Two Sisters Times Two Page 5

5

  Whitfield stood at the mirror in their hotel suite slowly undoing his silk jacquard tie. He stared at his nearly bald head reflected in the glass and frowned. How did all the Fulcher men—meaning by that Leah’s father Franklin, as her wayward brother Matt had skipped the wedding—manage to keep their hair? It was bad enough that he was nine and a half years older than his wife, but his hair loss made him look like her father—older than her father! Leah always dismissed his worries, claiming baldness made him look “dignified,” perhaps her highest compliment for a man. But she didn’t know what it felt like inside.

  Leah sat at the dressing table removing first her pearl necklace then her matching ear rings and carefully arranging them in their spring-hinged cases before setting those cases in her open travel kit.

  Jasper was already on his way back to school, hitching a ride straight from the reception with a carful of others from the university. Leah had thought he’d sleep on the pull out bed in their suite and they would drop him at his dorm on their drive back to Atlanta tomorrow. It wasn’t far out of their way, and she’d secretly hoped to get a mid-semester glimpse of his room and his freshman-year life. But he was anxious to get back and insisted on leaving tonight. Was there a girl waiting at school? Or maybe he had an eye on that willowy brunette from Randall’s side of the guest list and among those riding in that van back to the university. What was her name?

  She almost picked up the phone to ask Brooke. She had her sister’s new cellphone number already logged in from several calls in the days leading up to the wedding. But she stopped herself. Her question would only open the door to a lengthy interrogation about Jasper, and Leah wasn’t ready for that.

  She thought about Jodie, how Brooke had embarrassed her. Where had Jodie gone? She’d last seen her sitting alone at the bar, looking bored and somehow out of place at her own sister’s wedding while everyone else was busy saying goodbyes or, in some cases, the hellos of the next step in new friendships.

  “Your sister was over the top, as usual,” Whitfield said without turning from his mirror.

  “It was a challenging day for her,” Leah said quietly. She didn’t turn from her mirror either, but she watched her husband’s back in the left panel of the three-part make-up mirror. She noticed it stiffen slightly.

  “Why’s that? Dave paid a fortune for the best wedding planner in the state—hell, probably the best one in the country. Everything came off without a hitch.”

  “Her struggles were on the inside,” Leah said. “That’s where Brooke’s struggles always are.” She pulled out the hidden clips holding her hair in a loose fold at the nape of her neck. Her long hair, still naturally blond, fell in a rush over her back. From earliest childhood, she loved that feeling—like a single wave along her spine, so soft and delicate as to seem almost imagined, almost a sign from some other realm.

  “You cut her too much slack, Leah; always have. Everyone’s got struggles on the inside. Most people deal with theirs without making such a show of it.”

  Leah lightly swayed her head from side to side, letting her hair fan out across her back, gently to and fro. The action recalled memories of her childhood, when the absence of sound made touch—all touch, whether hair on her back or fingers on her wrist—that much more intense. She wondered what it would be like to reclaim those feelings, that intensity of experience. She could try turning off her processors, re-enter silence like in the shower or at night. Who would ever know? She laughed to herself at the thought of it—turning off sound. Brooke’s face—her youthful face from decades ago—rose in her mind. This was all her fault.

  “I don’t think it’s funny, Leah. She’s never grown up. I don’t care how many charities she’s started with Dave’s money or how many foundation boards she serves on. She’s still a spoiled child.” He laid his tie neatly over the back of the desk’s chair and began to unbutton his shirt.

  Leah stared at her face in the mirror. Somewhere behind those eyes, Brooke hid and waited.

  Normal Lives

  Brooke flew into the church lobby holding the covered aluminum pan of her customized version of Rice Krispy treats (melt a bag of chocolate bits and drizzle over the top, but don’t tell anyone it’s that simple) out in front of her like a sacred offering. She’d hardly had time last night to make them and even less time this morning to swing by and drop them off. But she’d been making them for so long now, since the boys were little and she used them as a bribe to get them to go church potlucks, and for every church food event for over thirty years that when Doris Upton called and asked her to contribute a pan for this Thursday’s post-funeral reception with the words “If Brooke Redmond’s Rice Krispy treats aren’t on the dessert table I believe they’ll have to lock the doors and send everyone home” she was only half-kidding.

  She stuck her head in the receptionist’s office. “O.K. if I drop these off in the kitchen?” She knew it was but asked anyway.

  Marjorie—the church secretary since she and Leah used to hide under her desk from Pastor Rick, five pastors back—nodded her approval. “God himself will rest easier.”

  “Anything for the Team!” Brooke said. She meant the Fellowship Team, a stalwart group of erstwhile middle-aged women who coordinated all church functions that involved food, made sure the tablecloths were ironed, the flowers fresh, the silver polished, and the plates spotless. Brooke had been Captain of this team a few years back during a particularly busy period as they welcomed their current shepherd, Pastor Bob, and his large family, holding several large receptions (Brooke’s idea) to introduce him to the community. She’d passed her Captain’s spatula (they actually had one, plated in shiny copper) to Doris a year-and-a-half ago with the excuse of having to focus on Penni’s wedding. But she’d kept her navy apron with the white pinstripes ever clean and at the ready, helping out the Team whenever she could.

  “Long as we remember our Captain,” Marjorie said. She meant Jesus.

  “I talked with her just yesterday,” Brooke laughed then scurried off to the dim Fellowship Hall with the kitchen along one side. She pulled a roll of masking tape from the mixed-supplies drawer and wrote Redmond on the curve in permanent marker then tore off the piece and stuck it on the side of the pan. She put the tape back in the drawer then had a second thought and pulled it out again, repeated her lettering and stuck that name on the pan’s top. “Can’t be too careful” she said to herself as she placed her pan next to a baker’s box of cupcakes labelled for the funeral by a sticky note. Must be from Bonnie Young, Brooke thought, picturing the youngest member of the Team and a practicing attorney who always contributed store-bought baked goods that were as tasteless as they were pretty. How many times had she tossed those cupcakes in the trash while cleaning up, left on some child’s plate with one bite taken out of it (and sometimes that bite regurgitated on one side of the plate)?

  “Brooke,” Pastor Bob shouted from the office hall as she raced back through the lobby. “Do you have a minute?”

  “No, I don’t,” Brooke whispered to herself with a frown of annoyance. But she paused in her flight and by the time she turned had managed to put a friendly smile on her face. “Good morning, Pastor Bob. I was just racing off to an appointment.”

  “This will only take a minute,” the tall dark-haired man with the booming preacher’s voice said as he quickly closed the gap between them. “How are you this morning?” he said as he gave her hand a firm and vigorous shake.

  “Busy.”

  “And the newlyweds?” He’d performed the service, right here in their large sanctuary, filled to overflowing that day.

  “Wedded,” Brooke said tersely, then felt guilty (he was a pastor, after all) and added by way of apology, “Penni’s decorating their condo in Boston, called me last night to ask if I thought cinnabar or burnt umber was a better wall color for their dining room. I told her green!”

  Pastor Bob laughed. “The trials of the younger generations,” he said, though he was closer to Penni’s age than her moth
er’s.

  Brooke smiled up at him. He did have a way of easing her stresses. She wasn’t sure if it was his spiritual side or something else.

  Pastor Bob’s eyes crossed hers. He grew flustered and looked away before recalling what he’d rushed out here to tell her. “I won’t keep you. I just wanted to let you know that with the funeral and all, I won’t be able to make it to the dedication of the new shelter.”

  Three years earlier, shortly after Pastor Bob arrived at this call, Brooke had spear-headed a fund-raising to build a new and larger homeless shelter to replace the aging downtown facility, one that could better accommodate and protect mothers and their children. Though not a parish-sponsored effort, Brooke had held several of the fund-raiser’s events in the church and leaned heavily on Pastor Bob and other congregation members for support. He’d grown to admire her tireless determination if not always her frank and sometimes impatient manner. Tonight, the product of her efforts, a gleaming facility in a renewed and safer part of downtown, was to be dedicated in a black-tie affair designed (by Brooke) to retire the facility’s mortgage before it was finalized.

  “That’s O.K.,” Brooke said. “I’ll be sure to give you and Ebenezer grateful acknowledgement. And I’ll pick up your contribution on Sunday,” she said with a wink.

  Pastor Bob laughed and shook his head. “It will be in your box.”

  “Got to run,” Brooke said and turned toward the door.

  “Good luck tonight,” Pastor Bob said to her back.

  “You too,” she said over her shoulder. “With the funeral.”

  “That’s in God’s hands,” he yelled after her.

  Sixty-four minutes and fifty-two point seven miles later, according to her hybrid SUV’s trip-tracker digital readout, she parked in front of the civil engineer’s office in a restored block of the county seat’s aging downtown.

  She was there to offer input on the design of One Care, her latest civic project. About a year ago, after Dave told her he was planning to expand his chain of dental clinics into the thinly populated coastal plain east of Charlotte, Brooke had what she’d taken to calling a vision of an oasis of cutting-edge medical care in the middle of the desert of agri-business, a full range of healthcare services readily accessible to the poor farm families and migrant workers so often deprived of such care. Dave’s initial plan—a dental clinic, that’s all—had been rapidly expanded—family medicine, reproductive counselling, a pain clinic!—by Brooke’s ever increasing enthusiasm and insistence. He feared losing money; but he feared losing Brooke more, especially as her homeless-shelter project wound down and planning for the wedding neared completion. Brooke would need something to fill those voids.

  When the architect called last week to say there was a problem with the planned shape and location of the complex’s parking lot—something to do with drainage and soil composition—Dave had told Brooke “Let the professionals figure it out. That’s what they’re paid for.”

  To which Brooke had replied with more than a little ardor, “Those stodgy old men don’t have my vision! If it’s going to be an oasis, it has to look and feel like an oasis!”

  Dave had chuckled as he shook his head. Some of those “stodgy old men” were far younger than she, but he kept that thought to himself along with the anxiety that Brooke’s famous vision was starting to cost him a pile of money.

  Brooke burst into the office fifteen minutes late and strode past the receptionist’s desk with only a curt nod to the pretty young woman—girl, really, younger than Penni—and on into the conference room beyond. Four men—the head architect and the project architect, the civil engineer and his assistant—were huddled around a raised drafting table. They looked up from the site plan at the commotion Brooke made.

  She paused in the doorway and smiled slyly. “I haven’t had this many handsome boys waiting on me since my senior prom.” It wasn’t true—Brooke hadn’t even gone to her senior prom. “Now who wants to dance first?”

  All four men were struck briefly speechless. Finally the head architect, a dignified country gentleman in a seersucker suit that reminded Brooke of her father, stepped forward to shake her hand. “Hello, Mrs. Redmond. Thank you for making the trip down here.” He moved aside to make room for her at the table.

  With no further word or introductions, she walked up to the table and leaned forward—it was almost chest-high on her—and studied the new plan. Not ten seconds into that review, she looked up and demanded, “Where’s my meditation garden?”

  The four men looked at each other, negotiating who would be the first to respond. Finally the project architect, an intern fresh out of architecture school in a flannel shirt and jeans, turned his blue eyes and charmingly unkempt brown locks toward her. They all silently agreed—he stood the best chance of justifying the change.

  But even he, with his youthful enthusiasm and charm and long list of explanations, realized as soon as he looked into her flashing eyes that this current plan was already obsolete. The meditation garden, a circle of green in the center of the circular parking lot set off by head-high cedars and shaded by a tall oak all imported at considerable initial expense and maintained and irrigated at considerable ongoing expense, would be reinserted into the site plan regardless of the cost, regardless of whether it ever got used. Despite his misgivings and the realization that he’d be working late tonight to redraft the plan, he couldn’t help but admire this woman’s sheer vivacity and will, and wondered briefly what it would be like to be in her orbit, subject to her steady gravitational pull. The thought produced both a vague sense of longing mixed with something approaching terror.

  Later that afternoon, Brooke flew into the hair salon—late again—to let Becky trim her hair. Years ago she felt secretly guilty at spending so much money on her hair. What had happened to the days when she simply let it grow out, hanging straight and thick over her shoulders and halfway down her back? If God meant for her hair to be trimmed into a tight bob or permed into layered curls or highlighted with streaks of gold, surely he would have made it so (and saved her a ton of money). But now she was resigned to the task, saw it as simply maintenance—like having the yard mowed or the house painted—to keep up appearances and comply with expectations. If she was going live in this world, she needed to play by its rules.

  Momma and Father had long ago showed her that truth. Leah in her own way and despite her handicap had demonstrated that truth throughout their childhood and adolescence. But Brooke had to discover it the way she discovered everything, the hard way—that is through experience, through screwing up so royally she had to burn it all down and start all over again, suffering the pain of loss and humiliation the whole way. It would’ve been a lot easier to learn from her parents or, better yet, from Leah, ever ready to advise and teach. But that wasn’t her way. That had never been her way.

  “The usual?” Becky asked after Brooke settled into the cushy salon chair.

  Brooke looked into the mirror at her gray-flecked brown hair surrounding her weathered face, then looked at Becky’s round and jolly and youthful face reflected in the mirror. “You think you can make me blond without making me look like a vain old woman?”

  The hint of disappointment passed over Becky’s eyes. She’d hoped to get off early to pick up her daughter from daycare and take her to the park. A quick trim of Mrs. Redmond (if she’d been on time) then out the door would’ve fulfilled that hope. But she didn’t let that disappointment settle on her face. Mrs. Redmond was her best, and best-tipping, customer. She gave a full smile and said, “Leave it to old Becky to work her magic.”

  Brooke nodded in return, did as requested.

  Later she knocked on the locked door of the dry cleaners. Jimmy Hall, a black classmate from high school whose hair was now completely gray, appeared from the back—thank God he was still here!—and unlocked the door.

  “Mrs. Redmond,” he said.

  “Jimmy, I’m so glad you’re still here. I need that gown.”

  L
ast week as she prepared to head out to purchase a dress for the shelter dedication, she’d been struck with a new idea. If she could find a suitable dress in her closet, she could add those funds to their already sizeable donation toward the shelter’s mortgage and tell Dave it wasn’t costing him an extra dime. She’d resurrected a floor-length sequined gown in midnight blue that she’d worn to a New Year’s Eve party five years ago. It was a little boisterous for the occasion, but boisterous was her new, post-wedding identity. And there might be a few people at the dedication who were at that New Year’s Eve party, but their memories would surely be fading by now. Besides, she still fit in the slinky dress; and that fact gave her great satisfaction.

  Jimmy frowned. “I’ve closed out the register.”

  Brooke reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a fifty. “I’ve got cash—a little spending money off the books.” Dave sometimes gave her envelopes of cash—“From non-insurance customers needing a break”—which she in turn distributed to some of her household help that preferred cash to a check.

  Jimmy ignored the bill then turned and went into the back, returning about a minute later with the gown in a tall garment bag rather than the normal thin and clingy clear plastic. He pulled off the receipt taped to the bag then handed the hanger to Brooke. “I’ll add this to your next order.”

  “Thank you so much, Jimmy. You’re a prince.” She turned and rushed off as her prince locked the door behind her.

  An hour later she emerged from her spacious dressing room attired in that sequined gown with sequined half heels on her feet and a gold shawl over her shoulders matching her gold earrings and necklace matching her golden hair.

  Dave, waiting in his tuxedo before the bedroom’s flat screen television tuned to the evening news, looked at her with a decades-old sense of amazement—his oldest memory of her from that day in computer science class when she’d challenged their professor and won both the argument and his heart—that Brooke seemed to constantly renew despite her presumptive manner and stubbornness and temper. She was his Phoenix, ever rising from the ashes of her actions or fate’s. “Don’t you look gorgeous,” he said then closed the distance between them and wrapped her in his arms.

  She silently basked in his adoration.

  After he stepped back, he tugged playfully at a fold of loose fabric at the gown’s waist. “You losing weight?”

  That was always the right thing to ask any middle-aged woman and no different for Brooke. “Just running around doing all your work,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah. How’d the meeting go?”

  She filled him in as they headed down the stairs and to the car, leaving out the part about the added cost for insisting on keeping the meditation garden.