The Sisters Hemingway

by Annie England Noblin

  “I need to borrow it,” Pfeiffer replied. “I can’t afford a plane ticket, and I can’t let Hadley pay for a plane ticket, because then she’ll know I lost my job.”

  “And you think showing up in a 1994 LeBaron won’t out you?”

  “I’ll figure something out between here and Cold River,” Pfeiffer said.

  “I know,” Seth replied, reaching out to touch her leg again and then thinking better of it. “You always do.”

  “Can I borrow your phone?” Pfeiffer asked. “I should probably call Hadley.”

  Seth stood up and worked his hand down into the pocket of his jeans. “Here.”

  Pfeiffer eyed her friend. “Could your jeans be any tighter?”

  “If I keep eating the scones at work, the answer is yes,” Seth replied.

  Pfeiffer rolled her eyes and shuffled back into her empty bedroom to call her sister. She pressed the numbers into the phone and waited. Hadley answered on the first ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Hadley?” Pfeiffer asked, even though she knew who it was. “It’s Pfeiffer.”

  “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you,” Hadley said. “What is going on? You aren’t at work. Your phone is out of service.”

  “My phone isn’t out of service.”

  “That’s the message I get when I call.”

  Pfeiffer sighed. “I’m having some trouble with it,” she said. “I’ll have it fixed soon.”

  “And why haven’t you been at work?” Hadley continued. “I’ve never known you to take more than half a day off in all the years you’ve been at Henry Brothers.”

  “I had some time coming,” Pfeiffer said simply. “I took it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “I didn’t call you so we could play twenty questions,” Pfeiffer replied.

  “That sounds more like you,” Hadley replied. “I guess you got the message about Aunt Beatrice?”

  “Just now.”

  “We need to go home.”

  “Why?” Pfeiffer wanted to know.

  “Because that’s what you do when someone dies,” Hadley replied. “You go home and go to the funeral. I mean, really, Pfeiffer. I thought you of all people would want to go to the funeral. She loved you best, after all.”

  And there it was. What Pfeiffer had been waiting for. “She didn’t love me best,” she said. “I just understood her.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “Look, Hadley,” Pfeiffer said. “Can we just not fight about this?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “So are you coming or not?”

  “Yes,” Pfeiffer replied. “I’ll be there.”

  “Good,” Hadley said. “Oh . . . and Pi?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I’m going to find out.”

  Chapter 2

  Martha

  MARTHA COULD SMELL THE COW SHIT EVEN BEFORE SHE crossed over the Ozark County line. She hated cows. They were big, dumb animals with mournful eyes and jittery dispositions. She’d been kicked by one once, in June, just after her eighth birthday, and broken her arm. Her mother said she’d been lucky it was her arm and not her head, but her sister Pfeiffer had muttered that Martha’s head was the hardest part of her body, anyway, so why not?

  Martha gripped the steering wheel as her Tesla Model S careened around the curves of the Missouri foothills. She’d written her first songs about this place. She’d closed her eyes and imagined it here a million times after she first moved to Nashville, longing to sit down on the front porch of her mother’s house in Cold River and listen to the crickets and mosquitoes join in with the hum of her guitar.

  But that had been nearly sixteen years ago, before she’d become a runaway, before the cockroach-infested apartment in an ugly part of Nashville, before she’d gotten her first record deal, and certainly before she’d met, married, and been divorced by Travis Tucker. And, of course, before she’d spent the last six months in rehab.

  Martha always thought her return home would be triumphant. She thought she’d arrive on a giant tour bus with Travis in tow, and she’d step out, glamorous and beautiful. She’d flip her golden hair over one shoulder, carrying her golden albums, and be presented with a key to the city.

  Instead, she was driving back from Nashville by herself. Still glamorous and golden, yes, but the shine slightly dulled with age and cigarette smoke. She hadn’t had a number one album in nearly three years, and it appeared she never would now that her husband and record label had dumped her all within the last year. Yep, the Nashville press had really had a field day with all of that. Her agent, the only person she’d told the doctors at the facility she would talk to, told her all about it. Later that month, she was served with the divorce papers and then a certified letter from her label. It’s a good thing, she thought, that she was already in rehab, because all of that bad news certainly would have driven her to commit herself.

  Martha rounded the corner just on the edge of town and rolled up her window so that nobody would be able to see her through the tint. The house where she’d grown up was on the other side of Cold River—a hundred and forty acres and a farmhouse plopped down somewhere in the middle. She wondered idly if her sisters, Hadley and Pfeiffer, were already there. She’d spoken to Hadley on the phone briefly, but the only words that stuck were “Aunt Bea” and “dead.” She’d been half-asleep when her sister called, and now she reached back into the far recesses of her brain to recall their conversation.

  It was no use. Martha’s memory was rotten. It had not been a kick from a cow but a fall from an apple tree that had seen to that. The whiskey in the years following didn’t help matters much. Her last fight with Travis, the one just before he’d walked out, had been about whiskey. Well, it was more about her drinking the whiskey than anything else, but hell, what else was she supposed to do on a tour bus alone? Travis sure hadn’t been spending any time with her.

  Martha saw a man on a horse trotting along on the side of the road, a typical sight in Cold River. No, this was certainly not the first place she thought she’d visit after rehab. She’d been envisioning a beach with white sand, her white bikini, and . . . well, something nonalcoholic that tasted fruity. Instead, she slowed down to move around the ambling horse and then sped up once again as the man atop the horse tipped his hat to her in her rearview mirror.

  Chapter 3

  Martha

  TEN MINUTES LATER AND MARTHA WAS OUTSIDE OF COLD River, eyes squinted to find the county road where she turned to get to the farm. It’d been so long, she could scarcely remember if it was on the right or left side of the road. The number, however, she remembered—County Road 1957. It was the year her mother had been born, and she and her sisters always joked that it meant her mother was as old as the dirt on the road they traveled.

  As she made the turn, on the right, as fate would have it, she noticed a car sitting in the middle of the road, seemingly abandoned. The car was placed so that Martha couldn’t get around it from either side without driving into the ditch.

  Annoyed, she threw the Tesla into park behind the car and got out. Upon closer inspection, she realized that there was smoke coming from the hood. Farther down the road, she saw the outline of a person moving away from where she stood and toward the farm.

  “Hey!” she shouted, running after them. “Hey! Your damn car is in the middle of the road!”

  The person didn’t stop, didn’t turn around.

  “Hey!” Martha continued her stride, feeling the rocks beneath her flip-flops digging into the soles of her feet. “Stop!”

  Finally, the person in front of her halted and turned on her heel to face Martha. The person, a woman, had her hands on her hips; one long, lean leg jutted out in front of her, as if she were ready for a confrontation.

  Martha blinked and then blinked again. The person standing half a football field away from her was one of her sisters. She ventured closer. “Pfeiffer?”


  “Martha?”

  Martha trotted up to her sister, arms flung out to embrace her before she remembered a millisecond too late that her sister didn’t, under any circumstances, hug. Her fingertips brushed at the sleeves of Pfeiffer’s red cardigan instead. “Is that your POS broke down in the middle of the road?”

  Pfeiffer straightened herself and brushed a speck of red clay mud off her pencil skirt. “No,” she replied, her tone haughty. “It’s my assistant’s. You know I don’t have a car.”

  “Or a valid license,” Martha muttered.

  Pfeiffer shot her sister a look. “I borrowed it.”

  Martha craned her neck around to look back at the car. It wasn’t Pfeiffer’s style at all and had clearly seen better days. “Why didn’t you just fly in?” she asked. “You could have rented a car at the airport.”

  Pfeiffer shrugged, rolling her eyes at the same time, an indication that she was bored with the conversation. “I thought it might be fun to drive, you know, clear my head.”

  “You?” Martha asked. “Have fun?”

  “Anyway, I don’t have cell service out here,” Pfeiffer replied, ignoring her sister. “I thought maybe the house might still have a landline, and I could call to have that monstrosity towed.”

  Martha followed along after her. “Do you have a key?”

  “I figured I could just use the one underneath the mat.”

  “Pfeiffer,” Martha said, catching up to her, “what makes you think that mat will even still be there?”

  “It’ll be there.”

  Martha wasn’t so sure, but she wasn’t about to argue. Of the three sisters, Pfeiffer was most often right, and she liked to remind Martha and Hadley of this on a regular basis. As the younger sister, Martha didn’t mind it so much. That was just what older siblings did, she assumed. But she did wonder sometimes if Hadley minded, since she was the oldest. Hadley was mild-mannered, for sure, but something about Pfeiffer always brought out the worst in her.

  “Do you think the old place will look the same as always?” Martha asked.

  Pfeiffer stopped in her tracks and stared over at Martha. “You certainly don’t look the same.”

  It wasn’t a compliment, Martha could tell. It was, however, true. “I look better,” she said indignantly. She hadn’t seen her sister in five years, not since the last time she’d flown to D.C. to see Hadley. The two of them practically had to force Pfeiffer to visit, playing on her duty to them as a sister. But she and Pfeiffer still talked on the phone every few months, and although their conversations were superficial, at least it was a conversation. Martha was used to being the go-between when it came to her sisters, but she wished more than anything that she didn’t have to be. She always thought that when they grew up, they’d be best friends. But when Hadley married Mark, all of that changed. Mark’s job as a congressman kept Hadley busy all the time, and Pfeiffer’s dislike for him kept her from Hadley.

  Pfeiffer, unaware that Martha was deep in thought, pointed down at her sister’s feet. “Couldn’t you afford a better pair of footwear than flip-flops?”

  Now it was Martha’s turn to roll her eyes. It was true, she was still wearing flip-flops, but they were more expensive flip-flops than the dollar-store ones she’d worn as a child. They were Marc Jacobs, after all. Her hair was blond now, and it suited her. Her blue eyes were blue, thanks to the help of colored contacts, and her V-neck tank top accentuated her cleavage, the very first thing she’d bought and paid for when her debut album went gold. “I doubt anybody would recognize me now,” she said. “Flip-flops or not.”

  “Everybody will notice you,” Pfeiffer retorted. “You’re famous, remember?”

  “I am,” Martha said, remembering herself.

  “How was rehab?”

  “Sober.” Martha sighed.

  “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “I don’t know.” Martha gave her sister a sly smile. “Do you like to be sober?”

  Ahead of them, the James farm loomed. The house, the second to be built by the James family after the first one burned in 1900, was a turn-of-the-century farmhouse. It was nothing special as far as houses go, as the ancestral Jameses had been Quakers and not much interested in making a statement of wealth or frivolity. It was a standard two stories, and with the exception of the time the sisters’ mother got the notion to paint it a pale pink like the houses she’d seen on the beaches of Florida, it was nearly always painted white. But it had a sprawling and inviting front porch, which had always been Martha’s favorite part of the house.

  Now, as they neared the property, Martha saw that the front porch appeared to be sagging, just like the rest of the place. It was as if someone had gone and sucked all of the air, all of the life, out of it.

  “I can’t believe Aunt Bea let it go like this,” Pfeiffer said. She put one foot atop the crumbling, concrete steps. “She was so particular.”

  “I know,” Martha muttered.

  Their aunt, unlike their mother, hadn’t liked a messy home. She started cleaning when the sun came up, and she didn’t stop until the sun went down. She even set out a list of chores every morning with each of the sisters’ names on it. They couldn’t leave the house or do anything else until the chores were done. Martha hadn’t minded so much, enjoying a clean house, and neither had Hadley. But Pfeiffer hated it. She’d sit up in her room for hours and hours, refusing to do anything their aunt wanted them to do. It was a battle of wills every day, and Pfeiffer never won. Still, Pfeiffer and their aunt shared a special bond that the other sisters didn’t. It was an understanding, Martha guessed, because they were just so much alike.

  “Found the key,” Pfeiffer huffed, straightening herself up from bending down to search under the mat. “Same mat and everything.”

  Martha looked down at the faded mat lying at the foot of the door. Once upon a time it had read “Welcome” in big, bold letters. Now the lettering was gone, and what was left was a lumpy, beige mass surrounded by a thick layer of dirt. “Great,” she replied halfheartedly.

  Pfeiffer wiped the key off on her skirt and stuck the key in the lock. “Hey,” she said. “It’s open.”

  “What?” Martha stepped closer to her sister. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s unlocked, dummy,” Pfeiffer said, impatient. “You think Hadley is already here?”

  “I didn’t see another car,” Martha replied.

  “Me either.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Martha said, stepping past her sister and pushing the front door open.

  “What if there’s somebody in there?” Pfeiffer asked, hanging back.

  “We’re not in New York City,” Martha replied. “The worst that could happen is that a couple of raccoons got inside and are going through the trash cans.”

  “I have no interest in being attacked by a raccoon,” Pfeiffer said, her slender hands, their mother’s hands, on her hips.

  “Remember Renaldo?” Martha asked, stepping through the threshold and into the house. “How he used to wait outside by the door in the morning for Mom to feed him?”

  Renaldo had been the family’s pet raccoon. He’d been injured as a baby, run over on the highway and left for dead. The girls’ mother stopped when she saw a flash of movement as she drove by, and rescued him from his fate. They’d nursed him back to health, and when he got old enough, their mother released him into the forest, and their youngest sister, Mary, had cried all night. The next morning, however, Renaldo was back, clearly not happy about having been turned out. From then on, they took turns feeding him in the morning. After their mother died, the girls never saw him again.

  “I wonder what happened to poor, old Renaldo,” Pfeiffer mused. “I still think about him sometimes, you know.”

  Martha was touched by this display of humanity from her sister. It didn’t often make an appearance. They’d lost their father, mother, and sister, all before they’d become adults. Pfeiffer’s way of dealing with it was to close herself off from everyone, eve
n more than she already had. It was a wonder she hadn’t stopped speaking completely like their aunt.

  “I’m sure he ran off with the woman of his dreams,” Martha replied. “I bet they had lots of tiny raccoon babies.”

  “Kits,” Pfeiffer reminded her.

  “Yes,” Martha said. “Kits.”

  The two women took in their surroundings. The house, if one could still call it that, was a shambles. Everything, including the peeling wallpaper, was covered in what looked like an impenetrable layer of dust. There were sheets covering all of the furniture in the living room, but even they were dirty and moth-eaten. The floors, original hardwood and once their aunt Bea’s pride and joy, looked as if they might splinter with every step.

  “Oh my God,” Pfeiffer whispered. “What happened here?”

  “Hadley did say that Aunt Bea was pretty bad there at the end,” Martha replied. “Of course, I doubt she would let anyone know it. We sure didn’t know it.”

  “I didn’t even know she was sick until I got the call that she’d died,” Pfeiffer said, walking around the living room, her face scrunched up as if she were about to cry. “Did you?”

  Martha shook her head. “No.”

  Above them, there was a creak in the floorboards that made both of them jump. Pfeiffer put her finger to her lips and pointed toward the stairs. “Do you think someone is up there?” she whispered.

  “Who?” Martha mouthed.

  Pfeiffer shrugged and motioned for her sister to follow her.

  The noises coming from the upstairs sounded like furniture or something equally heavy was being dragged across the floor—obviously a feat too large for a group of raccoons, even rabid ones. A gaze, Martha reminded herself as she crept up the stairs. A group of raccoons is called a gaze. She wasn’t sure why she was thinking about that right then, but she knew that if she and her sister survived the next few minutes, and she happened to use the wrong term in the future, Pfeiffer would be more than happy to correct her.

  She was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t see that Pfeiffer had stopped in front of her, and Martha charged right smack into her, causing her sister to fly forward, face first into the closed door of their childhood bedroom.