“Leia, you’ll have your hands full there. You’ll need a helper,” she said, as if she were doing me a favor. “It will even be fun for Lavender, that big old attic full of furniture and letters and oh, the clothes! I used to be so jealous, seeing your summer pictures playing dress-up with real flapper gowns, bustles, poodle skirts, and that wedding dress. . . .”
“Yeah, when I was nine,” I said. By the time I was Lavender’s age, the attic seemed like a great place to get heatstroke and spider bites. I missed JJ’s Super Nintendo so much that Birchie drove into Montgomery and bought me one to ensure I stayed through July. Rachel spent her own teen summers with Keith’s parents down in Myrtle Beach, getting blonder and browner in her bikini, decorously French-kissing every cute boy in South Carolina. “No thirteen-year-old girl dreams of a vacation down in Birchville, Alabama. And I need to focus on Birchie.”
“Yes, exactly,” Rachel agreed. “But you also have to decide what to store and what gets packed for Goodwill. You’re awful at that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to close down—” I began, but Rachel interrupted me.
“Yes you do.” As she spoke, she kept right on typing Lavender’s birth date and home address into Delta, as if it were already decided. “I’m sorry, but you do. You have to move Birchie here, to assisted living. You’ve already put it off longer than you should have. She needs more care than she can get in Eastern Jesus, Alabama.”
“Maybe so, but Birchie will have her own opinions,” I said, an understatement so enormous I was surprised it didn’t get stuck and smother me on the way out of my mouth.
“You have to be firm. At a certain point, you have to take charge of things. With your grandmother that point came years ago.” Now she was choosing two side-by-side seats on the plane diagram. First class, which was ridiculous. A thousand extra bucks for a hot towel, some leg room, and free cocktails that Digby wouldn’t let me drink. “Lavender can help you. She’s naturally an organizer.”
It was true that Rachel’s genetic legacy was visible in Lavender’s alphabetized-by-author bookshelves and color-coded sweater drawers. But Rachel had never seen the Birch ancestral home in person. There were a hundred and fifty years of history in that house, most of it in the form of junk that had been stuffed and stacked and piled up in the attic. It would take four strong men a week to make a dent in it. Lavender would no more be useful than would Sergeant Stripes, the feral cat who lived in my backyard. I started to say so, but Rachel talked over me.
“That frees me up to find some places for Birchie to tour here. The nicest facilities all have monstrous waiting lists, I hope you know, but I can get her in almost anywhere she likes. People all over this town owe me favors.” I think she still saw a big fat no on my face, because she stopped typing, looked up at me, and added, “Please, Leia. I need some room to think right now. Please?”
That stopped my refusal cold. Rachel was asking me for help. Unprecedented, though she’d been shoveling her own unstoppable help at me for thirty-five years now. Even back in freaking preschool, she “helped” me color. One of my first memories was Rachel lisping, Pee-poo aren’t green. Pee-poo are like dis, while peeling an Electric Lime Crayola from my fist and replacing it with Flesh.
As an adult, she’d helped me choose everything from cars to Christmas trees to lip gloss. She’d bullied me into surviving after JJ screwed me over, even though she didn’t know what was wrong with me. JJ was so socially beneath her that she’d barely noticed his presence, much less his absence. All she knew was that I’d stopped eating and washing my hair. Even my Wonder Woman comics piled up unread. She’d stepped in, telling me that if I didn’t get out of bed, I would molder. She force-marched me to Soup-N-Salad with her friends and dragged me to watch her current boyfriend do his sportsball things. When I sat blank-eyed through these events, she changed tactics, suffering through Men in Black and The Fifth Element and even a teeny local Star Trek con, anything she thought might spark my interest. She’d done my color chart, too, claiming that going off to college required a makeover, then took Keith’s Visa and bought me a slew of spring-colored scarves to rectify my stark winter wardrobe.
“Just get some pink or this turquoise up around your face,” she’d told me, and the enraging thing was, with Spring colors by my face, damn it all if I did not look fresher and bright-eyed. Less broken anyway. Twenty years later I was still winding a funky scarf in the correct colors around my neck, elevating my uniform—black top, boot-cut jeans, and Chucks—into an actual outfit. Her genuinely good intentions coupled with her self-assured rightness made the helping both exasperating and impossible to turn down.
What had I done to help her back? Nothing. She never let anybody help her. Even on those rare occasions when Rachel allowed a virus to get through her cloud of vitamins, she kept her freezer stocked with frozen quarts of homemade chicken soup she made out of organic bone broth and whatever root vegetables had the most antioxidants.
“Well, there’s no harm in finding places for Birchie to tour, but only if they have two-bedroom units. Wattie and Birchie will likely want to stay together. I have to give them the option,” I told her, digging out my AmEx. Rachel was on the payment page already. “And fly us coach. Those seats are big enough to hold two Lavenders.”
She hesitated, eyeing my Digby-inspired larger ass. She noticed whenever I put on a few pounds and would gift me with fruit baskets and yoga-class cards until my jeans got roomy again. She reached for her purse, and I knew this move as well. She was about to get out her own credit card and pay to put me where she wanted me.
“Do you want me to take Lav or not?” I asked.
“Fine. I’ll put you back in steerage,” she said, and she even used my card.
Now here we were, Lavender and me, both under different kinds of Rachel-fueled duress. Me with only a best guess idea of what had happened between her parents.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lavender said. “No one ever talks to me about anything, so why should I talk to you? You’re as bad as them, running around all secret pregnant, and I’m this dumb kid who gets to find out last. Or never.”
Her hands were shaking, she was that angry, that helpless in the face of whatever was happening to her family.
“Lav,” I said softly, “you’re not the last to know, okay? You’re first. Unless you count doctors, I haven’t told a living soul I’m pregnant.”
That gave her pause, and she asked, “Gramma and Grampa don’t know?” I shook my head. “Mom doesn’t know?”
“Nope. And I would like to be the one to tell her. Them. Everyone—in my own time, if you don’t mind,” I said, and looked over to meet her eyes, so she would know how serious I was. She nodded, solemn, and I looked back to the road.
After a minute Lavender asked, “What about, like, the dad? The dad of the baby? Does he know?” She was calmer, and that was good, but oh, what a complicated question.
Instead of answering directly, I told her, “The father is not going to be involved.”