The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (20 page)

Marty talks in a whisper and Emma has to hold her left hand over her ear to hear what her mother is saying.

“Emma, dear, you get to a point in your life when you are fifty or sixty, or in my case seventy-eight, and you realize that holding back and not saying what is real and is in your heart is crippling,” Marty tries to explain, through her own tears. “There are so many things I should have told especially you all these years because you are the one who has suffered the most, the one who needs to hear it all, the one who always has so much to lose.”

“Mom, I never ever thought of you as the holding-back kind of person,” Emma exclaims because she cannot stand the sound of her mother sniffling on the other end of the phone. “You say it like it is. I’ve always wished I would have inherited that trait from you.”

“Honey,” Marty finally admits, “your father was a master gardener. He had the gift for the earth just like you have the gift for the soil. And he had to give it all up because gardening back then was not a way to support a family.”

“Why would this be such a secret, why would you never tell
me something like that, why would it not have been good to let me know where this compulsion comes from, why—”

“There are reasons that no longer matter and promises I made to your father that do matter, but that no longer seem as important as they once did,” Marty shares. “And there are other things, things about me that I should have told you, that would explain some of my own compulsions. And there are things that I will tell you as soon as you can pick your sorry rear end off the floor and make yourself something to eat and get out of your little funk, my dear.”

Emma hangs up.

She walks into her backyard in late afternoon and finds a lonely row of nonblossoming plants that always seem to her to be looking with envy at the beautiful blooms of their sisters and brothers. She impulsively yanks out the few weeds that have slipped in between their gorgeous stems and then she lowers herself so that when she turns to the left it looks as if she is lying in tall grass at the end of a beach.

From where she sits, she can see her entire house and almost all of her gardens. And when the wind shifts and the stems of her plants move, there is a lovely ripple of green that flashes like dancers moving as fast as spring lightning across a stage.

Emma does not crave kittens or beer. But she does wonder how she could think all of these years that she knew her mother, her sisters or her very own and apparently out-of-control self.

And then, emboldened by her talk with Marty and the strength she always seems to get from her flowers, Emma gets to her feet. She walks to her bedroom to look at the photograph of her and Samuel to see if she can find in it one reason to return his call. And that is when she discovers that the photograph is missing.

“Are you serious?” Chloe wants to know.
“Red hair?
No one has red hair on purpose anymore except those grandmas who can’t quite seem to get the dye right and are too cheap to go for professional help.”

“No kidding! Even the weirdos at school who still think Goth is cool don’t bother with red anymore and go for purple and orange,” Kendall agrees.

If anyone can think of a better way to start a reunion-planning update meeting that was supposed to launch itself with Emma, Debra and Joy exchanging quiet words of forgiveness and love in the kitchen, Emma would love to hear about it. A meeting where Emma had planned to confess her reunion failings and ask for help and forgiveness as she once again slipped into the role of the screw-up baby sister.

What Emma would really like to do at this particular moment is turn on her heels, just like Doris Day did in every single movie she ever made, smile over her shoulder, and then get the heck off the street and out of there before more Gilford hell breaks loose.

But Marty Gilford’s daughter does not and cannot do that. Instead she saunters up to the porch making believe she has heard nothing, says hello to her two nieces, then sits down as if this is something she does every day at this specific time.

The girls do not miss a beat and Chloe asks Emma the exact same question Kendall just asked her. “Have you heard that Uncle Rick has run off with a chick who has red hair?”

“Who told you this?” Emma demands.

“Stephie called just a few minutes ago. I’m surprised she hasn’t called you yet because she was kind of upset and stuff,” Kendall shares.

“Is she coming over here for this meeting?” Emma wants to know.

Kids, Emma realizes, know everything. And these two are kids age-wise but not so much in any other way.

“Very funny, smarty-pants,” Emma says, pushing her niece back into an upright position. “Does this mean I’m not the only one who wishes we didn’t have to have another reunion and yet another night to plan it?”

“My God!” Chloe exclaims, feigning shock by putting her hand to her head. “What would we do at the reunion without the arguments and the drunk people and Aunt Joy running around with her white plastic bags picking up paper plates and plastic forks?”

There are a few blank reunion years that Emma cannot remember, most likely the ones towards the end of her father’s illness when someone else either planned the party or the entire thing was thrown together at the last minute but Marty, Emma knew, was always there, always involved, because she’d told her daughters more than once that the reunion planning was her duty, handed down by their father’s mother, and the promise she had made to their father.

The family planning, the assignments outlined in the infamous planning bible authored by Marty, that include the annual family charity auction that has actually turned into a hilarious three-hour show that includes gifts and an assortment of wild and ridiculous items that Gilford family members work on all year long.

One year someone hauled in an antique outhouse on which they had painted the Confederate flag, and some far-flung Gilford
cousin bought it for five hundred dollars and had it shipped over a thousand miles home. There have been live chickens, car parts—including a huge chrome bumper that had been dented during an accident with a hearse and was supposed to resemble a profile of Elvis—a barn door splattered with shotgun pellets, an entire swing set hand-painted that was in a box the size of a mini-Volkswagen, and Emma’s favorite thus far—cartoon-like nude sketches of a variety of aunts, uncles, cousins and nieces that were not just hilarious but apparently extremely anatomically accurate as well.

Last year the family auction raised five thousand dollars and the money was donated to a domestic violence shelter. As Emma thinks about confronting her sisters, her mother and anyone else who cares to have at it with her, she is wondering how many women in her family could be possible domestic violence perpetrators. Obviously, they might need an entire wing at the county jail for the wild Gilford females who have never been physically violent but who seem to have a penchant for yelling as if their lungs are on fire.

“Girls,” Emma cautions both of her nieces, “I hope you are taking notes about how to behave and how not to behave as part of this insane family.”

“Are you kidding me?” Kendall laughs. “Things are getting so exciting around here I am thinking of not leaving for college just so I can sit around and watch.”

“No shit,” Chloe adds as Emma taps her niece’s potty mouth lightly. “I was supposed to go over to a barbecue at my friend’s house but I’m afraid if I leave for just a little while I might miss something. Plus, we all know that you have all been fighting, like
serious
fighting.”

“It has been a bit much,” Emma agrees, not surprised at all that the nieces know everything. She’s also wishing she never had to go inside the house and see her sisters. “But if things were calm and
quiet and boring, we would know that aliens have invaded our bodies or something. We have always been like this.”

“Not quite this bad, though,” Kendall reminds her. “Grandma is sleeping around, all my aunts are pissed at each other, Uncle Rick is having an affair, about a zillion relatives will be here in two weeks, and I think Aunt Erika is coming home this week for a while.”

“What?” Emma exclaims, startled.

“Mom said Aunt Erika was flying in alone for a while and staying with Grandma, I think, because she has some business around here. And then Uncle Jeff and Tyler will just come later for the reunion.”

“Great,” Emma sighs, putting her head in her hands and wondering if Grandma and Thongman have any idea their romantic bungalow is about to be invaded. And also feeling hurt because Erika has not bothered to tell her about the trip. Or anything else, for that matter. “Are you birds making all of this up?”

None of it, the two swear, putting their hands over their hearts, and then sitting as if they are waiting for a package to arrive as Emma decides it’s time to face her sisters and whoever else might be in the kitchen.

Emma has had several days to recover from her long overdue long haul, which half ended after she talked with Marty, weeded furiously in her garden, and then found out that Samuel’s photograph was missing. Her increasingly frantic search for the misplaced photograph led her to an album of old photos in her room, certain that in her emotional angst she had mistakenly returned the photo to a new location.

The old photos were tinted Polaroids from the early seventies, all greens and reds and browns, all faded as if a careless someone had spilled colored water on top of them. Emma recalled the camera and how her mother went crazy taking photographs because as
Marty kept pointing out, you could see them right away. Modern magic, Marty called it, and she was right.

Looking through the photos had unleashed a wave of emotional longing for the lovely memories captured there—parties and picnics and graduations. The memories, as Emma flipped through the album pages, seemed as faded and muted as the photographs. She had to struggle to remember as she held up first one and then another picture. Was this taken before her father was sick or after he got ill? Was this photograph from the backyard or from the neighbor’s side of the fence? And where were photographs, any photographs, of a garden her father might have planted, a trip to an arboretum, fresh flowers from a roadside stand, her father standing proudly over a row of seedlings?

The notion of her father passing on his innate abilities to make things grow had never before been part of any of Emma’s imaginings. Emma tried to recall something about gardens and plantings with her father but there was nothing she could hold on to, no signature moment under a pine tree, no memorial tomato plant harvesting, no grafting experiment in the basement during the cooler winter months.