“You don’t want to hear your middle-aged sister complain about getting the life she always thought she wanted,” Kimber said, her gaze on the mason jar filled with a rainbow of dry erase markers.
“I want to talk to my sister about her life. I’m not here to judge you.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing to you.”
“Uh, yeah. Caught that,” Remi said. She stepped back into the kitchen and rummaged through cabinets until she found a bottle of vodka tucked behind two boxes of whole-grain organic pasta.
“Straight or what?” she asked, wiggling the bottle.
“Get the glasses,” Kimber said, pointing at a cabinet. Remi skipped the tasteful rocks glasses and found two tumblers with cartoons and big, bendy straws.
Kimber snorted when she saw them.
“These hold more,” Remi insisted.
Kimber mixed drinks and gave Mega his afternoon treat while Remi sat on the counter and listened.
“I remember thinking how much I liked Kyle’s ambition when we were in college,” her sister said.
“And now?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think I realized that his ambition would only extend to his job. Not his family or his home or his wife. I thought that I wanted to stay home and raise our kids. And for a while I did. But somewhere along the way it started to feel like not enough. Kyle got more important in his job, and that meant more money for us, but also more travel for him. He stopped being around. He goes days without talking to his kids. There are days when we only exchange one or two text messages.”
She blew out a breath and shook the ice cubes in her cup. “It’s like the more important Kyle got at work, the less important I got in my life.”
“Well, that’s bullshit,” Remi said.
“Excuse me. This is my existential crisis. Not yours.”
“I’m just saying, what’s more important—other people recognizing that you are more than just a label or a role or you recognizing it?” Remi asked, then blinked. She swore softly under her breath.
“What?” Kimber asked.
“Ever give great advice to someone else that you should be taking yourself?”
“I haven’t eaten a salad in six weeks but I made Hadley and Ian try four different Brussels sprouts recipes last week. What do you think?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about.”
Kimber raised her cup in the air in a mock toast, and Remi did the same.
“I don’t even know if he’s happy,” Kimber said.
“Are you happy?”
“I’m fucking miserable. Haven’t you been listening to me yell at you?” There was no heat to her sister’s words. “I mean, I basically tried to pin years of dissatisfaction with my own life on you because you were handy and Kyle made time to be concerned about you.”
“What would make you happy besides selling your children to the circus and dumping Kyle’s body in the lake?” Remi asked.
“I haven’t really thought much past Ian on a trapeze and Hadley barking for the bearded lady.”
Remi felt the glimmer of recognition. A glimpse of the smart, snarky big sister she’d idolized. “Who could blame you? So what have you tried?”
“Tried?” Kimber asked, pausing to make a slurping noise at the bottom of her drink.
“With Kyle, with the kids. You want something more than home improvement projects and that creepy whiteboard. What have you talked to them about?”
“Well, nothing really. I mean, I yell at Kyle for skipping out on yet another family event. And then I yell at my kids for making demands like doing their laundry faster so Ian can have his lucky underwear for his math test. Or Hadley forgetting to tell me she signed up for the junior high bake sale and needs four dozen cupcakes tomorrow.”
“Mm-hmm. So yelling,” Remi said, hopping down off the counter and strolling into the laundry room. She picked up the hot pink eraser from the chalk tray.
“How long does it take you to update this every week?” she asked.
“About an hour and a half. But that’s after I’ve worked out the meal plan, made the grocery list, and reviewed Kyle and the kids’ schedules,” Kimber said.
“Hmm. Interesting.” Casually, Remi lifted the eraser and swiped it right through the column labeled Monday, erasing the day from existence.
Kimber’s eyes went wide. “You erased my Monday.”
“Yelling,” Remi repeated, and wrote it on the board in red. “Did it work?”
Kimber shook her head, still staring at the damage to her weekly schedule. Then she went back into the kitchen, and Remi heard the telltale sound of vodka pouring into a sippy cup.
“What else?” Remi called.
“Guilt trips,” Kimber said, reappearing. “The back of the hand to the forehead kind of martyrdom as I carry another laundry basket up the stairs like a peasant woman in pioneer days.”
“Guilt trips,” Remi wrote. “Good. Any results?”
“Yeah. They all got even better at ignoring my under the breath mutterings,” Kimber said.
“If these are the only two approaches you’ve tried, I think there’s a lot of fresh options. For instance, have you considered kicking Kyle in the balls instead of doing his laundry?”
Kimber laughed, choking on vodka and tonic. She hiccuped. “I’m saving that for a last resort.”
“Now, feel free to ignore me because I don’t have children and a house to run. But I’m seeing a whole lot of doing things for other people and nothing like ‘take bath with waterproof vibrator and romance novel’ on your list.”
“You aren’t actually selling sex toys are you?” Kimber asked.
“Ha. Ha. We’re talking about you right now. It looks to me like you’re filling your hours with responsibilities and tasks for other people. What’s the worst that could happen if, instead of making turkey burgers on Wednesday, you just told the kids to make whatever they want.”
“They would eat ice cream for dinner, make a huge mess in the kitchen, and I’d be forced to spend two hours cleaning chocolate syrup off the dog,” Kimber said.
“So it’s easier if you do it all yourself?” Remi pressed.
“Well, yeah. No one else is going to do it the way I want it done. So it’s just easier for me to be the one to do it.”
“In theory,” Remi said, wielding the marker, “if your goal was to raise children incapable of making themselves a peanut butter and jelly or doing their own laundry, you would be correct.”
Kimber pursed her lips. “Shit.” She took another slurp from the straw. “You are making a point that I’m not sure I’m mentally ready to accept. I may need to linger longer in the martyr zone.”
“Understandable and valid,” Remi said, handing her sister the eraser.
Kimber hopped up on top of the washer and took another long pull on her straw. “I’m really sorry for being a raging asshole to you the other night. I hate people who take their existential misery out on others, and that’s exactly what I did to you.”
“Apology accepted,” Remi said, stretching out on the spotless bench perched above a neat row of snow boots.
“You shouldn’t accept apologies so easily. That just gives assholes like me the opening to be assholes again.”