Sister Mine

by Tawni O'Dell

  “Yeah, they even follow kids out to their cars,” her one friend volunteers.

  “They even talk to girls,” the other one says.

  “Remember when they came up to us?” Autumn asks then lowers her voice to mimic the Marine. “Girls, do you value your freedom?” she says in a crisp baritone.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “We said no.”

  They burst into the exaggerated, exclusionary laughter special to teenaged girls that makes everyone else think they’re the butt of their jokes.

  They hand me money over the backseat, get out of the car, and start to walk away.

  “Teddy’s signing up,” I hear one of them say in a more sober voice.

  “So is Tyler.”

  I give the Marine a final look before I leave. He glances my way, without pausing in his speech to the boy, and our eyes meet for a second.

  I notice a patch of purple crocuses near the flagpole. They poke valiantly through the snow, their tips like little floral missiles. He notices them, too, and makes an effort not to step on them.

  Chapter Seventeen

  TWO PINK TRICYCLES, a plastic play kitchen, an overturned bucket of sidewalk chalk, a few stuffed animals, an inflatable wading pool filled with water now crusted with ice, and a lawn chair draped with a wet beach towel take up most of Brandi and Dusty’s driveway.

  I park on the side of the road. Before I’m out of my car, I hear someone screaming in the backyard. All of a sudden a tiny female in a glittering green bathing suit and snow boots, with a ponytail sprouting from the top of her head like a small gold fountain, comes tearing across the front yard. She grabs up one of the bicycles and begins her mad getaway, only to arrive at the end of the driveway and realize she’s not allowed to go any further.

  She drops the bike and contemplates hiding, then she sees me.

  “Are you Goldie or Grace?” I ask her. “Do you remember me? I’m Shae-Lynn.”

  “I’m Grace,” she tells me. “Goldie’s mad.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, I bet you do. Does your mom know you’re outside in a bathing suit?”

  Brandi comes around the corner of the house at that moment with Rose on her hip and a sobbing Goldie holding her hand.

  “Grace!” she shouts. “What are you doing? You’re supposed to be dressed and ready to go to the doctor with us.”

  She offers me a weak smile.

  “Hi, Shae-Lynn. Sorry about this. We’re obviously not ready.”

  “Grace,” she says, turning her attention back to her daughter. “Did you take your sister’s princess crown?”

  Grace shakes her head. “No.”

  “Grace,” Brandi states firmly.

  “I didn’t take it. I put it in the dishwasher,” she says proudly and watches her sister burst into more tears.

  “The dishwasher? You’re not allowed near the dishwasher,” Brandi growls, her face darkening as she lets go of Goldie’s hand and adjusts Rose on her hip.

  Rose appears to be the sick one. Her eyes look glassy and her nose is red. Brandi has her overbundled against the cold in a hand-me-down snowsuit.

  “Sometimes there are knives in the dishwasher,” Brandi scolds Grace, “and the corners on the door are very sharp when it’s open. You could fall and hurt yourself.”

  “Come on.” She grabs Grace by the hand and yanks her toward the house with Goldie following along.

  I get in line behind them.

  We go in the front door, pass through a family room that’s in the same condition as the driveway, and end up in the kitchen.

  The remains of breakfast are spread over the table: crusts of toast stained with grape jam, a few remaining spoonfuls of milk and soggy pastel-colored flakes in the bottoms of plastic bowls with cartoon characters on them, and two cups sitting in small sticky puddles of juice.

  The tray of Rose’s high chair is smeared with banana.

  Brandi heads straight for the dishwasher and opens the door. A sparkling tiara sits in the middle of the rack. She takes it out and places it on Goldie’s head.

  “Okay, Princess Goldie,” Brandi says to her now-smiling daughter, “why don’t you go play in your castle for a few minutes while your sister gets ready?

  “Does Grace get a time-out?” Goldie asks, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Yes, she does, but she can’t have it now because we have to take Rose to the doctor.”

  “Mommy!” Grace shrieks. “That’s not fair. I told you where it was.”

  “The time-out is for taking it in the first place and for opening the dishwasher. Now go put your clothes back on.”

  The twins depart, each with a separate assignment, but somehow I get the feeling their paths are going to cross again in the next few minutes.

  Brandi grabs a washcloth out of the sink, wipes off the high chair tray, and sets the toddler down behind it in one fluid motion.

  Rose lets loose with a couple hacking coughs.

  “So what’s going on with you?” she asks me as she starts cleaning off the table. “You look like you’ve been invited on a ski trip with Hef and some of his Bunnies. What happened to your face? Did Choker do that?”

  “Choker?” I laugh. “In his dreams.”

  “I heard about your fight.”

  “No, it wasn’t Choker. I had a little accident. No big deal.”

  Most of the women around Jolly Mount consider Brandi to be too thin and too opinionated. I’ve always thought she was striking, both physically and mentally, ever since I first met her as Dusty’s senior prom date.

  She’s boyish with short dark hair and large dark eyes in a pale chiseled face with a long sensuous mouth that droops at the corners, giving her the appearance of being disappointed and seductive at the same time. A mole sits on the top of her right cheekbone like a droplet that’s fallen from her chocolate eyes.

  In a city like D.C. she could have thrown on some old jeans and a tattered top, adopted an imperious pout, and slouched around clubs and bars easily convincing everyone she met that she was a European supermodel.

  Today her face is haggard from lack of sleep and too much worrying and her luminous eyes are ringed with shadows.

  She and Dusty had only been married for two years, the twins were a little over a year old, and Rose was a newborn when the accident happened.

  During our four-day vigil, I kept waiting for her to fall to pieces. I couldn’t believe someone so young with so many little lives dependent on her could hold it together while she was faced with the very real possibility that she was going to be a widow. But she never cracked.

  She took care of everyone, not just her children but all the other wives as well.

  Teresa was angry. Ray’s wife, Vonda, spent the entire time trying to be interviewed by every reporter she could find. Isabel was simply a wreck: Both her son and her husband were trapped in Jojo.

  I spent a good deal of that time curled up on my couch in my safe place and on the surface seemed unflappably cool; I was on duty. I only let my true emotions surface once when I confronted the governor over the conflicting reports we were getting from the rescue site, and as luck would have it, a reporter and photographer were there to document the event. From then on I was labeled a hothead and E.J.’s girlfriend.

  Brandi found a way to calm Teresa’s feelings of betrayal, to periodically remind Vonda that her daughters needed her more than the American public did, and to convince Isabel that miracles do happen. She got down on a blanket on the floor and played with her twins, nursed her baby in a quiet corner, and prayed with Dusty’s grandparents.

  Watching the way she tirelessly tended to the generations and smoothed all the conflicting emotions in that church basement into one long ribbon of hope, I couldn’t help thinking about Dusty’s childhood belief that everyone should be true to their natures. If he could have seen her during those few days he would have agreed with me that Brandi was meant to be a miner’s wi
fe.

  “Do you believe this weather? It’s probably what’s making Rose sick,” she says as she flies around the table, putting dishes in the sink, brushing crumbs into her cupped hand, reaching for the washcloth again.

  “I can’t decide if I should take her in or not. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I should just let her get better by herself. But I worry the girls will get sick, too.”

  She pauses in the midst of her whirlwind of cleaning and fixes me with a frank stare.

  “We don’t have health insurance anymore,” she offers by way of explanation.

  “I know how that feels,” I commiserate.

  “I know. Clay’s told us.”

  “Of course he has.”

  “But why should I be worrying about money?” she says with a brittle laugh. “We’re going to be filthy rich soon, right? When we win our lawsuit against J&P.”

  Rose starts coughing again.

  Brandi pours some juice into a sippy cup for her and sticks her head into the other room, yelling at Grace to hurry up.

  “You never know,” I tell her. “You could win.”

  “We’d have had a much better chance with wrongful death suits.”

  She glances my way, looking embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry. That was a terrible thing to say.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s true. They know it, too. I think Ray put it best one night at Jolly’s when he said if he had died and Vonda had sued Cam Jack for wrongful death, she’d be making millions for sitting on her ass instead of him making next to nothing working his ass off.”

  She smiles as she walks past me to a closet, where she takes out a broom and dustpan.

  “I don’t care about the money. I really don’t. We always got by on what Dusty made. We made do. And I figured when the girls started school, I’d get a job, too.”

  She starts sweeping.

  “Dusty’d always been so proud of what he did. He loved being a miner. He loved getting dirty and working hard and knowing at the end of the day that he earned the pay in his pocket with his own two hands. But as soon as he got a big chunk of unexpected money, what did he do? He tried to become a big businessman like Cam Jack. He acted just like him. He cut corners. He treated his employees bad. He started alienating everyone he knew because he became this big pompous ass who only wanted to talk about money and how to make more money. He became exactly the kind of man he used to hate. The kind of man who was responsible for him ending up trapped in a mine in the first place.

  “Money makes men stupid,” she summarizes. “Money and fame.”

  “That’s because they need outside approval. We shouldn’t be too hard on them, since we can’t completely understand where they’re coming from. We’re not the same way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A man spends his whole life trying to prove his worth to others. A woman spends her life trying to prove her worth to herself.”

  Brandi thinks about this for a moment.

  “Sucks for us, doesn’t it?” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  She dumps the dustpan full of crumbs into a garbage can under the sink and puts the broom away.

  “The real problem is he can’t work in the mines anymore and there’s nothing else he wants to do and there aren’t any other jobs around here even if he did want to do something else. And the worst thing is he could still work in the mines like E.J. and Ray. Nobody’s stopping him. It’s his own fear that’s keeping him out.”

  “No one can blame him for that,” I say emphatically. “Personally, I think E.J. and Ray are out of their minds for going back.”

  “Dusty doesn’t see it that way. He thinks he’s a coward. If they can do it, why can’t he? He thinks he’s failing us, but instead of trying to deal with that he puts up this stupid front to the outside world. He tells everyone he could still work in the mines if he wanted to, but he’s been exposed to bigger things, and he’s smart enough to realize he should want more in life than just being a miner.”

  “Bigger things? You mean he wants to be somebody?” I ask, repeating Clay’s description of the situation.

  “He’s become somebody already. But not somebody I want to be around. He’s changed so much. He was always the most easygoing guy. Full of fun. He loved to play with the girls. He’d come home after his shift and plunk right down in the middle of the carpet and start playing with their toys. I can’t remember the last time he did that.”

  She zips Rose’s snowsuit, pulls her out of the high chair, and walks back into the family room calling for the twins.

  “What exactly is going on with the two of you?” I ask as I trail along behind her. “Have you officially separated?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” she sighs. “I asked him to move out for a little while. I need to think.”

  “So this has nothing do with what’s her name?”

  “Who? That Tina person? No. We worked that out a long time ago. At first he made all these excuses. He said he wasn’t right in his head after being trapped for four days. He said he thought he was going crazy. He blamed having an affair on the firedamp. Can you believe that?”

  She plops Rose down on the floor and goes to the closet by the front door to get her coat.

  “Then one day we were having a wicked fight and he finally admitted the real reason. I knew it all along. I just wanted to hear him say it.”

  She picks up a diaper bag from the floor and checks the contents before putting it over her shoulder.

  “He said to me: You know how you’re always being told you should want a certain kind of woman, just like if you got class you’re supposed to want to drink fancy French wines instead of beer or you’re supposed to choose the caviar over the cocktail weenies.”

  “Don’t tell me he compared her to caviar and called you a cocktail weenie?”

  “He said he finally had the opportunity to try the caviar, so he did, and it wasn’t all that good. But he loves cocktail weenies.”

  “And he does love cocktail weenies,” I say, smiling happily. “You know he does.”

  “I know. He meant it as a compliment. See, I understand that about him. I know him. I love him. That’s why I forgave him.

  “She’s the one I hate,” Brandi goes on, her voice turning cold. “She used him. She didn’t care about him at all. He was like some sort of intriguing sideshow freak to her, an adventure she could tell her friends about.

  “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen,” she announces in an imitation of a carnival barker’s voice, gesturing with her hands. “In this tent for one night only watch a publicist get screwed by a coal miner. Come experience the terror of a prissy New Yorker being pawed by a creature in dirty coveralls. Is he man or is he beast? Judge for yourself as he prowls the streets of the city. Watch as he refuses to take his ball cap off in a theater. Hear his snorts of laughter each time he sees a guy he thinks is gay. See his confusion when he’s charged nine dollars for a dollar-fifty beer.”

  I’m laughing so hard, I’m almost in tears over her performance.

  Goldie and Grace join us, both fully dressed, Goldie wearing her crown and Grace wearing a pair of rabbit ears.

  “What’s so funny, Mommy?”

  “Nothing, honey. Get your coats on.”

  I glance over at her. There are tears in her eyes, too, but I don’t think they have anything to do with being amused.

  I end up waiting at the pediatrician’s office with them. I enjoy talking to Brandi and she appreciates the little bit of help I can give her with the girls.

  When I drop them off at home, she asks me if I’d mind taking some leftovers and a clean change of clothes to Dusty at the restaurant.

  I agree to do it.

  I find him sitting inside, in the dark, slouched down in one of his deserted booths, his ball cap pulled down over his eyes, holding a half-empty bottle of rum, watching a small TV on the tabletop in front of him. He looks like he hasn’t slept, eaten, or shaved for a week.r />
  His initial response at seeing me is embarrassment, and he tries to come up with an excuse for his appearance and his whereabouts until he sees the food in my hands.

  He recognizes the plate as one from his home, and he recognizes the smell from beneath the tent of foil as Brandi’s chicken and gravy over waffles.

  “Hey, Miss Penrose,” he says dully.

  He still can’t call me by my first name. I’ll always be Clay’s mom.

  “Hi, Dusty.”

  “I guess you’ve talked to Brandi.”

  Unlike his wife, the exhaustion and dejection on his face makes him appear younger, not older. He looks like a little boy who’s spent the day chasing something that finally got away.

  I decide not to tell him that his daughter is sick or that his wife just spent a hundred dollars on a doctor’s visit in order to be told that his daughter doesn’t need a doctor, just a bottle of cough syrup.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “And the girls?”

  “They’re fine, too. Except they miss you.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I doubt it.”

  He takes a swig off his bottle.

  “You want some? I got lots of glasses around here. It’s a restaurant.”

  He finds this particularly funny and has a good laugh over it.

  “Women don’t send food to men they don’t love,” I tell him, taking the bottle from him but not drinking from it.

  “I know she loves me. She says she’ll always love me. She just doesn’t want to live with me anymore. She says she doesn’t know me anymore. I depress her.

  “Clay’s smart,” he slurs at me. “Not getting married. Not having kids. It’s good to not have anyone depend on you.”

  He starts shaking his head.

  “’Cause you never know. You never know.”

  His voice trails off into a mutter as his head droops lower onto his chest.

  I’m beginning to wonder if he’s drifted off to sleep when he suddenly jerks up his head and slams his hand on the tabletop.

  “I wanted to be a coal miner,” he shouts, semi-coherently. “A coal miner! What’s so fucking unreasonable about that? It’s not like I wanted to be a pro quarterback or a movie star or the president of some big fucking corporation flying around in my own big fucking jet. I just wanted to be a miner. Like my dad. Like Lib and Jimmy.”