Two Sisters Times Two Read online

5

  The next morning dawned clear and bright but with a brisk northeast wind blowing off the cold Atlantic. On rising, each woman made a solitary foray out onto the deck, called forth by the brilliant spring sunshine and the sparkling ocean, only to come running back into the cottage after a few minutes, hugging themselves against the wind and rushing for something hot to drink and cut the chill. Jodie, the last to descend the stairs in her baggy hooded sweatshirt from yesterday and knee-length shorts, trudged out to the deck without a word to the others milling about in the kitchen and lasted longer than anyone else, but returned with pale blue lips and a face flushed in cold and gladly accepted Penni’s offer of a mug of hot cocoa with miniature marshmallows, a throwback to their childhood days.

  By then Brooke, with Leah’s quiet assistance, had laid out a breakfast buffet of startling variety along the kitchen’s long peninsula, including everything from fresh fruit salad, granola, and yogurt to oatmeal, pancakes, scrambled eggs, and bacon.

  “You think you’re cooking for the boys,” Leah said as the food kept coming.

  “I know who I’m cooking for,” Brooke said.

  “Whom,” Leah said over her shoulder.

  “Them too,” Brooke said.

  And in fact the four women made a substantial dent in the extensive offerings, nibbling away over nearly two hours as they sat around that generous dining room table and caught up on the recent activities in each other’s lives like sorority sisters returning after summer vacation, each carefully avoiding any reference to the one sister’s monumental news.

  Penni was now partners in a small childcare business that operated out of her partner’s condominium, splitting its days between morning daycare for their affluent neighbors and after-school care and tutoring of at-risk grade-school kids. This ad hoc model allowed their business to fly under the radar and strict regulations of full-time daycares, and also gave the proprietors flexibility in their midday schedules.

  “Do you think you’ll expand to hiring employees?” Leah asked.

  Penni shrugged. “That would be a big step.”

  “What about when the baby is born?”

  “I’d like to think her presence will fit in perfectly.”

  “Her?” all three others asked simultaneously.

  Penni smiled sheepishly. “Only a wish at this point. I don’t know and don’t want to know. I told Randall he can ask if he wants, but don’t tell me!”

  Jodie would be moving to LA for a six-week design gig arranged by the director of her last production. She’d be leaving in two weeks and already had an Internet-arranged studio apartment within walking distance of the theater. She’d had to renew her Guild membership, as this job had to be by the books, and would be working with a director of notoriously short-temper and stringent demands. But it was a good career move and she was ready for a break from Seattle, “Especially with its springtime weather!”

  “What about your apartment there?” Brooke asked.

  “Oh, I’ll keep it. Andrea will be there and take care of our cat.”

  “Won’t she be lonely?” Penni asked.

  Jodie weighed the question’s possible meanings. “Andrea will find the company she needs,” she responded finally while glancing down at her food, chuckling quietly to herself either at the coy response or the apt summation of her roommate’s resourcefulness or both.

  Leah was in the midst of planning their non-profit’s annual azalea giveaway. This included coordinating the contribution of plants from several local nurseries, reviewing and approving recipient requests, and overseeing various levels of follow-up, from arranging to have the plants delivered and planted to publicly thanking the contributors. This year’s giveaway was complicated by the addition of a Green Ways booth at the Spring Festival scheduled for next weekend.

  “So you’re a busy woman for someone who doesn’t have a job,” Jodie said.

  Leah laughed. “Tell me about it!”

  “Tell Jasper to come home and run his charity,” Penni suggested.

  “He’s turned it over to me.”

  “Figures.”

  “And we’ve hired a full-time coordinator.”

  “Really?” Brooke asked.

  Leah nodded. “Had to either scale back or expand. The Board decided to expand.”

  “The Board?”

  “Jasper, Whitfield, and two teachers from the school. And me.”

  “So you decided to expand.”

  “Well,” Leah said slowly, “You could say that. I needed help.”

  “Who did you hire?”

  “His name is Billy Erwin. He used to work for a local landscaper and managed two of our larger projects. He’s good. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Brooke smiled across the table, waiting for Leah to look up.

  “What?” Leah said as soon as she glanced up.

  Brooke said, “Expansion is good” then burst into laughter.

  Jodie and Penni looked at each other. Leah looked away.

  Brooke’s life was full to the max, as it always was. The plans for One Care were nearing completion and would be put out for bids in a few weeks. But there were still many decisions to be made, particularly regarding fixture and finish selections and estimates for allowance figures on such things as landscaping and artwork. Brooke could’ve turned all of this over to the project architect. By now he was quite familiar with her tastes and desires and could’ve made initial selections for this phase, decisions that could be and no doubt would be revised later. But Brooke would not surrender even these provisional choices to another.

  “What, and pass on a chance to rub up against Greg?” she cried out.

  “Greg?” Leah asked.

  “The project architect—about forty and cute as a button and smells like gingerbread.”

  “Gingerbread?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s his wife’s cooking—I think she’s oriental.”

  “Wife?” Penni said.

  “Yes, dear—wife. You know, like you are to Randall.”

  “That means hands off!”

  “My hands are off. It’s just my arm and shoulder and leg that brushes against him now and again.”

  “Mom!”

  “Get off your high horse, Penni. Just a little harmless fun, isn’t it Leah?”

  Leah was silent.

  “Doesn’t sound harmless,” Penni said.

  “You don’t think some pretty young nurse is rubbing up against Doctor Coulter right now?”

  “She better not be. He better not let her.”

  Brooke laughed. “Get with the program, Penni. Your innocent romance is over. The rest of your life has begun—learn the rules and play by them.” She looked to first Leah then Jodie for affirmation, but both judiciously looked away. So she added, somewhat less insistently, “Or so I would suggest for your future happiness.”

  Penni stared back blankly.

  No sooner had they cleaned up from breakfast—cleared and wiped down the table, rinsed and loaded the plates and silverware into the dishwasher, wrapped and stored the leftovers—then Brooke began planning for their picnic lunch on the beach. She had store-bought fried chicken in the fridge but solicited Leah’s help in making potato salad and deviled eggs.

  “With sour cream and Dijon mustard,” Leah insisted.

  Brooke confirmed she had those ingredients then said, “Whatever you say.”

  Penni went out on the deck. There was no one on the beach in front of their cottage. In the distance to the left were a few fisherman with their poles stuck in the sand and a handful of people walking along the water. All had on sweatshirts or coats and walked huddled against the wind. Nobody was lying or sitting on the beach. “Might be a little brisk out there for a picnic, Mom,” she said when she came back inside.

  Brooke was undaunted. “That’s why you and Jodie are going to scout out a place that is warm and sheltered from the wind.”

  “Sounds like an order,” Jodie said from her spot on the couch where she
’d just started reading an article in a left-behind issue of The New Yorker.

  “A suggested communal activity,” Leah said.

  Jodie laughed. “Thanks, Aunt Leah,” she said as she set the magazine aside and went to pee before heading out with her sister on their reconnaissance mission.

  The younger sisters did find a place that would be suitable, a depression in the dunes toward the sound side that offered full defense from the gusts (which were slowly calming) and full access to the warming of the spring sun.

  Jodie threw herself down into the sand at the bottom of the basin and actually laid her face on a small mound she pushed up with her forearm. Though the sand below the surface was still cold, that on top was warm and soothing. She closed her eyes and cooed, “I’ll stay and guard our claim while you get the others.”

  Penni laughed and sat beside her. It really was a different world down here out of the wind and hidden from the glittering water and undulating dunes. Even the ocean’s resolute murmur was all but inaudible. “I don’t know,” Penni said. “Kind of dangerous here.” She lay on her back, cushioning her head with her arm folded beneath. She closed her eyes against the intense sunlight. Through her eyelids she saw the pink of her blood flowing. Just then she was startled to realize that same blood was now flowing through a second heart. The thought, like everything this weekend, both frightened and mesmerized her.

  “I’ll be O.K.” Jodie murmured, already half-dozing from the sun’s warmth and the flush of the big breakfast’s carbohydrates through her system.

  “Will you?”

  Jodie laughed. Her quick exhalation sent grains of sand rolling away from her mouth and nose. “I’ll survive.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “Has been so far. Will have to be.”

  Penni had so many challenges to those assertions she didn’t know where to start. So she didn’t—start, that is. She sat up instead. She suddenly missed the sound of the ocean, the sweeping view of water and sand interrupted only by their solitary cottage standing like a monument against this eternity. But she wouldn’t stand and leave her sister flat, however much Jodie might have preferred that. She reached out and brushed Jodie’s silken black hair, still like a child’s—thin and flat.

  Jodie purred beneath the touch, briefly imagined it as from some goddess or sea nymph. She knew from her mythology that gods and water always led to a bad ending, but couldn’t she indulge herself just this once?

  “Leah has Whitfield to help her through. I have Randall. But you’re alone.”

  “You assume.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then which is it?” Jodie had never confessed her bisexuality, but Penni had suspected it even before her brief visit to Seattle a few years ago. Though Andrea was absent that weekend (Penni assumed that circumstance was planned) it was clear that only one of the two bedrooms in their apartment was in regular use. At the same time, she knew Jodie was sexually active with males—by inference from the occasional dates or partners she’d brought home or to family functions but more specifically by the witness she bore of Jodie in bed with a high school boy (she recalled his name as Tab—could that be true?) one day when she was in second grade and walked home from school early with a sore throat, didn’t know at the time what those undulating movements under the sheets meant but knew enough to keep quiet and invisible, both then and since. So if Jodie had intimate companionship, it might be of either sex. Penni didn’t care which, as long as there was someone to help carry her sister through the storms that lay ahead.

  Jodie sighed. Though Penni’s hand was still on the back of her head, it now felt like a heavy weight, pressing her face, her whole body, into the earth. “I have access to the companionship I need.”

  “In LA?”

  “Jeez, Penni,” Jodie cried. She rose suddenly, sloughing off Penni’s hand with a shake of her head and pushing her whole body up with her arms and standing in a single motion, generating a minor sandstorm from the effort. “In LA, Seattle, wherever. I find what I need. I can take care of myself.” She shook herself like a dog then quickly brushed away the sand sticking to her arms and face.

  Penni remained seated and stared up at her sister. Jodie’s body aligned with the brilliant sun, giving Penni multiple excuses for her brimming eyes; but her voice remained clear and strong. “I only want you to be—.” She paused to consider the word she desired, its necessarily resonant meaning.

  Jodie remained standing above Penni. Part of her was touched by her sister’s concern, but most of her resented its intrusion and was glad to be standing now, holding the upper ground. “Happy?” She volunteered the cliché after what seemed a long pause then wondered if Penni was still searching the right word or had lost her voice.

  “I want you to know you are loved.”

  Much as Jodie wished she could offer a quick and unthinking affirmation of the fact, she didn’t because she couldn’t. Instead, she turned and walked to the top of the nearest dune, took great relief in her quick breaths of cool wind, the broad ocean vistas surrounding.

  Back at the cottage the elder sisters were just finishing the food preparation. Brooke transferred the potato salad to a plastic bowl and carefully spooned the deviled eggs into a shallow resealable container. As she finished each task, she handed Leah the dirty dishes and utensils for rinsing and loading into the dishwasher.

  “You two look like a well-practiced team,” Penni said as she hung her coat on a peg inside the back door.

  Leah smiled from her place at the sink. For a moment she’d forgot they were at the widow’s walk cottage with her nieces, had imagined they were at the old cottage in the second row down by the pier, doing clean up duty after lunch with Momma and Father.

  Brooke had been caught up in the same seamless, and silent, recollection. “Before Leah could hear, we had to be very in tune with each other. We functioned almost as two parts of the same body.” She stretched plastic wrap over the bowl of potato salad.

  Brooke’s words caused a wrenching spasm in the pit of Leah’s stomach. To hide her reaction, she turned back to the sink and concentrated on cleaning the sticky egg yolk remains from the prep bowl in her hand. The spigot’s flow of warm water seemed a thousand tears pouring out of her heart, a million.

  “I can’t imagine Aunt Leah deaf,” Penni said. “She’s always in control.”

  Brooke laughed. “She was that way when she was deaf! Bossed me around even though I was the older sister!”

  Leah was silent.

  Jodie said, “Just like my younger sister” as she entered the kitchen and closed the door.

  Everyone else looked up, startled by the same phenomenon—Jodie’s voice in a lilting playful tone.

  Penni jumped to the bait. “When did I ever boss you around?”

  Jodie laughed. “Little sisters have their sneaky ways.”

  “See!” Brooke said to no one in particular.

  Leah finished loading the dishwasher and faced the others with a forced smile. “I had to use all the means at my disposal.”

  “And it worked every time,” Brooke said. She loaded the food and drinks into the blue and white cooler, then checked the wicker picnic basket for adequate supplies of paper plates, plastic utensils, cups, and napkins.

  “Some of the time,” Leah reluctantly conceded. “Maybe.”

  Penni said, “Was I really a spoiled brat?”

  The others laughed.

  Jodie said, “The ‘spoiled’ part for sure, but not the brat. Even I had to admit you were cute.” By then she was standing next to Leah, leaning against the counter beside the sink.

  Leah tilted close to Jodie but didn’t touch her. She could smell the salt air and sand on her and maybe a touch of herbal fragrance from her hair. She recalled lightly brushing that feathery hair for hours on end when she’d visit Shawnituck Island and babysit the infant Jodie so Brooke and Onion could have the afternoon to themselves in a futile attemp
t to save their faltering marriage, or back at home when Brooke was living there and commuting to school and she’d watch Jodie, just starting to walk by then, during her breaks from college. These memories, surely prompted by Jodie’s scent, wrenched another silent moan of loss from some place in her she hadn’t known existed.

  “What do you mean ‘were cute’?” Penni asked.

  “Well—,” Jodie paused for effect. “We’ll give you a few more weeks till you begin to blow up like a helium balloon.”

  “Thanks for the encouragement.”

  Brooke had finished loading the cooler and adding a few odds and ends—salt and pepper in capped shakers, small packets of mustard and mayonnaise—to the picnic basket and asked, “Did y’all find us a spot?”

  Jodie said, “Sure did.”

  And Penni added, “The perfect luncheon hideaway.”

  “Then we’re almost ready.” She disappeared into the storeroom off the hall and returned with a large brown wool blanket to sit on and a smaller red and white checked tablecloth to lay out the food. She set them on the island next to the cooler and picnic basket. “Jodie, you and Penni will carry the cooler. Leah will bring the blanket and tablecloth. And I’ll have the honor of carrying the picnic basket.” She grabbed it and held it in front of her and made a coy gesture like a child with her lunchbox on her first day of school. “Like Little Red Riding Hood.”

  “Or the wolf,” Jodie said in a stage whisper to Leah.

  “No wise cracks from the peanut gallery,” Brooke said as she returned the basket to the counter. “But first we each need to pick a bonnet.”

  The other three looked at her like she’d finally lost her mind.

  “I thought that would get your attention. Follow me.” She waved them to the storeroom where she opened the door then stood back to let them look. High on the right-side wall, above open shelves of canned goods and cleaning supplies, was a row of ten sun bonnets and hats, each hanging on a wooden peg. They all had wide brims. Some were straw, others canvas, and there was one rubberized foul-weather lobsterman’s hat. A few had colored sashes to tie under the chin. One was a white skimmer with plastic flowers arranged around the rim.

  “What in the world?” Penni exclaimed.

  “Place must be owned by a commune of dikes,” Brooke joked.

  Leah glared at her.

  Jodie rolled her eyes.

  “What? Dikes are nice. They left us their hats!” Brooke said, glaring right back at Leah. “Choose your mate,” she said finally. “But I’ve got dibs on Minnie Pearl.”

  “Who’s that?” Penni asked.

  “You’re about to find out,” Jodie said.

  The others chuckled in relief.

  Penni stepped into the storeroom first and chose a natural straw model with a turquoise (her favorite color) sash. Jodie grabbed a khaki canvas hat and pulled the brim low over her right eye like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Leah took a little longer, debating between the Mexican straw sombrero and the white cowboy hat, finally opting for the sombrero.

  Then Brooke stepped into the room and closed the door, emerging a minute later with an open-collared gingham shirt (where had she found that?) over her T-shirt, her hair pulled into short ponytails on either side of her head, some horn-rimmed glasses with the lenses missing, and of course the Minnie Pearl bonnet sitting high on her head. “How-dy!” she cried and did a little high-stepping jig over to the island to grab the picnic basket.

  “That’s Minnie Pearl, or at least Brooke’s rendition,” Leah said.

  Jodie sighed. “Now I’ve seen everything—Little Red Riding Hood disguised as Minnie Pearl.”

  “I’m so glad there’s no one else on the beach!” Penni said.

  Leah shook her head. This was vintage Brooke—doing what she needed to do to lay claim to the moment. In an odd way, it was all very reassuring.

  “Come on, troops,” Brooke said. “Fall in.” The general in Minnie Pearl costume led the way out the door, down the stairs, and onto the dunes. The others followed beneath their bonnets, toting their supplies, Jodie and Penni needing to coordinate their movements on either end of the heavy cooler.

  After a few wrong turns—“I thought it was this way” Penni said; “No, this way” Jodie corrected; “Some scouts” Brooke said—they finally found the girls’ tracks from the morning and followed them to the deep and sheltered haven in the dunes.

  Standing below the others in the flat bottom of the basin just large enough to accommodate the four of them for lunch, Brooke looked up and smiled. “Perfect.”

  She set aside the picnic basket and waved for Leah, and they spread out the blanket then centered the square tablecloth on top. The two sisters worked together to unload the picnic basket and set out four settings of paper plates, cups, and napkins, and plastic forks, knives, and spoons. Brooke crowned their efforts by placing a white china bud vase with a single daisy—real and undamaged, but from where?—in the middle of the array. Out on the beach, the blanket and tablecloth, not to mention all the paper products, would’ve long since been scattered by the wind, which still blew vigorously above, though not as cold. But nestled down in this sanctuary, the air was utterly calm and warm. Brooke and Leah stood on either side of their impromptu dining table and silently admired their handiwork.

  From the crest of the highest dune and sitting on either end of the cooler, Jodie and Penni offered their applause.

  Brooke took a bow at which point her Minnie Pearl hat fell off, landing atop one of the paper plates. “Well, then, I’ll eat my hat,” she said.

  And they all could laugh.

  With the food spread out and each sitting cross-legged at her place at the table—each except Brooke still with her hat on against the bright and quite warm sun, Brooke’s back to the sun so she could leave her funny hat off, placed now next to the daisy as decoration and humorous reminder, the sun glowing through Brooke’s gray-brown-golden ponytails—they paused before beginning the meal, each looking at the others in expectation or maybe awed respect. Though none except Brooke was currently a regular church goer, they all felt the sudden and irrepressible need to offer thanks—for everything. The other three all looked to Brooke.

  But Brooke for once was silent, backed by golden rays and smiling contentedly, absorbing every beautiful sight, every passing second.

  So Leah without closing her eyes said with a quiet but firm voice, “We give thanks this day for this day, for the beauty of your creation and for the privilege of sharing in it, for these loved ones gathered around this table and for those loved ones not present in body but present in our hearts. We thank you for this food and the hands that prepared it. We ask that you would combine this food with your grace to strengthen us for the days ahead, the task before us. In Jesus name—amen.”

  Jodie quickly added, “We pray for the fifth one here, that you make her healthy and strong and keep her safe.” She stared across the tablecloth at her sister.

  Penni stared back, shocked at first, then nodded thanks.

  Brooke laughed. “Y’all are worse than Pastor Bob. Let’s eat!” She handed the container of fried chicken to Jodie, followed it with the potato salad, the eggs, the rolls.

  After serving herself and passing everything on to Leah, Jodie said, “I keep thinking we’re trapped in a scene from To the Lighthouse.” It was one of her favorite books.

  Leah laughed. “Then I’m Cam,” she said, referring to the Ramsays’ daughter Camilla.

  Jodie nodded. “Fine by me. I always identified best with James”—the Ramsays’ underappreciated son.

  “So who am I?” Brooke asked as she spooned out some potato salad.

  “Mr. Ramsay!” Jodie and Leah said in unison.

  “I’m guessing that’s not a compliment.”

  “Depends on your perspective,” Leah said, winking at Jodie.

  “Yeah, right,” Brooke muttered, vaguely recalling that she’d got about five pages into her sophomore English assignment of the book before giving
up and reaching for the Cliff Notes.

  “And who am I?” Penni asked.

  The others faced the youngest in their group. She looked at just that moment stunningly beautiful and serene, her fair skin glowing in the sun’s kind light, her face framed by the turquoise sash of her bonnet.

  “The girl with the pearl earring,” Brooke said, recalling Vermeer’s most famous painting but merging it in her mind with his full-body portrait of the pregnant woman reading a letter. How could this daughter, still so young and beautiful, now be with child?

  Jodie laughed. “Wrong century!”

  “Wrong medium!” Leah added.

  “So?” Brooke said.

  “Woolf and Vermeer—not a bad combination,” Jodie conceded. “Both fuzzy around the edges and idealized.”

  Leah shook her head. “You two cut it out. You’ll cause me to blow a gasket. Penni can be Lily, painting the scene from afar”—referring to the young woman endlessly painting the scene of the boat carrying the travelers to the lighthouse’s island.

  “‘There, I’ve had my vision.’” Jodie quoted her favorite line from the book, maybe her favorite line from anything, anytime, anywhere.

  “So Lily watches the others?” Penni asked.

  Leah nodded. “Simultaneously superfluous and indispensable.”

  “The great chronicler in the sky,” Jodie said, more to herself than the group.

  “That’s funny,” Penni said.

  “What?”

  “Me as watcher.”

  “Get used to it,” Brooke said, a hint of bitterness in her tone.

  The others looked at her.

  She replaced her frown with an ironic smile. “Motherhood—doomed to watch them grow up and leave to their own lives.” Her eyes were planted on Leah.

  “We come back,” Penni said.

  Brooke faced her and nodded. “I’m grateful.” Then she faced the others with dancing playful eyes. “Tomorrow we’re To the Lighthouse, if I can find full-length Victorian skirts and parasols.”

  “And full-body swimsuits for the ‘boys’” Leah added.

  “Will I have to stand in the distance at an easel?” Penni asked.

  “The widow’s walk,” Jodie suggested.

  “Perfect,” Leah said.

  “But I don’t want to be left alone,” Penni cried.

  “O.K.” Jodie granted in her best big sisterly magnanimity. “You can be Mr. Macalister.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The boat captain.”

  “I like that better.”

  “Done.”

  They settled into the quiet of eating their cold lunch in the warm spring sun. Though none of them was hungry after the large and sprawling breakfast, they all ate with acute pleasure and visceral joy, not so much at the tastiness of the fare (though it was all delicious, especially Leah’s deviled eggs and Brooke’s home-brewed iced tea sweetened with honey and flavored with just the right number of lemon slices) as for the entrance that food seemed to grant to a private realm cut off from the world, from the forward march of time and the dependencies and obligations beyond this small circle. If they ate slowly enough and with sufficient appreciation and satisfaction, maybe they could stay in this bubble forever.

  A lone gull circled above then alighted on the crest of one of the surrounding dunes. Unmoving and standing on one leg, it studied the scene unfolding below, as if surprised by the sight, or intrigued or mesmerized. Then it flew off.

  Leah said, “How can we help you through this?”

  Brooke smiled thinly at her sister across the table, both saddened and relieved to have the spell broken. “You already are.”

  “How?”

  “This,” she said, waving an arm as if in incantation over the assembly, their table, then outward above the dunes to the cottage and the oceanfront watch and the brilliant clear sky. “I needed you all here with me this weekend, and you came.” Her voice faltered then, so she let her broad smile and glistening eyes speak her thanks.

  To the other three, this openly vulnerable Brooke was unfamiliar and unsettling.

  “Our pleasure,” Leah said.

  Both Jodie and Penni nodded assent; but neither could look directly at their mom, looked instead to Leah for support and guidance in these uncharted waters.

  “And after this weekend?” Leah asked.

  Brooke quickly blinked away her tears and set her face in its more normal hard-edged confidence and determination. She gazed toward the top of the dune and wondered where the sentinel bird had gone. Then she looked across the sand-supported table at her sister. “The trial starts next Friday. They straddle a weekend to better accommodate out-of-town participants and their families. I’m told there will be a minimum of four days of in-patient therapy, including treatments and monitoring. They don’t expect any of the procedures to be ‘difficult to tolerate or deleterious to normal metabolic function’—got to love the authors of these patient information packets! But in the fine print they’re quick to warn you of possible allergic reaction or ‘other adverse side effects including possible fatal episodes.’” Brooke paused and laughed. “Didn’t we see that episode on Gilligan’s Island, Leah?”

  None of the others joined her laughter.

  “Anyway, I figure Dave and the boys will keep me well tended during my hospital stay. They can sneak in Chinese take-out and Dove candy bars—the dark chocolate ones—and Cosmo and Playgirl magazines. Do they still publish Playgirl?”

  “Unlimited access on the Internet,” Penni said, then covered her mouth.

  “How do you know?” Brooke asked.

  “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?” Jodie jumped in.

  “By osmosis, in my mind anyway,” Brooke insisted.

  “Yeah,” Jodie said. “Another virgin birth.”

  “We’ll need to get you an Internet tablet, Mom—for your reading, and viewing, pleasure.”

  “Give me a book or an 8x10 glossy and my imagination, thank you very much.”

  “There are battery-powered assistants for that as well,” Jodie said.

  Leah cried, “I believe we’ve wandered beyond the bounds of propriety.”

  Brooke laughed. “So what else is new?”

  “If my brothers will be there, I should be there too,” Penni said.

  Brooke fixed Penni with an insistent stare. “Listen, Penni! You took time away from Randall to be here this weekend, and I’m profoundly grateful. You have a husband, a home, and a job to tend to. And now you’re pregnant, so you have an unborn dependent to boot. Do not neglect your other responsibilities to come sit and watch me in a hospital bed twiddling my thumbs.” She turned her glare from Penni to Jodie then Leah. “That goes for all of you. I will call on you if I need you. You have my word on that. Until then, cards and letters and phone calls—or, if you must, e-mails delivered to my new tablet—will suffice. Understood?”

  Jodie and Penni each nodded automatically, relieved as always (if reluctantly, in Jodie’s case) by the release from decision-making carried in their mother’s clear directives.

  But Leah, not saddled with this parental prescription, hesitated. “You’ve got to let us care for you, Brooke.”

  “I am. I will.”

  Leah nodded. “And that’s fine. Call on us as needed—we’ll be there.” She checked this with both her nieces and received their affirming nods. “But you also have to let us care for you in our own ways, as we feel the need.”

  Brooke stared across at her sister, wondered when the last time she’d let someone freely dote on her, and knew it was decades ago, and the doting attention and care flowed forth from those same eyes gazing across the checked tablecloth at her now, unchanged despite the years, despite the addition of hearing and speaking ability in the interim.

  “You have to let us love you,” Leah said, mimicking her spoken words with their old child’s primitive sign language—her fingers shaping a heart that flowed into hands clasped together in prayer, or an unbreakable bond.

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