“He’s up there on the Brushy Mountains. I bet he’s got a view. Hard to believe. I’d have liked to have built up there, but it wasn’t in the cards for me.” Don clapped his hands hard, like the idea was finished in his mind.
Sylvia searched Don’s face for the joke. She wasn’t sure he’d ever really wanted anything except the next gullible woman. Maybe sex was what he thought he actually had access to in this world, the best thing he had a chance in hell of getting. This was the problem with Don. He’d screwed her over all their lives, with women, with general trifling ways, and now she was feeling sorry for him. If the world was even a little bit fair, she would have never met this man. Sylvia closed her eyes and stretched her legs out in front of her, swung her arms overhead, tried to make herself as long as she could. If it were a good day when she opened her eyes, Don would be gone.
“You should have fixed the house you had,” she said.
Don laughed and pulled up Sylvia from the couch and led her into the guest room that had become her room. The bed was heaped with clothes, clean and dirty, some free weights Sylvia always planned to use with her exercise tape, and her large rolling suitcase.
“You going somewhere?” Don asked, a flutter of nerves worming its way into his stomach.
“Where am I gonna go?” Sylvia snapped. “Lana wanted it.”
Sylvia had a collection of postcards that Lana had sent her over the years from Europe, from Kenya, from several tropical ports of call. People sent postcards to bring their loved one into the strange place with them, and Sylvia was grateful to be remembered. Even if she did feel that the postcards were designed to inspire envy. Still Sylvia kept them all. In her whole life she’d never received any other mail from her sister. No cards or notes in Lana’s tight controlled handwriting had come with baby or birthday gifts. Besides, the postcards were so much better than suffering through the albums of pictures with Lana and her husband, Gus, smiling in front of monuments and statues all over the world, groups of middle-aged white people clustered all around them.
Don ignored her tone, tried not to let Sylvia see his exhale of relief. “Lana’s always wanting something,” he said.
“Don, let her alone, she don’t need to be in this.”
But she was there. Sylvia had always loved Lana but she’d always envied her too. Lana was the beautiful girl with the no-nonsense attitude and the long ponytail that swung from the back of her head. Hair Sylvia used to dream of sneaking up behind her and cutting off with pruning shears and lofting the hair in the air over her head like a prize. When Devon was born she finally got over the pettiness. She didn’t have time for it. All the issues that had separated the sisters, Sylvia just didn’t care about them anymore. Devon helped them be the sisters they were meant to be. Lana had no children. She was married to a man more than twenty years older who had counted himself lucky that he’d made it out of his first marriage childless. Too bad, too bad. Lana would have been a wonderful mother, much better than Sylvia. Everyone, including every child, always liked Lana better.
Don took off his shirt, then his jeans. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m thinking about my sister, do you mind?”
“She ain’t welcome as far as I’m concerned.” Don reached down to take off his socks.
Jonnie had soaked all of Don’s athletic socks in a bucket with bleach to get them white again. She’d been so proud of herself and presented his clean socks to him like a gift. Like white socks would ever be anything that mattered to him. “Are you going with her?”
“What did I tell you about my business, Don?”
“Okay. I’m just thinking about you. I know you don’t like happy people congregated in one place.”
Sylvia laughed. Don was a shit, always had been, but his concern softened her. He still had that power over her. Sylvia stood in front of the bed waiting for directions. Nothing about Sylvia was shy, but her relationship with Don, this marriage that wasn’t a marriage, confused her, angered her and finally defeated her. She was not in uncharted land with Don, but he disoriented her and gave her the feeling that everything familiar was gone, suddenly oddly shaped like it was covered in drifts of snow.
“Come here, Syl,” Don whispered and pulled Sylvia into him, swayed with her, hummed in her ear.
Sylvia grinned though she hadn’t meant to. Nobody in the world but Don would think about dancing in the middle of the mess they were in.
Sylvia looked so young when she really smiled and Don felt a surge of warmth for her, for the fun young girl who drank beer as well as he ever did, let the foam dribble on her chin, if she wanted. The girl who from the day he saw her naked liked for him to take in her whole long body, her legs thick and strong as tree trunks, the pooch of her belly, her big heavy breasts, nipples dark as plums. She convinced him that she was the way a woman should look and anything else was a compromise. At first he was afraid to tell her how good she was and lived in terror that she would realize the whole truth and walk away. A young man won’t believe that holding back the truth won’t keep a woman close.
When Sylvia laughed it was the only time she was truly a beautiful woman. Her grandmother’s tiny freckles weren’t pinched into a seagull shape on her cheeks, her mother’s disappointed mouth finally twisted into happiness. “JJ Ferguson. Can you believe it?”
“Here, look at my face, but follow my feet.” Don pulled her into his body. Sylvia stiffened, unsure. “What’s wrong? Are you worried about that boy? Does he want something from you?” Don knew that one event doesn’t make another, but many elements converge and mix together like the ingredients of a cake, to set the events that rupture the membranes of our everyday lives. By the time you see the thing and recognize it for the danger it presents, it is, of course, too late.
Sylvia thought quickly about Marcus but realized Don must mean JJ. He wants everything from me, Sylvia thought, but she didn’t know how to say it right.