The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (10 page)

His voice is filled with emotion and he mentions his phone number not once, but three times, and the third time she hears it Emma manages to grab a chair, pull it towards her with her foot, and sit down.

Samuel doesn’t sound desperate or frightening, but persistent,
and if Emma could focus on just that, whatever it is he might possibly have to say to her, or why he so needs to see her now, it would probably help her slow her heart from near bursting to a simple wild thump.

But there’s also the other message. The one that’s been sitting on the machine for days. The one she never heard the day she was lying in her garden and trying to forget about Samuel, family reunions, and the fact that she is one of four sisters.

It’s Marty with so many reunion assignments Emma is wondering if the entire affair has turned into a one-woman show. There’s the theme selection, which Marty wants her to discuss with her three sisters and decide upon, let’s see … tomorrow. There’s the shopping, some of which she’s already messed up, the invitation design and selection, and the most important, crucial thing of all.

Emma was supposed to go stand in line at the park office
yesterday
in order to make certain she got the park reservation accepted. The park where the reunion is always and will always be held. The park where dozens and dozens of Gilford family members land simply by pointing their cars in that direction because they have been there so many times.

The reservation mess alone is a major problem because the city parks are absolutely beautiful and some people camp out for days to make certain they get their reservation approved. But Samuel’s voice, Emma’s increasing inability to be or do anything Emma-like, and then Samuel’s voice again, makes her feel almost incapacitated.
What in God’s name is she going to do?

Surely Erika will help her.

Before she can even dial her sister, however, a call comes in from Stephie and Emma can’t bring herself to talk to her but immediately retrieves the message.

The good news is what Emma grabs on to immediately. At least she won’t have to convince Joy to let Stephie stay with her. But the bad news is that Stephie will be showing up with all her teenage stuff and maybe complicate what is turning out to be one of the worst days, weeks, and months of her entire life.

Emma quickly calls Erika, who cheerfully picks up the phone on the first ring and greets Emma as if she’s been sitting in her living room and waiting for her to call.

“Sugar pie!” Erika says without hesitation.

And Emma tells her almost everything. She tells her about shopping and flipping out in the aisle and how stressed out she is at work and how Debra looks like hell and how Joy is even more agitated than usual and how Stephie is moving in with her for a week and how their mother looks young and fresh and lovely and
is having sex with men Emma has never even met and how she walked out of the brunch because Debra wanted to know if they all have the same father.

Erika stops her right there.

“What in the hell is going on in Higgins? Sex and drunken sisters and someone flipping out in public and reunion-planning stress. So far this all seems pretty darn normal to me for our family, except the parts about you.”

Before answering, Emma takes in a breath and runs her fingers lightly across the scissors, which she has bravely picked up again. “I screwed something up really big-time, Erika,” she replies, “and I have no idea what to do about it. Actually, I may have screwed up tons of stuff …”

“I can’t imagine how you could do that. You are the sugar pie. What did you do and I hope it was something more bizarre than Joy or Debra?”

Emma hasn’t decided yet if she is going to mention Samuel’s phone calls. A long time ago, when Samuel left and Erika visited her and saw that she was a mess from missing him, she’d learned about their relationship and that Emma had been totally in love with him. Emma had sworn her to secrecy and as the years passed neither one of them had ever talked about it again. Years when Emma had dated other men and even dared to bring one or two of them to the family reunion. Years when she held up her invisible checklist and no one else even came close to the standards she had set since Samuel. Years when she had finally, so she thought, pushed him away from the center of her heart and just assumed that he had been her one love and her only, and very lost, chance.

The one thing that Emma so loves about Erika is that she has also never judged her. She’s never complained about how Emma lives or what she drives or how involved she seems to be with her gardens and their mother’s life. She’s never given her unsolicited
advice and has been free and open with her heart. Emma has always felt lucky and blessed to have her, not just as a sister, but also as a best friend.

All of that even as the years have seemed to move too quickly and Erika’s life and job and responsibilities as a wife and mother have kept them from seeing each other as often as they used to when life did not seem so complicated. Emma wonders now for just a moment how much she really knows of Erika’s real life and passions. They are both so busy. It’s been way too long since they have sat and talked without the worry of time and responsibility.

This is why Emma knows that it won’t matter when she tells Erika about the reunion mess and how much work she now has to do in such a terribly short period of time. So she tells Erika. Her beloved, open, lovely sister.

And Erika freaks out.

“I didn’t answer my messages. I just pulled the plug. I have no idea what to do now—”

“Why in the hell wouldn’t you answer your messages?”

“I don’t know,” Emma lies.

“Sweet Jesus, Emma! This is like the biggest deal for Mom and about five hundred other people. Did you at least start on the invitations?”

“No. That was on the list, too. I really haven’t done anything—”

“Well, Joy and Debra seem useless. Here I am trying to find a new full-time teaching job and filling in for all the sick teachers here. Shit, Emma. Just shit. You never act like this. What is wrong with you?”

Emma has no idea how to answer the question so she just sits on the edge of the kitchen chair and can only think to finally toss
the scissors out of arm’s reach because once again they are way too tempting. She has never felt so alone and useless in her entire life.

She can hear Erika breathing into the phone as if she’s just run around the block at full speed.

“Erika?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Do I just go down to the park office and throw myself on their mercy? Do I tell Mom? Do I tell Debra and Joy?”

“What then?” Emma asks miserably.

“Just give me a minute. Let me think about this. Do not—and let me repeat that,
not
—tell Joy and Debra. You’ve already pissed them off enough. And anyway Joy is leaving town.”

By the time Emma hangs up the phone her headache has returned and she feels as if she’s been run over by a truck. She is actually relieved to hear Stephie singing as she pushes the front door open.

“I’m here, Auntie Emma!”

Joy does not even get out of the car, which Emma decides is the best thing that has happened to her in days. She merely waves, throws one more bag of Stephie’s stuff out the window, and drives off.

“That was lovely,” Emma remarks as she ushers Stephie into the guest room.

“She’s like totally off the wall about something. Has she said anything to you about anything?”

“No,” Emma shares, suddenly thrilled beyond belief by the distractions Stephie will now be bringing into her life.

“It’s like worse than ever. I’m hoping she doesn’t kill my dad or one of my brothers at the beach in their sleep. She’s so edgy. But, really, I cannot believe she is letting me stay here. I’m not big on the Jesus stuff but this is pretty close to a miracle.”

Stephie settled in and Emma tried to put one foot in front of the other. She could only think to tell her niece to never, ever touch the answering machine, which Stephie thought was a bit odd but what the heck.

What the heck because here she was for a week with her favorite auntie who is not anything like her mother and who is allowing her to stay up late, take over half the house, loves the variety of music Stephie listens to and will let her just be herself.

Stephie feels lucky because Emma could have chosen one of the others. It could have been another niece or nephew that she held so close to her heart. It could have been one of Stephie’s brothers, the almost twins Bo and Riley, who are so opposite it has become yet another family joke.

Bo, totally obsessed with his genitalia, is a poster child for anything testosterone. He plays soccer, football, basketball, rugby and has been to the emergency room an average of five times, not a year, but a season. This is a boy who is attacking the world as if he is a gladiator from ancient Rome and yet he also remembers to call Emma on her birthday, helps her without complaint for all heavy-lifting projects, and has secretly been phoning her to ask her questions about girls.

Riley is the quintessential second son. He is short and thin and loves music and the thought of anything typically masculine makes his lovely hazel eyes roll back so far inside of his head it’s a wonder he has not gone blind. And yet Riley is gifted in the arts, a boy who lives by the song he has always felt moving through the thin veins of his heart that no one else in the entire world can hear.

It could also have been one of Debra’s two daughters, Kendall, eighteen, and Chloe, sixteen. Chloe can only be called independently individual. Once, when she was ten, she stood up during the slicing of the ham at family brunch and announced that she was a
vegetarian and could no longer eat at the same table as her sick meat-loving family. Two years later, she declared she was thinking of becoming a nun. “You are not Catholic,” her mother reminded her. This comment and Chloe’s announcement launched such a long and loud discussion about religion that Chloe finally made the sign of the cross and actually slipped under the table. Stephie always hopes Chloe will come to the family events just so something remarkable will happen but when she doesn’t Stephanie fills the gap with a pierced face or green hair to keep things stirred up.

Kendall will probably become a professional cheerleader and make her mama proud. She’s already been the homecoming queen, has dated half of every male sports team at the high school, and if she could move into the new Higgins Mall, where she already works as a sales clerk at a trendy and very expensive urban fashion store, she’d be gone before her hairspray dried.

There’s one other choice, too. It’s Tyler, who almost always prefers to stay with his “real” mother when Erika and her husband can manage a visit to the Gilford homeland but when he does come he’s polite and fun and Stephie thinks he’d give her a run for her money in the Aunt Emma Loves Me the Best Department. She hasn’t told anyone, even Emma, that Tyler has started emailing her and asking her all kinds of questions about Higgins and South Carolina or that he’s told his “other” mother that he’s coming to this year’s family reunion.

By the time Stephie has settled in and managed to get Emma to agree to letting her have her two best friends come in the morning and spend the day while Emma is at work, Emma has given up waiting for Erika to call back. She’s convinced herself that her older sister is designing some great reunion master plan that will rescue her from Gilford disgrace, get her mother and the other two sisters off her back, and maybe even find a cure for cancer and save a few whales.

She’s been so successful at ignoring the reunion, the things she didn’t do, Samuel’s latest phone message and her mother’s silence about why she looks ten years younger than she normally does, Emma hasn’t even noticed that Stephie’s put her scissors back in the shed, washed all the dishes by hand, and made them both some chamomile tea.

Stephie snuggles into bed with Emma to read, excited about her week of absolute—so she thinks—freedom, and then falls asleep curled next to her like a very large puppy. This, Emma thinks, is lovely, as she falls asleep herself.

In the morning, when reality drops back into her world way too quickly, she has a dream hangover the size of a fairly tall man and when she stops to think about it, Emma knows exactly what that man looks, sounds and feels like.