Sister Mine (15 page)

I open my eyes. My heart is thudding sickly in my throat. I'm sitting in my car, although I don't remember walking here.

The face is still there behind the glass, and I stifle a scream. It's only Kenny at his father's window waving good-bye.

Chapter Thirteen

S
OPHIA IS WAITING FOR ME
on her front porch, sitting in a lawn chair with her big tan pocketbook at her feet. She has on a pair of mint green polyester pants, a long-sleeved white blouse, a quilted vest patterned in peach-colored roses, a tan raincoat, plain white canvas tennis shoes with white anklets, and a small gold crucifix around her neck.

She's sitting in her usual upright position with her head and shoulders against the back of the chair, her feet flat on the floor, and an arm on each armrest like a queen about to receive subjects. In all my years of knowing her, I've never seen her slouched in a chair, or with her feet tucked under her, or sprawled out on a couch. She once remarked to me that people nowadays have even forgotten how to sit.

“Hi, Sophia,” I call out to her.

Her eyes are open behind her gold-rimmed glasses, but she could be asleep for all the movement and attention she displays. She's wearing the dreamy expression peculiar to the very old and the very young, where they seem fascinated by something everyone else takes for granted. People find the phenomenon adorable in babies. It means they're inquisitive and intrigued by objects in their new world. In old people they usually chalk it up to senility, but I don't think that's the case. For both, it's the ability to see things in their purest sense. All the knowledge that comes from experience doesn't exist for a child and doesn't matter anymore to an old lady. With a life completely in front of you or a life completely behind you, the world looks basically the same.

She gazes past me at my yellow Subaru. It doesn't register in her brain as a means of travel or the source of a loan payment or the way I make my living. She doesn't care about its safety features or what it's doing to the ozone layer. She doesn't find the words
MOUNT ME
to be amusing or offensive. It's simply a large roaring machine that disturbs the serenity of the day with its unpleasant noise and exhaust smell.

“Do you still need that ride?” I ask her.

Her eyes travel slowly from my car to my face and take a moment to recognize me.

“Hello, Shae-Lynn.”

“Hi, Sophia. Do you still need a ride to Lib's house?”

“I could use a ride to Lib's house.”

She rises shakily from the chair. I wait for her at the bottom of her porch steps. I know she won't allow me to help her.

She passes by me. The top of her head, crowned in a small cloud of gray hair like silver spun sugar, barely reaches to my chin.

I open the passenger side door for her and wait for the comment she always makes about the color.

“Well at least everyone will be able to see us coming.”

We set off to Lib's house driving faded, snaking blacktop that dips and swells and hugs the hills. The air rushing through my partially open window has the wet, earthy smell of an old, shattered tree stump when the sun starts to warm it after a rainstorm. It blends nicely with the faint scent of Sophia's lavender perfume.

We exchange some small talk while Sophia sits perfectly still, strapped snugly into her seat with her gnarled arthritic hands placed primly in her lap, showing all the composure and concentration of a tiny astronaut.

“So what do you think of all this lawsuit talk?” I ask her.

“You don't want my opinion,” she laughs. “I'm an old lady.”

“That's exactly why I want it.”

“Well, I don't understand any of it.” She shakes her head at me. “Back in my day a miner would never have sued his company.”

“He never could've won,” I remind her.

A trace of a frown passes over her lips dabbed in a shade of coral lipstick she's been wearing for as long as I've known her.

“I don't understand why people nowadays are so anxious to go running to lawyers and judges every time they have a problem. In my day the last thing you wanted to do was bring strangers into your life and have them tell you what to do. You figured out how to fix what was wrong on your own or you learned how to live with the hand God dealt you.”

She seems pleased with her brief speech and looks like she's nodding off, then I realize she's staring at her gold wedding band with the same detached expression she wore earlier sitting on her porch.

I wonder what she sees when she looks at it. Is it still a symbol of love and commitment? Does it remind her of her wedding in a church filled with flowers and the raucous reception afterwards in the Union Hall? Does it make her think of her husband as a vital, blushing, young man proposing to her with coal dirt under his fingernails or as the frail, wasted shell of a man whose hand she held in a hospital room the morning his black lungs took their final breath?

Or is it simply something shiny that's caught her eye?

Lib is mowing his front yard when we arrive. His wife, Teresa, is standing over her emerald green gazing ball with a cleaning rag in one hand watching him curiously, the way she might watch a turtle trying to climb a tree.

Back and forth he marches, never breaking stride, his pace constant, his eyes fixed on the dead grass ahead of him. In summer he would be cutting perfect diagonal paths through its green lushness, but this time of year it's the color of hay and matted down from old snow.

He's using his lawn mower instead of the tractor his sons bought him for his birthday five years ago. He loves the tractor. He hardly ever uses the lawn mower anymore. From what Teresa has told me, when he brings it out, it's a bad sign. It means he's trying to physically chew up a problem.

“What's he doing?” I ask Teresa when Sophia and I join her. “There's no grass to mow yet.”

“He'd mow snow if he could,” she replies without taking her eyes off him.

He has on a J&P ball cap and an old pair of jeans with a white ring permanently faded onto one of the back pockets where he keeps his tin of chewing tobacco. He's shirtless and the hair on his chest and arms is damp with sweat.

Both the passage of time and Teresa's cooking has softened his exterior some, but the core underneath remains rock hard. His gut is like a mattress protecting a boulder, and his arms have the consistency of slabs of packed clay.

“He can blow snow,” I say.

“It doesn't seem to give him the same satisfaction.”

She finally looks my way with a not-altogether-welcoming yet still neighborly enough smile on her lips. Disapproval flashes in the depths of her dark eyes, but she douses it quickly out of respect for the bond that grew up between us two years ago while we waited for four days and nights with Vonda, Isabel, and Brandi to find out if our men were going to live or die.

She thinks I should dress my age. I'm not sure exactly what she means by this, but whenever I've heard her make this comment about other women it's seemed obvious to me that she believes there is a sort of unspoken dress code regarding appropriate attire for women at every age, and we are all under an obligation to memorize and practice it daily.

I don't take her opinion on clothing too seriously. She's only in her mid-fifties but she's been dressing like she's in her mid-seventies since she's been in her mid-thirties. Today she's wearing a pair of elastic-waisted navy blue polyester pants and a blouse in a blue and white check that fits her like a dental hygienist's smock.

Neither piece of apparel is very flattering stretched across her heavy bosom and backside. She's always been busty with ample hips but in her youth she also had an enviably small waist and petite doll's hands she liked to show off in dainty gloves. I remember the pair of soft white ones with little pearl buttons she used to wear to church in spring and a pair of scarlet ones with matching dyed rabbit fur trim she wore at Christmas.

When I was a girl and in the full flush of my longing for Lib and his dark-eyed, Italian good looks, I hated and adored her. I wanted to be just like her yet I wished she'd disappear off the face of the earth.

I used to get out my mom's high school yearbook and stare at Teresa's picture. I was more fascinated by it than my own mother's picture.

In her way, I believed my mother was just as pretty, but it was a completely different kind of beauty, fresh and unrestrained. In her senior picture, my mom looked much younger than the other girls. Part of the reason was the way she wore her hair. It was long and free, tied back with a polka-dot ribbon and falling in waves around her wide, sunburned cheeks. All the other girls wore their hair in teased bobs with meaningless tiny bows lost in the middle of them.

Her smile was different, too—wide and engaging—while the others had closemouthed, beatific Mona Lisa smiles that I'm sure they practiced for hours before a mirror.

Teresa, on the other hand, was a dead ringer for Snow White. Porcelain skin. Ruby red lips pursed in a pouty bow. Her smooth black hair grazing her shoulders and curled at the ends in little flips. Her eyes black and empty like lovely polished stones.

Now her face is lined and careworn and her hands are rough and callused, but her hair is still a young, shiny blue-black that she wears in a thick braid that falls down the middle of her back.

Sophia gives Teresa's arm a squeeze.

“What's he worried about now?”

“Oh, I don't know. He's been upset all week ever since we went and had our will made.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I say without thinking.

I can tell instantly that Teresa feels I have no right to hold any opinion on this particular highly personal topic.

“All I mean is he's probably been thinking about dying all week if he just made a will.” I try to explain myself and end up making things worse.

Sophia nods her agreement.

“We don't have much but I want to make sure what we do have ends up in the right hands,” Teresa says, sounding a little defensive.

“She wants to make sure Angie doesn't take any of her jewelry,” Sophia tells me.

She's standing next to me, her eyes fixed on the road as she speaks, her purse hanging from the crook of one arm, looking like she's waiting for a bus.

Angie is the daughter-in-law Teresa likes less than the other one.

“That's not true,” Teresa protests.

Sophia nods that it is.

“Lib was terrible the whole time,” she tells us. “Then the lawyer made the mistake of saying it was lucky Lib had two Purple Hearts because that way he could give one to each son and not have to worry about choosing between them.”

“Lib got furious. He said he sure as hell didn't feel lucky at the time he was getting two of them but he sure felt lucky now if it meant it was going to get him out of a goddamned lawyer's office a couple minutes earlier.”

I laugh.

Sophia frowns at the cursing.

“As far as Lib's concerned, the only thing he owns of any value is his tractor mower,” Teresa adds.

“What's he going to do with it? It was a gift from both your boys, wasn't it?”

“Yes, and he thought it wouldn't be fair to choose between them. I didn't have the heart to tell him that neither one of them wants it.”

“So who's getting the mower?”

“Jimmy.”

“That's perfect,” I say.

Sophia nods her approval.

Jimmy will never use it, but he'll park it in a place of honor in his front yard where everyone will see it. He'll keep it waxed and buffed, and talk to it, and drink a toast to it every day.

It's the closest Lib can come to putting the mower out to stud.

“Why don't we go inside and get you some coffee, Mom?” Teresa says to her mother-in-law and begins to guide her toward the house by her elbow.

“Just a minute.” Sophia pulls her arm away from Teresa and walks back to me.

“Here, Shae-Lynn.”

She hands me a ten-dollar bill and a roll of peppermint Life Savers.

Teresa gives me one more of her disapproving glances, but once again does a good job of keeping it brief.

I know she thinks I should have given Sophia a ride for free, and I'd be happy to give Sophia a ride for free, but Sophia would never call and ask me to give her a ride for free. She would drive herself or call and ask Lib or Teresa to pick her up before she'd do that. She understands that this is what I do for a living.

Teresa hasn't had an easy life by any means and no one could ever look at her immaculate house and yard, or her impressive vegetable garden and the amount of food she cans every fall lining the shelves of her basement, and accuse her of not being a hard worker. She and Lib raised two sons on little money and put them both through college. She knows all about making sacrifices and surviving nightmares, but she doesn't know anything about being on her own.

She went from being one man's daughter to being another man's wife to being the mother of two other men. She moved directly from her father's house into her husband's house and if she outlives Lib, I'm certain she's going to end up living in one of her son's houses even though it may mean the end of his marriage.

She's never had to financially support herself or support others and she thinks women like me choose our lifestyles just to prove a point.

I'm about to leave without interrupting Lib's mad mowing but then I remember Clay's concern about Dusty. I decide to ask Lib what he thinks.

I wave at him. He gestures for me to wait.

I walk back to my car parked in their driveway and lean against the hood while he completes a few more passes at his dead grass.

He lets the engine die and wheels the mower toward me then past me as he heads toward the garage, where he retrieves a pack of Marlboros and a flannel shirt.

I watch him from behind. His bare back is covered with shiny pink patches of new skin from the grafts he had after the explosion because parts of his rubberized rain gear melted through his work clothes into his flesh.

He joins me, smoking a cigarette, and surveys his yard, looking disappointed that he's done. Lib always seems happiest when he has a straightforward task in front of him, whether it's mowing a yard, or eating a barbecued chicken, or playing horseshoes: one thing he can concentrate his full attention upon without having to talk and without having to be talked to.