but exposing that vulnerable place where my wedding ring used to be. I fold my fingers together. There. Better.
Grandma, of course, sees. “Something’s the matter, Marie. I can tell. What is it? You know you can say anything to me.”
I do know it. Without question. And knowing, I take a minute to gather my nerve. It’s my turn. “I’m worried about Dad.” I get the words out in a rush.
“Why?”
“I think…” I rearrange my hands again. I tuck my purse closer to my side. I am too nervous. I am too ashamed and awkward. I want to disappear.
My concerned grandmother watches closely.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m jumping the gun. I’m sure it’s nothing.” I make myself smile at her, stiff and unconvincing.
“Well. Now you have to tell me, Marie, or I’ll be losing sleep over it.” She is trying to joke. It almost works.
I have to tell her. There is no getting out of it. “There was some money…it’s gone missing.”
This stings her. Grandma was getting all set to explain to me that I am overreacting, again, but I’ve mentioned money.
“What money? Missing from where?”
I tell her about Geraldine’s graduation present to Robbie and how it vanished. I am ashamed. Every bit of me displays it. Nervous hands, downcast eyes, tremulous voice. Poor little Marie. Daddy’s baby girl. Marie doesn’t know what to do.
Disapproval hardens like a mask over Grandma’s features.
“Marie. Why on earth would you think your father had taken it? Simply because he pointed out to Geraldine she shouldn’t have made such an extravagant gesture?”
“No, it’s not that.” I stop again. Breathe again. Her gaze chisels into me. Whatever I say next, she will believe. Grandma Millicent knows I am incapable of lying to her. I have worked hard to make sure of that.
“Dad’s been talking with Jeff Seward more lately, and Walt. I think there might be trouble with the business.”
Trouble with the business. The words hang between us, vibrating in the building heat. Trouble with the business. It’s the one thing all Monroes fear. Trouble with the business means being left without money. Trouble with the business means shame and all our dirtiest laundry exposed for the entire world to see. Grandma’s mind is already racing ahead, fitting pieces together, drawing conclusions. I wish I could see inside her. I want to watch the pictures take shape.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” She takes my nervous hands, and holds on, forcing my fidgeting fingers to be still. “You’ve just been too stressed with Robbie’s graduation party.”
“I know. I know. I just…Dad won’t talk to me.”
Her hands are all sharp angles. The softer flesh wore away years ago and what’s left is granite and iron. “Don’t worry, Marie. I’ll speak with him.”
“But you won’t tell him I told you?”
“I said don’t worry.” Grandma pauses and her fingers dig deeper into mine. “It’s not just your father who depends on you, Marie. We all do, but that means you must depend on us.”
“I do, Grandma.” I lean forward and so very impulsively kiss her cheek.
Her smile is small, doling out the expected level of approval, but nothing more. “Well, now. That’s settled. Would you go find June for me? I think it’s time to go home.”
Of course I will. I climb out with my box of almond macaroons and hurry down the street toward Lakeshore Books. I don’t look back. She doesn’t need to see my face. Not that she’d bother looking toward me. I’ve been managed and am therefore no longer a matter of concern.
But thanks to our confidential conversation, she does know something’s gone wrong with Dad. That is a matter for concern. It will worry at her until she discovers all the details and devises some means to make the problem go away.
Good.
One under-examined aspect of the Household Tales is the princes. The ones who come to the rescue and who always seem to think choosing a wife from a family filled with witches, murderers, and cannibals is a good idea.
It’s unsurprising that those princes get behind the idea that the family branches need a little pruning, starting with the bad sisters and wicked stepmothers. These men are, after all, royalty. They represent the power of high and low justice. Why shouldn’t they use it to secure happiness and peace of mind for their new bride? Of course, it also secures them a castle, and a kingdom.
Somehow, this calculation never renders them less charming.
—Out of the Woods: Musings on Fairy Tales in the Real World,
Dr. Geraldine Monroe
GERALDINE, PRESENT DAY
STACEY B’S SANDWICHES AND STUFF
1.
The phone’s ringing.
I wake up with a start. I’m in my driver’s seat. Sun streams through the windshield. The car smells of stale coffee and overripe strawberries from the wilting container on the passenger seat. My toes are cramping inside my damp socks.
My phone’s still ringing.
I spent the night in my car. This was strictly my choice. Even though the tourist season is well under way, there are still plenty of vacancies in the motels by the highway, and no matter what my father believes, I’m not that broke yet.
But I wanted to watch the old house and see if anything happened. I didn’t seriously believe that any of my relations would come and burn the place down or call the cops to report suspicious activity. Not yet anyway.
I also did it to see if I still could. If something else went wrong and I had to leave in a hurry, did I remember what I needed to keep close? How to sleep with one ear open in case somebody came around looking for a dollar or a grope? Even before I left Lillywell, I put a couple changes of clothes and other useful stuff in my backpack, where I could get to them easily. Shimmying out of my party clothes in the dark was a little awkward, but nothing I hadn’t done before.
Once I was in my old jeans, white men’s T-shirt, and plaid flannel, I found my flashlight and pepper spray, and hunkered down to wait for morning. The sound of the wind in the trees mixed with the rush of the occasional car was as familiar as my name. So was the smell of cool summer night. I was home, whether I wanted this to be home or not. My body and my brain recognized it and relaxed. I fell asleep. No dreams found me. Thank God.
The ringing stops, just long enough for me to roll my shoulders, flex my toes inside my worn boots, and crick my neck.
And it starts again. I swear and root around in my purse, until I drag the annoying little device up from the bottom to check the screen.
Tyler.
Shut it off, I tell myself. Wait it out. He’ll get the message.
But I can’t. It is physically beyond me to turn him away again. I touch the Accept button and hold the phone to my ear.
“Geraldine?”
I close my eyes and swallow like I’m drinking his voice.
“Geraldine, come on. I just want to know you’re okay. That’s it. I promise.”
How can I be okay? Tyler’s voice is in my ear and I can see every lean, clean inch of him, with his chestnut hair flopping over his forehead and his beard cut so close around his jaw it’s almost a five o’clock shadow. His café au lait eyes under their heavy black brows. The way he smiles with only one side of his mouth. Cheekbones to die for. Shoulders, arms, chest, waist. I’m remembering him with mind and hands and mouth.
So, I know exactly how he looks when he gives out that sigh that slips into my ear. “All right. We’re not talking. Just…just tell me you’re okay,” Tyler whispers. “Please, Geraldine.”
I swallow, and swallow again. Finally, my throat unsticks enough to let a trickle of breath thread its way through.
“I’m okay.”
“Where are you?” The question is eager, and a little desperate. “Nobody back at Lillywell would give me anything.”
I open my mouth to tell him, but catch myself just in time.
“This is a bad idea, Tyler.”
“Do you want to know where I am?”
Yes. I do. I want to climb through the phone and be there, too. I want to wrap myself around you. I want you to hold me and say that everything will be all right even though it’s never going to be all right again.
“Ty…”
“Chicago,” he says before I can get any further. “I’m finishing up my paperwork at Northwestern. I got a graduate lecturer job.”
“You didn’t tell me you’d applied to Northwestern.”
“I was saving it for a surprise.”
Chicago. That’s only ten hours away, nine if the traffic cooperates. Tyler is less than a day away from me. Way less if he flies into Traverse City and rents a car.
Tyler’s in Chicago with a job and a chance to start a new life. Not still a student at Lillywell with scandals and old crimes sniffing around both our heels. The fact of it goes straight down to my stupid, starving vagina, and all at once I’m dripping and straining with raw need.
“Pay’s for shit right now, but it’ll look really good on the CV,” he says. “I told you it’d work out.”
“You did.” I can admit that much.
“I love you, Gerie.”
“Don’t call me Gerie.” The words are automatic.
“I love you anyway.”
It’s our very own call and response. We’ve repeated it in bed, at the table, in the woods, in the shadows of my office after we’ve almost broken the desk and the chair. After I’ve made myself drunk again on his scent and his hard, eager, delighted sex.
That, of course, was all before the department found out I was living the biggest cliché imaginable and sleeping with a student. Before Jeannine got scared and fired me and I had to make sure she didn’t do worse.
My fingers curl around the steering wheel, because if I pound it, he’ll hear me. “We can’t. I can’t.”
“Sorry. You were breaking up there for a second.”
“Don’t joke about this, Ty!”
“I’m not joking. Where are you? Are you coming here, or should I come get you?”
“We agreed to separate.”
“You said you were going away. I couldn’t stop you, because of that little thing where you left in the middle of the night without saying good-bye. That is not an agreement to separate.”
I should scream at him. Pour out all the hateful, insane things I thought in the dark as I packed up this car back in Alowana. Then, I should hang up and let him sit in Chicago with all that ringing in his ears (only ten hours away, nine if the traffic cooperates, even less if he flies into Traverse City). Let the anger and the pride and the pain make it easy for him to stay away. It would be for his own good.
That’s not what I do. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…I should have found another way.”
“Then make it up to me. Let me come see you,” he says. “Please, Geraldine. I just want to talk. Or you come here. I’ve converted to the way of the deep-dish pizza. You were right. I can’t ever go back now.” He purrs the last words, a tone of faux seduction that never fails to make me laugh.
It doesn’t fail either of us now. I’m throwing my head back against the seat and I’m laughing. It hurts. Oh, God, it hurts so bad.
“I do not want to give us up, Geraldine. But, if you tell me that’s not what you want, I’ll hang up. I’ll drown myself in the lake, or in pizza sauce. Whatever. But you won’t hear from me again.”
“Don’t drown yourself,” I say. “It hurts way more than they tell you.”
“Okay. I won’t. But I have to see you, Gerie.”
He’s twenty-four, and he calls me Gerie and I call him Ty. He’s handsome and I’m eighteen years older than he is and I spent every minute until we got caught not caring. Because I was finally alive, really, physically alive in my own battered body. I had a pulse and hope and a reason to make a life that I could share with another human being. With Tyler I believed in Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After. I wanted to clear everything between the two away.
And God help me, for a minute there, I believed that I could.
“I’m home,” I say. “At my old house.”
“Nice?”
I stare through the driver’s side window at the dirty white aluminum siding. I think about the other house on the hill, looking down. “No.”
“How about your sister? Is she there?”
I’d told him a little about Marie, once. After the regular phone calls started last year.
I’ve got some stuff that I have to work on, Ty. We’d been in bed, of course. It was sunset. Which I suppose was appropriate, symbolically speaking.
Everybody’s got something.
Not like this.
What is it?
I can’t tell you. Not yet. But…Marie, my sister, called. We’ve been talking. I might need to go home for a while and…You’re just going to have to trust me for a bit. I’m doing this so we can be together.
Then I’m all for it.
That was before he and I got caught. Before I had to work my little bit of blackmail on Jeannine.
“Geraldine?” Ty prompts. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I croak. “Yes. I…Marie’s son, my nephew, Robbie, he’s graduating this weekend. That’s why I’m here. I promised him.”
“Gonna be a big party and everything?” We’re talking about nothing, but we’re talking, and I am not sending him away.
“Massive party. My father has a thing about entertaining. Probably half the town’s going to be there.”
“And that’s not nice, either?”
“No. It isn’t.” Because it’ll be the half that knows me, or used to.
“So, tell me what you’re doing there again? I mean aside from avoiding me in an epic fashion?”
I am not hanging up or erasing his number or the hundred or so photos I’ve got of him on my phone. I am not letting him go for his own good or mine.
“I’m trying, Ty. I swear to God, I’m trying.”
“I know. I just…I want to help. Why don’t you come down here? Just for a couple of days.”
He needs me. He wants me. I can trust this. Trust him. I always could. That’s the part that gets inside and twists. “I can’t.”
“Then I’m coming to you.”
“Stop saying that!”
Silence, heavy and stunned, leaches through the phone and into my mind.
“I’m sorry,” I croak. “I just…it’s complicated. I don’t…I can’t deal with us right now.”
