“Okay. Sorry,” I say, though I don’t actually believe her. “You know it’s my thing….You overpack; I obsess about germs.”
“I know,” she says, retreating a few steps. “But still. Don’t you remember how Mom used to tell us to say ‘thank you’ before we had a chance to spit the words out?”
“Yeah,” I say with a laugh. “The cupcake wouldn’t yet be transferred to our hands before she was like, ‘Gir-ls! What do you saaay?’?”
Josie sits on the floor, pulling off her boots. “Exactly. And don’t you remember how much it always annoyed us? Because we were totally going to say it? Only now…we no longer got the credit for having good manners? We just looked like a couple of dolts….” She stands and looks at me, her brows raised.
I smile, thinking, not for the first time, that although some of our worst sibling rivalry involves vying for our mother’s favor, some of our best bonding has come at her expense.
I carry the groceries into Ellen’s tiny galley kitchen, putting away the few perishable items before washing my hands. Josie does the same, this time without prompting, then turns and eagerly asks for a tour.
“Well, this is pretty much it,” I say, gesturing toward the living room. “Plus her bedroom in the back.”
“It’s nice,” she says, walking over to the windows and looking out to the street below. “Very cute…and cozy…What’s the rent run?”
“They bought it. And I have no idea what they paid for it,” I say, despising the way Josie talks about money.
“Must be nice,” she says under her breath, “having that kind of loot.”
“Better than being broke, I guess,” I say, refraining from my usual commentary about how money can’t buy you happiness.
“Yeah…that’s an understatement,” Josie says with a laugh, picking up a little bronze Buddha from an end table. “This is cute.”
I nod, thinking Ellen probably isn’t going for cute. “Yeah. She has good taste.”
“What would you call her style, anyway?” Josie asks, putting down the Buddha and running her hand up and down the base of a lamp made of cork.
“Oh, I don’t know…eclectic? The opposite of Andy’s?”
She nods, then inspects Ellen’s coffee table books, now in full-on nosy mode. She opens one on photography, reading the inscription from Andy, then flipping randomly to an edgy black-and-white portrait of Lenny Kravitz. “Cool shot,” she murmurs.
I nod.
“Did Ellen take any of these?” she asks, still flipping through the pages.
“I don’t think so…but maybe,” I say, thinking that Josie seems to have such love-hate feelings about Ellen, sort of the way I felt about Shawna in high school, both fascinated by and disdainful of her at once—which often boils down to jealousy. “She’s shot a few famous people.”
“Oh, I know. She’s told me,” Josie says, rolling her eyes, implying that Ellen brags—which couldn’t be further from the truth. “Does she know I’m here this weekend?”
I nod. “Uh-huh.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I don’t remember exactly. Just that you were coming for the weekend.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Did you tell her why I was coming?”
I raise my eyebrows and stare at her pointedly. “Um. No…How could I do that?”
She gives me a blank look.
“I don’t know why. Remember?”
She glances away, crossing her arms over her chest as she sits on the far end of Ellen’s contemporary sofa. “God. This is so uncomfortable,” she says. At first I think she’s talking about the two of us, until she adds, “Why would she buy a sofa that’s this hard?”
“Maybe she likes it,” I say. “To each her own.”
“Not possible. It’s terrible.”
I shrug. “Well, I don’t think she sits around here very much….She really just works and sleeps when she’s in the city.”
“So…was she okay with me staying here?” Josie asks expectantly, almost as if she wants the answer to be no.
“Yeah. She was totally fine with it….” I say, sitting on the other end of the sofa. It is the truth, but I leave out the part about how Ellen and I analyzed the subject for nearly thirty minutes, unable to come up with any possible Daniel-related topic that would necessitate an urgent, face-to-face dialogue.
“I doubt that,” Josie mumbles.
Against my better judgment, I ask her why she always thinks the worst of Ellen.
“I don’t think the worst of her,” Josie says. “I like her fine….I just get the feeling she thinks the worst of me.”
I shake my head. “That’s not true,” I say, because it actually isn’t. “She often defends you….” My voice trails off.
She narrows her eyes and says, “Oh? Why would she need to do that?”
My mind races for a clever retort, but I come up empty-handed. “Because you drive me nuts,” I say, smirking at her. “That’s why.”