A Light at Winter’s End

by Julia London

  No one could say Hannah Fisher Drake hadn’t been the perfect daughter all her life. No one could say she hadn’t been a paragon of strength and virtue during her mother’s illness. Hannah was a rock; she knew just what to do in any given circumstance. She was, in Holly’s mind, the mother of all control freaks.

  But no one could say that Holly hadn’t tried to help out with her mother, and hadn’t always—always—tried to measure up. Only Holly couldn’t drive out to check on her mom every day like Hannah. Holly was a songwriter living in a studio apartment and surviving off her coffeehouse wages and the nice bit of income she’d gotten from Austin Sound Company, or ASC, a music publisher that had bought three of her songs. Holly’s life was black and white compared to Hannah’s. She couldn’t miss work. If she didn’t show up, she didn’t get paid; and if she didn’t get paid, she didn’t pay rent. Holly didn’t have different banks with different savings like Hannah. She didn’t have any cushions to fall back on. She wasn’t as organized or as efficient as her sister. She’d tried to explain that when Hannah had asked her to check on Mom once, a few months before her death.

  “I can’t,” Holly had said, feeling terribly guilty and inadequate. “I have to work. Rent is due next week.”

  Hannah had remained silent for a very long moment. “Really, Holly?” she’d said at last, her voice full of skepticism. “Because I have a baby, I am working fifty hours a week, and I am taking care of Mom. You really can’t get out there in the next couple of days?”

  “I can go Wednesday,” Holly had offered.

  “Wednesday is too late.”

  “See, this is why I tried to pick up the slack for you last week,” Holly had said irritably. She was aware of her shortcomings and her inability to be a model sister or daughter. “I had the days off then. But you had it all figured out and there was no room for me, remember?”

  “No room?” Hannah had snorted her opinion of that. “You couldn’t take Mom to chemo, remember? So what was the point? I still had to take time off from work.”

  “But I could have done something, Hannah. Come on, you know I don’t have the same degrees of freedom as you do. I have gone out to see about Mom every chance I’ve been able to do it. I took her food shopping just last week. I took her to see Uncle D.J.”

  “Yes, I know you took her to the grocery store and to see Uncle D.J. But you did those things when it was convenient for you. I used to wait tables in college, so don’t act like I don’t know that you can switch shifts.”

  “But I am a shift supervisor,” Holly pointed out. “I can’t just switch with anyone. It has to be another supervisor. So let’s hire someone, Hannah. Then you don’t have to do it all.”

  “Are you going to pay for someone?” Hannah had snapped. “Look, don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it just like I always handle it. I should have known better than to try and count on you being there.”

  “I should have known better than to expect you to be anything less than a complete control freak,” Holly shot back.

  “Jesus, Holly, our mother is dying! Do you really want to do this now?”

  “Oh, great, pull out the trump card and have the last word,” Holly had scoffed.

  That phone call had ended like so many of their phone calls: in an angry stalemate. There had been other phone calls, too, all with the same tone. Hannah, increasingly distant, and Holly, never doing enough.

  Holly shook her head as she gazed that photo of the two girls. There was so much freezing, bitter water under their bridge now. In the last year, it had felt like rising floodwaters, moving too fast, threatening to sweep them away and pummel their relationship into nothing. And then Hannah had hired a nurse to see after Mom a couple of hours each day. She’d done it without consulting Holly. She’d just done it.

  It hadn’t always been like that between them, but Holly could no longer say when the fissures had begun to open up between them. There’d been a time when Holly had worshipped Hannah. Her sister was smart and fun and sunny. They’d played dolls and cowboys and Indians together. They’d slept in twin beds in a room at the end of the upstairs hall, where summer breezes drifted in through open windows and their dog, Tigger, would stand still to be dressed in silly outfits.

  When Holly had boarded the school bus in the first grade, it was Hannah who held her hand and found a seat they could share. Hannah had walked her to her class and met her after school. Hannah helped her learn her multiplication tables and tacked up the drawings Holly had made at school around their room. Hannah was compassionate when Holly’s poor performance in school was diagnosed as dyslexia, and had drilled her on the tricks for dealing with it. Not that it had helped—Holly had never been a great student.

  Hannah was the first person Holly had turned to when she had her first boyfriend, and then her first breakup, at thirteen. She’d helped Holly prepare to audition for the school musical at fifteen, and when Holly had been awarded with a lead part, she’d helped her make her costumes.

  When had things gotten so cold and distant between them?

  At the moment, Holly could see Hannah flitting here and there, making sure no one’s plate sat empty or any glass went unfilled. She was a model hostess, and a little thing like her mother’s funeral didn’t throw her off her game.

  Holly had moved dumbly through the day, not feeling, not helping … She looked away from Hannah and her gaze landed on Hannah’s husband, Loren. Ugh. With hand shoved in the pocket of his suit trousers, one shoulder against the wall, Loren was chatting up Stella, the daughter of Holly’s cousin, Renette. Stella was a pretty nineteen-year-old girl with expressive brown eyes. She was laughing at something Loren said, and honestly, Loren seemed just a little too smiley-faced, as if this were an afternoon barbecue instead of the somber occasion that it was. Holly had never cared for Loren; there was something a little too slick about him for her tastes. She’d never understand what Hannah saw in him, which had just shoved another wedge in between them.

  Oh, sure, she got the obvious part—Loren was a handsome guy with blond hair and blue eyes. He was a lawyer who specialized in oil and mineral rights, and liked jetting around on oil company planes to consult. He bragged about his golf scores and his hunting, and it seemed as if every weekend he went away to do one or the other.

  Hannah had met Loren at work. She was an assistant administrator at the Baker Botts Law Firm in Austin when Loren was hired. Holly had the impression that he’d immediately started hitting on Hannah, which was understandable, as Hannah was beautiful. She was toned and tan and had such pretty blue eyes. But Hannah was usually very reserved about that sort of thing, especially at work. Hannah had rules to live by. Loads of them.

  Holly would never forget the day that Hannah announced that she was leaving the firm because she and Loren were officially an item. That had been eight or nine years ago. Holly and Hannah were here, at the homestead, which was what their parents had called the family ranch, just as Dad’s parents before him. It was a rambling old Victorian house with a wraparound porch and lots of natural light streaming in through big windows. From every room, there was a view of pastures filled with grass, live oaks, cottonwoods, and cedar. And cows. Lots and lots of meandering, cud-chewing, bellowing cows.

  The floors were wood planked and the bedrooms—five in all—had high ceilings and tiny closets. There were two shared baths upstairs and one half bath on the first floor, and a big farmhouse eat-in kitchen with a scarred table where the family had dined over the years. The living room—or, as Holly’s grandmother had called it, the parlor—was small and cozy with a big fireplace as the focal point.

  That Sunday, Holly’s mother had baked a ham and Hannah was making her perfected low-fat potato salad in the chipped blue ceramic bowl with the little flowers that their mother had always used to make cake batter.

  Holly had brought her usual contribution to the Sunday gathering—chips, salsa, and a six-pack of beer that no one drank besides her. Holly would freely admit she wasn’t much
use in the kitchen, no matter how many attempts her mother had made to turn her into a cook. Holly had sat on a red bar stool, watching Hannah and her mother.

  Her mother was healthy then. She was a little thick around the middle, and her red hair was beginning to gray; but she’d worn it short and curly in the last several years, and when she went to church on Sundays, it looked as if she’d shellacked it into place.

  “Are you still seeing that boy in the band?” her mother had asked Holly.

  Holly had to think which guy her mother meant. She hadn’t had much luck in the relationship department; it was a fact that musicians made for lousy boyfriends. And, Holly suspected, she didn’t exactly choose well. She’d always been attracted to the bad boys: rogue cowboys she met at the Broken Spoke, or musicians who liked to drift from gig to gig.

  “Which guy?” she’d asked curiously.

  “Ru-al, or something like that,” her mother had said, trying to jog Holly’s memory.

  “Raul?” He’d been the dark-eyed, sweet-lipped guitarist who had played with Charlie Sexton for a while. She’d gone out with him three or four times before he’d moved on to the next woman. Holly had walked into the Saxon Pub to catch his set, and there he was, kissing the next woman. “No,” she’d said, studying the salsa. “I think he’s in San Antonio now.”

  “San Antonio,” her mother had repeated, as if she hadn’t been quite sure where or what that was. “That’s too bad.”

  “Not really,” Holly had cheerfully assured her. She was over Raul. She always got over them.

  “Well, as your mother, I’d sure feel better about you if you could meet a nice man like Hannah’s Loren.”

  As if meeting a man would somehow improve Holly. And Hannah’s Loren? Holly had met him a couple of times by then, and both times, he’d done a slow, casual intake of her body with his eyes. It had given her the creeps.

  “Speaking of Loren, I have news,” Hannah had said lightly. She was wearing a cute green cotton dress and kitten-heeled sandals, and Holly, in her shorts and flip-flops, had felt a twinge of jealousy. “It’s gotten kind of serious,” Hannah had said, and paused to smile girlishly at her mother, which had surprised Holly. “I am quitting Baker Botts at the end of the month.”

  “What?” her mother had cried. Peggy Fisher thought there was nothing worse than being without a job—Holly knew that better than anyone.

  “Well, we’re officially a couple, and Baker Botts has a no fraternization policy, so …” She’d shrugged. And with that pert little smile on her face, she’d stirred the potato salad again.

  “You’re going to quit?” Holly had asked incredulously. She’d been shocked that Hannah—driven, ambitious Hannah—would quit.

  “Hannah!” her mother had cried, ignoring Holly. She was beaming as if Hannah had just announced she’d found a million dollars buried in the backyard. “This must mean it is very serious between the two of you.”

  “We’ll see,” Hannah had said coyly.

  “But why do you have to quit your job?” Holly had asked. “Where I work, no one cares who dates whom as long as everyone shows up for work.”

  “But you work at Whole Foods,” Hannah had calmly pointed out.

  Holly hadn’t known exactly what that meant, but it didn’t seem very flattering.

  “I guess I can assume that even bigger news is coming?” Holly’s mother had pressed excitedly.

  “Calm down, Mom,” Hannah had said laughingly. “Right now we’re okay with seeing where this is going.”

  It had been Hannah speaking, the woman who planned everything to the nth degree. Hannah, who had known from the time they were girls where she would go to college (the University of Texas) and what she would study (business administration). She’d never done anything without a firm plan, whereas Holly did things without a plan all the time. But not Hannah; she’d never quit a job just to “see where it goes.”

  “I don’t get it,” Holly had said. “You would really quit your job?”

  Holly’s question had earned her one of Hannah’s patently impatient looks. “Well, I can’t work there and see Loren. So, yes, I’m really quitting my job.”

  “Why do you have to be the one to quit?” Holly had asked as she dipped another chip in the salsa. “Seems like a huge deal and you’ve worked really hard to get that position. Why not him?”

  “Because,” Hannah had said, and put down her spoon to give Holly her full attention. “Because that’s what we decided to do. He’s got a great position there—”

  “So do you.”

  “—And I am going to look for another job, Holly, okay? Does that meet with your approval?”

  “I don’t mean it like that,” Holly had said, miffed. “I’m just thinking of you, to be honest. I mean, how easy is it going to be for you to find a job like the one you have now?”

  “Holly, you stop that right now,” her mother had chastised her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think I could find another job,” Hannah had said, and returned to her potato salad. “I’ve got a couple of really good leads and Loren knows a lot of people in town. I don’t think it will be a problem at all.”

  “Honestly, Holly, you would do well to focus on your own job choices,” her mother had tossed out there, because her mother had always enjoyed spicing up an already tense conversation.

  It had worked: Holly had stilled with one chip in the salsa. “What does that mean?”

  “You know very well what I mean: working at a grocery store isn’t what I’d call a real job. You had every opportunity to finish college and make something of yourself, too, and you threw that all away.”

  They’d started down a familiar path with that: Holly had washed out of U.T., whereas Hannah had graduated with honors. Holly hadn’t wanted to spend four years in school trying to figure out something that would go with songwriting, which was what she’d really wanted to do. But when she’d taken music theory and piano her first semester, her mother had threatened to cut off her college funds. So Holly had signed up for history and business administration classes, like Hannah, and had been so bored and so lost in the words that she’d lost all interest in school.

  “I am guessing that grocers the world over would not appreciate you disparaging their occupation, Mom. And really, do we have to turn everything into a lecture on why I should have finished college?” Holly had asked testily.

  “I’m just saying that all your life, you’ve flit from one thing to another,” her mother had rather blithely continued. “How many jobs have you had now?”

  “I’ve had a few,” Holly had admitted, her annoyance barely contained. “But they’re just jobs. You seem to forget that my life’s work is music, and I’ve stuck with it since I was a little girl. I’ve had different jobs to accommodate my songwriting, Mom. That’s what I want to do with my life.”

  “Well, I am entitled to my opinion, and my opinion is that you are setting yourself up for a long, hard life. You’re thirty-four now, Holly, and I’ve never known a songwriter who could put as much as a chicken on a table,” her mother had said, as if she’d known loads of songwriters instead of one. “Your sister finished college and she’s been working hard all her life. I have no doubt she’ll find another excellent job, if that’s what she wants—and I am sure it is, because Hannah is a very focused and ambitious. So, instead of giving her the third degree, you should be looking at how Hannah has accomplished so much in her life and take a page out of her book.”

  As if Holly were lazy. As if she wanted to write songs because that was somehow the easy way out. Look at your sister. Holly had been duly stung, and she’d gaped at her mother. “Do you honestly think it’s a good idea that Hannah quits her job so she can see where it’s going with some random guy she is dating?”

  “For God’s sake, Holly,” Hannah had said, and brushed past her, walking to the table with the potato salad. “He’s not random.”

  “Let
me tell you something, Holly Lynn,” her mother had said, pointing the knife she was using to carve the ham at her. “Loren Drake is a good man. You should find yourself a man like him.”

  Be like Hannah, date like Hannah. Holly, trained like one of Pavlov’s dogs, had reacted without thinking. “I don’t need a husband, Mom.” She’d known the moment the words came tumbling out of her mouth that she was responding exactly as her mother had wanted, and yet she had gone on. “I don’t have to have a guy to feel like my life is complete.”

  “No, I guess that high-paying songwriting does it,” her mother had said with a snort.

  It was as infuriating now as it had been then. Her songwriting wasn’t some lark, it was Holly’s passion, and she was good at it. She was finally starting to get somewhere with it. Moreover, she’d never asked her mother for money, she’d always made her own way, and she could not understand why her mother couldn’t just … support her.

  Because she wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t Hannah.

  Holly looked across the living room to Hannah now. She looked distracted, on autopilot, as she carried empty plates into the kitchen and handed them to one of the church ladies. Holly shifted her gaze to Loren again. He’d moved closer to Stella.

  She heard her nephew Mason’s cry through the baby monitor on the mantel at the same moment Hannah heard it. Hannah instantly started for the stairs, but Holly intercepted her. “Is it all right if I get him?”

  Hannah blinked and stood a moment as if she couldn’t process Holly’s question. Then she nodded curtly. “Sure.”