The Sisters Hemingway

by Annie England Noblin

  The first time members of the church came out to check on them, their aunt let them in and listened calmly to all the reasons why she ought to bring her orphaned nieces back into the fold. When they’d finally run out of reasons, their aunt looked at Pfeiffer and nodded, which was a cue for Pfeiffer to say, “Thank you very much for your time, but we’ll worship the lord from the living room on Sunday morning.”

  Despite protests from the elders, Pfeiffer got up and showed them the door. Once it had been closed and locked behind them, their aunt got up and baked a chocolate cake, allowing the sisters to have cake for breakfast, and they stayed in their pajamas all day watching Molly Ringwald movies on their old, blurry television set. It was a day that Hadley remembered well, but she hoped that none of the elders of the church did.

  The older women watched the sisters as they approached. They had everything planned, and they eyed Hadley, Pfeiffer, and Martha as if they were strangers from a foreign land rather than grown-up versions of the girls they’d once been—the girls all of the Cold River Ladies Auxiliary had known since birth.

  They met the sisters at the door of the funeral home with waxy smiles and lipstick settling into the creases just beyond their lips.

  “And I thought we looked like the Witches of Eastwick,” Pfeiffer muttered as they approached.

  “The movie was better than the book,” Martha shot back, knowing full well that a reference to any movie being better than the book would get a rise out of her sister.

  “At least you don’t have two black eyes,” Pfeiffer replied.

  “Be quiet,” Hadley replied through gritted teeth. “You both promised to be on your best behavior.”

  “Girls!” Anna Graham, the president of the auxiliary and Aunt Bea’s closest friend, said. “I was starting to think you wouldn’t make it.”

  Martha looked down at her phone. “It’s only half-past six,” she said.

  “I hardly recognized you,” another one of the women replied. She was staring straight at Martha’s chest. “You’ve changed so much since the last time I laid eyes on you.”

  “Thank you for taking care of the arrangements,” Hadley said. “We all three appreciate it so much.”

  “It’s the least we could do,” Ellen replied. “Besides, we know how busy you girls are nowadays.”

  “I wish she’d stop calling us girls,” Pfeiffer said, just loud enough for her sisters to hear. “We’re women.”

  Hadley gave Pfeiffer a sharp jab in her side. “We are all quite a ways from Cold River now, it’s true,” she said.

  “Shall we go inside?” Anna offered. “I know you’d like to pay your respects.”

  “We’d like that,” Hadley replied.

  Anna and Ellen led them inside, past the man at the door in the woolen suit too hot for August, and past the book of names of visitors. Hadley wanted to stop for a moment and scan the list, but the older women marched right past it and into the big room, where a crowd was gathered.

  “Your aunt didn’t want an open casket,” Anna said, gesturing to the front of the room, where a large, rose-gold casket sat, half of the top propped open, the top of their aunt’s face just visible from where they stood. “She wanted to be cremated, but we talked her out of that.”

  “Then why is the casket open?” Pfeiffer asked.

  “The funeral home misunderstood the instructions,” Anna replied, a slight tone of annoyance in her voice. “By the time we realized, people were coming in. And how would that look? Running up to slam a coffin lid down in the middle of a crowd?”

  The room grew quiet as they entered. It was as if by opening the door and walking inside, they’d let out all of the air. Hadley knew most of the faces she saw, but it would take her a moment for the names to come back to her. Names were her specialty. It was one of the reasons Mark insisted she attend every event with him, political or otherwise. She could whisper the name of a man they’d met once in a coffee shop on their morning walk through the city, and Mark could say that man’s name and make him feel as if he were the most important person in the world. He had charm, her husband. He’d do well here tonight, and Hadley felt a twinge of longing for him that she hadn’t expected, even though she knew it was far too late for any of that. It had been a long time since they were even in the same room, let alone out in public, together.

  Hadley smiled at the faces she recognized and even the few she didn’t. They all smiled back, and many came to her with an embrace and kind words. A few of them, mostly the older women closer to her aunt’s age, made thinly veiled references to the fact that Hadley and her sisters never visited. Hadley glanced over at her sisters. Pfeiffer and Martha were sticking closely together, careful not to get any closer to Aunt Bea than they had to.

  “Would you like to go up and see your aunt?” Anna asked, gesturing to the front of the room.

  “Oh . . .” Hadley trailed off. In fact, that was the very last thing she wanted to do. “I suppose so.”

  Hadley motioned to her sisters, but they pretended not to see her. Instead, she let Anna and Ellen take each one of her arms and lead her to the front. The carpet in the mourning room was a deep burgundy, and she felt her heels sinking deep down into it with each step. As they neared the casket, she prayed for the carpet to instead be quicksand and swallow up more than just her expensive heels. She wished she could be swallowed; that way she wouldn’t have to face what she knew was coming.

  “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” Anna asked, glancing down at Hadley’s dead aunt, her eyes so full of love that they threatened to overflow with it.

  Hadley cleared her throat, struggling to find her voice. “She does,” she replied.

  Aunt Bea did look quite lovely. Her long, white hair surrounded her face. They’d left it loose, Hadley supposed, to honor the style in which she always wore it. Aunt Bea’s hair had been white as long as she’d known her, but she’d seen pictures of her with long chestnut hair that fell in soft, loose curls all down her back, the same color and texture as Pfeiffer’s. Their aunt’s hair was her crowning glory, and even though it had been completely white by the time she came to live with them, it was still beautiful.

  The last time Hadley had seen a dead body was at the funeral of her mother and youngest sister. She was eighteen at the time. Both of their caskets had been open, which drew many more visitors than usual, because everyone was interested to see how a springtime tornado could pick up two people in one spot and place them in another miles away without a single scratch. When Pfeiffer overheard two girls in her high school class gossiping about it in the hallway, she’d flown into a rage, scratching one of them across the face, and had to be restrained by Aunt Bea, who’d arrived only days before and was completely out of her depth with the teenagers. She’d pulled Pfeiffer outside and tried to calm her down, but instead, Pfeiffer took her anger out on their mother’s station wagon, denting the hood in several places. Their aunt hadn’t said a thing about it, but Hadley always wondered if in that moment their aunt Bea didn’t ask herself if she hadn’t made a huge mistake agreeing to take care of them.

  Hadley remembered watching the scene unfold with a kind of serenity she hadn’t understood at the time. She didn’t feel rage like Pfeiffer did. She didn’t feel abandoned like Martha did. All she knew was that her mother and her baby sister, Mary, were both dead.

  Their mother’s name had been Rachael, and she liked to say that she and Mary were two slices of bread in a sandwich, the top the oldest and the bottom the youngest, holding in the rest of the family, and although Mary joked that her older sisters were bologna and smelly cheese and mustard, their mother said they came together to make something delicious, something perfect, something whole, and something made for each other.

  The day of their funeral, all Hadley had been able to think about was how their wholeness had been broken, their perfection torn apart, and now she and her sisters were alone in the world without a proper beginning or ending. She knew, of course, that the unraveling had start
ed long before that.

  As Hadley thought about this, about the last time she’d stood in this exact same spot, she felt tears prick at her eyes and her shoulders began to shake. For all her embarrassment, she couldn’t hold it in.

  “There, there, honey,” Anna said. “Don’t cry. It’s going to be okay.”

  “She had a good, long life, your aunt,” Ellen told her. “Come here and have a seat.”

  Hadley did as she was told. She wasn’t crying for her aunt, not really. She was crying for all of them—for all the years they’d spent without their mother and sister, and for all the ways their aunt couldn’t fix it.

  “Thank you,” Hadley said when Ellen handed her a handkerchief. She was oddly comforted to see that somebody actually still carried those. It smelled like lavender and something else she couldn’t identify. Mothballs, maybe.

  She glanced over at her sisters just in time to see two younger women approach Martha, eyes wide. Her sister was, after all, quite famous. She’d been less successful over the last few years, it was true, without a hit record or even a new single for the radio. Most of the attention Martha got lately was about her divorce, which had been splashed all over the place, and Hadley was sure everybody in Cold River knew and had an opinion about it. Hadley knew how much Martha had loved Travis, even though Martha wouldn’t admit it, not even to her—maybe especially to her. Despite all of this, though, her sister was a star. There was no doubt about it. She’d be back on top soon; Hadley knew it.

  “I can’t believe you’re here!” one of the girls in the room squealed in Martha’s face. “I told Katie you would be. I mean, it is your aunt’s funeral, after all.”

  “Are you Katie?” Martha asked, unperturbed and turning her attention to the other girl.

  “Yes,” the girl replied. “And that’s Kelly.”

  “Sisters?” Martha asked.

  “Yes,” they said in unison.

  “You look alike,” Martha replied.

  Kelly gave Pfeiffer a sweeping gaze before she said, “You don’t look anything like your sister.”

  “You don’t think so?” Martha asked.

  The girls shook their heads.

  “Well,” Martha replied, “we used to look so much alike as kids, people thought we were twins.”

  “It’s true,” Pfeiffer said. “That was before . . . you know . . . the reconstructive surgery on my face.”

  “What?” Kelly gasped. “You had reconstructive surgery?”

  “No,” Martha cut in, giving Pfeiffer a sidelong glare. “She’s just being silly.”

  “Oh,” Katie said, visibly relieved.

  “So,” Kelly continued. “Did you really go to rehab because Travis Tucker dumped you?”

  “I better go and collect my sisters,” Hadley said to Anna, standing up. “It looks like they’re starting to get in over their heads.”

  She hurried over to Martha and grabbed her arm. “I’m sorry to interrupt, ladies, but my sisters and I really need to be going.”

  “Aw,” Katie replied. Then her eyes brightened. “Are you coming to the potluck after the funeral tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think so,” Hadley replied.

  “I need to get back to Nashville,” Martha added.

  “To record another album?” Kelly asked. “We’ve been waiting forever!”

  “Oh, please stay!” Katie said, her voice on the edge of a squeal. “Please, please!”

  “It would be nice if you girls could stay afterward,” Anna cut in, approaching them. “I think your aunt’s friends would really appreciate it.”

  Hadley looked at Pfeiffer, hoping she would speak up, but she only shrugged. She’d always been the one to say the things nobody else wanted to say, and Hadley couldn’t imagine her actually wanting to stay in Cold River any longer than she had to.

  “Okay, why not,” Hadley said at last. “I’m sure we can work it out.”

  “Well, then it’s settled,” Anna said. “You girls don’t have to bring anything other than yourselves. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Hadley watched Anna leave, Katie and Kelly in tow. She felt a sense of relief wash over her. “Do you think we can leave now without anybody thinking we’re bad people?”

  “I’m pretty sure they all already think that,” Pfeiffer replied. “Well, not Martha. Everybody loves her. She’s just so pretty.”

  “Shut up,” Martha replied. “At least nobody is asking you about your recent divorce or stint in rehab.”

  “Not yet,” Pfeiffer replied, a wry grin on her face.

  “Why didn’t you speak up when you had the chance about the potluck?” Hadley asked Pfeiffer. “I figured you’d say something.”

  “I don’t care to stay,” Pfeiffer replied.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Hadley glanced around the room, gauging the crowd to decide upon their safest exit strategy.

  Martha caught her and asked, “See anybody else you know?”

  “Only half the town.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  Hadley knew that wasn’t what her sister meant, but aside from the teenage girls fawning all over Martha, girls who’d probably come with their grandmothers simply because they knew Martha would be there, Hadley hadn’t seen anyone under eighty years old all night. “I haven’t seen anyone,” she said.

  “I really thought he’d be here,” Martha said.

  “Why?”

  Martha sighed. “Oh, come on, Hadley.”

  “I haven’t seen him in twenty years,” Hadley replied.

  “We haven’t seen any of these people in twenty years,” Martha replied, pursing her lips. “I just thought he might turn up for old time’s sake.”

  “To our ancient aunt’s family night?”

  “If it might be a chance to see you.”

  “That was a long time ago, Martha,” Hadley said. “A very long time ago.”

  “You two were pretty fast and furious, if I remember correctly,” Martha said.

  “What would you know about that?” Hadley asked. “You were fourteen years old.”

  “I knew a lot more than you thought,” Martha replied, taking her sister’s arm and steering her toward Pfeiffer. “I knew a lot more than you thought.”

  Chapter 6

  Pfeiffer

  ALTHOUGH SHE’D NEVER ADMIT IT, PFEIFFER WAS GLAD that her sisters had agreed to spend the night at the farm. She hadn’t wanted to stay by herself. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to stay at all, but she’d used any hotel money she had to get Seth’s junk towed. It was why she’d also agreed, with little fight, to go to the potluck the next morning after the funeral. She knew her sisters would have to know eventually that she was without both a job and a home, but she didn’t suppose they had to know just yet. The longer she could prolong her stay at the farm, the longer she had to figure things out.

  “I made up the beds in our old rooms,” Hadley said, coming down the stairs. “But I’m afraid that Pfeiffer’s mattress is a little worse for the wear.”

  “It’s fine,” Pfeiffer said, shrugging. “I’ll sleep down here on the couch.”

  “You’re quite agreeable tonight,” Hadley replied, sitting down next to her.

  “I just hate sharing a room with you,” Pfeiffer said with another shrug. “You snore.”

  “I do not!” Hadley protested.

  “You do,” Martha said, setting a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of Coke on the coffee table in front of them. “You always have.”

  “Where did you get that?” Hadley asked.

  “The whiskey?” Martha replied. “I got that from Aunt Bea’s liquor cabinet. You know, the one Mama used to keep all her sewing supplies in. The Coke I bought from a gas station before I got into town.”

  “I thought you stopped drinking,” Hadley said.

  “I did,” Martha replied with a shrug. “Six months sober. Girl Scout’s honor. But that doesn’t mean you all have to abstain on account of me.”

&nb
sp; Pfeiffer glanced from one sister to the other. Hadley was staring at Martha as if she didn’t quite believe her. Hadley could always sniff out a liar, especially if one of the liars was one of her sisters. Her stare was like a truth serum, and neither Pfeiffer nor Martha was ever able to keep anything to herself once Hadley made her mind up to get their secrets out of them.

  “Didn’t they teach you at . . . at the facility that you should keep yourself away from temptation?” Hadley asked.

  “You mean the rehab facility that cost me ten thousand dollars a week?” Martha asked.

  Pfeiffer, who’d already poured herself a shot of whiskey, was now choking on it. “Rehab cost you ten thousand dollars a week?”

  Martha nodded, unscrewing the cap of the Coke. “Yep, and it was money well spent, too,” she said, looking pointedly at Hadley. “Would I like to have a drink? Yes. Always. Will I have a drink? No. I won’t.”

  “I just don’t know if we should drink in front of you,” Hadley said.

  “Oh, leave her alone,” Pfeiffer heard herself say. Her throat was burning, and she poured herself another. “She’s a big girl. If she says she can handle it, she can.”

  “Fine,” Hadley replied. “But I’m not having any.”

  “More for me,” Pfeiffer replied.

  “I can’t believe you,” Hadley said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “What?” Pfeiffer asked. “I’m not the one who set out the whiskey. I’m not the one who is an alcoholic.” She glanced over at Martha. “No offense, of course.”

  “None taken,” Martha replied. “It’s really okay. I got it out so that I could get it over with. If I hadn’t, I would have been looking at that cabinet the whole time I was here wondering what’s inside. Now I know, and I know I don’t need it.”