Later, when JJ reappeared and Rachel got so serious about him, I made myself believe that he was a new guy—some stranger I’d just met. Especially after they got married and then Lavender came. I separated Jake from JJ, my ex-bestie who’d once wept and writhed and used me, spending his sorrows in my body while keeping his heart for Rachel, for later. It was this secret piece of ugly history that made me sure he was capable of thoroughly shitty sexual behavior now.
“This cake is amazing,” Rachel said with her mouth full. She stuffed more in.
“Where’s Lavender?” I asked.
Rachel shot me an irked look, her mouth now too full to answer. She stood in profile to me, chewing, breathing heavily in and out through her nose. After she swallowed, she dropped the rest of the chunk of cake onto the floor and dusted her hands together, adding crumbs to the carnage.
“She walked down the street to play at Olivia’s house. Surely you don’t think I’d let my child witness this.”
She said it flat, rhetorical, but after the last five minutes I wasn’t sure of anything. I’d never seen her this way—never. I hadn’t been allowed to. Not even when I might have helped. As a kid she did her grieving in the laundry closet with no witness except Thimble, her stuffed bunny. Back then, at least, I knew when she was ruined. I would sit outside the closet in silent solidarity and be extra nice to her when she emerged. As an adult I couldn’t even do that much. I didn’t have the intel. I’d never seen her weep her mascara off, not once.
“What did he do?” I asked, meaning, how had Rachel caught him? And was it a true affair? A one-night thing? A hooker?
It didn’t actually matter. I was on her side, period, because Rachel was a “step” in name only. We were both barely three when Mom and Keith got married. I had no concrete memories of a life before her. She was family, while Jake was like her garden shed, fabricated elsewhere and then added on. And the boy he used to be? JJ? He was a bullet I’d dodged years ago.
Rachel straightened up. She had five inches on me, even in bare feet. I watched her trying to gather the shreds of her cool blond dignity. She couldn’t, quite. The raccoon eyes spoiled a lot of it, and the way her hands were shaking spoiled the rest.
“What are you even doing here, Leia? Didn’t you get my e-mail?” The tremble in her voice wrecked her go-to tone of fond exasperation. She was trying to pretend her dining room wasn’t full of broken glass and upended furniture. Like the problem here was my inability to check my messages.
“Let me see,” I said, and it was a relief to look away from this nakedly wretched Rachel, scrabbling in my purse to turn on my phone. “Is this really what you want to talk about?”
“I don’t want to talk at all,” Rachel barked, suddenly so vehement that I looked back at her in spite of myself. Her hands fisted in her wonky hair.
The phone buzzed and pinged in my hands. A text was landing. And another. And another. My Underdog theme-song ringtone started, cheery in the fraught silence. The screen said Polly Fincher, a First Baptist member down in Birchville. I sent the call to voice mail, and I started to ask Rachel if I could at least help her straighten up the room before Lavender got home. I barely got two words out before the pings of more texts landing sounded. Then my phone started ringing again.
“What’s going on?” Rachel asked.
I opened up Messenger and saw a host of familiar names. Lois Gainey, Chester Beckworth, Alston Rhodes, Pastor Rick, and more, all Birchville people. My heart stuttered, and I started flipping through them. They all said variations of the same thing:
What’s the matter with Miss Birchie?
Oh, honey, we are all sick worried!
What does her doctor say?
How long has she been this bad off?
And from Martina Mack, that vicious crone: Your granny surely showed out ugly in church this morning. . . .
I looked up at Rachel, stricken.
“What?” she said. “Leia, what?”
“Birchie,” I said. “Something’s wrong with Birchie.”
Bad wrong, too, because the phone started ringing again. Pastor Rick, but I didn’t want to talk to him. I needed to talk to Wattie. I swiped him to voice mail, and still more messages were landing.
Childhood summers aside, I had never lived in Birchville. Since I’d graduated high school, I had never spent more than a week at a time there. But I was a Birch. The last Birch, so far as they knew, and this is what round two of all the texts was saying:
Come home.
Come home.
You must come home.
I reached for Rachel, blindly moving toward her, and instantly her failed rally made good. It was as if she teleported slightly above and to the left of her own human turmoil, ready to help me, to fix and manage my mess. This was her essential self, her place, always, as the rest of us mere mortals plodded through our tacky mud. It was sad, and it could be enraging, but it was also very, very useful when the world went south.
“Did she fall?” Rachel asked, putting a comforting arm around me as we peered into the phone. A fall had been my worry for a dozen years now. Those damn staircases all over that house!
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said. I opened my e-mail, and the first versions of the day’s events were already landing. Rachel and I read in tandem. I was too horrified to be relieved that Birchie hadn’t broken a hip; this was somehow worse. She had survived so much, been so essentially and willfully herself. She was bull-minded, chock-full of strong opinions that often belied her genteel-bastion-of-the-Old-South looks. But now the texts were saying that with Wattie’s help she had apparently snuck her way down deep into senile dementia or Alzheimer’s. “I have to get there, I have to go!”
My hands were now the shaking ones, and I couldn’t get the phone to do right. Birchie had refused to leave her town, much less her house, and before Wattie had moved in, she’d driven off a string of in-home nurses. She’d thrown her Life Alert away, saying that only dogs wore collars, and she rarely remembered to charge the cell phone I had bought her. Her sole support system was Wattie, who was almost as old as she was.
“Breathe, sweetie. We can’t even be sure what we’re up against until you go and see. I can book your travel while you’re packing,” Rachel said.
I loved her for that inclusive pronoun. What we’re up against—the casual, unconscious declaration that she owned a share in my troubles.
“But you have things going on here, too, with J—Jake,” I said. I wanted a share in hers as well. “I don’t want to—”
“Shhh, we’ll fix me later,” Rachel lied.
I let her. My dear old Birchie, far away and failing, trumped whatever Jake was doing with his penis.
I kept flipping through the e-mails, and the more versions I read, the more I found that I was also furious. Those two devious old ladies had put one over on the whole town for God only knew how long, smiling and tatting antimacassars and showing up for church bake sales. They didn’t want their lives to change, so they had deliberately hidden truths—oh, I was so angry! Going back to read the latest texts only made me angrier.
So many of our family friends assumed I knew. They were asking what her doctors said, how long it had been going on, and what I planned to do. Only Martina Mack assumed I’d been in the dark. Her latest Facebook message called me “irresponsible and either blind or very stupid” for abandoning a “poor old crazy lady” to “the slapdash care of an ancient, colored maid.” I wasn’t sure which of the three descriptions made me maddest, and then I was sure.