by Holly Jacobs
I thought he was done, but then Logan added, “Because Ms. Pip changed my mom’s life, she changed mine. It wasn’t just having a house to call home or a room of my own. I went to college. And I became a nurse, like Ms. Pip.”
“She’s a nurse?” I asked. I’d read her bio online and had seen her picture, but I hadn’t gone surfing for more in-depth information. Logan knew so much more about my biological mom than I did.
He nodded. “That’s what she was doing when she became a writer. I’m going back to school to be a nurse practitioner. I finished the first year and then did another stint with First Aid, an international medical relief organization. I’ve already signed up to go abroad again next year when I’ve finished—”
He was interrupted by the sound of the front door banging open. Fiona raced into the room. “You’re still here.”
There were so many confusing emotions still tossing about in me, but when I looked at Fiona, things were clear. She was a kid I already genuinely liked. “Yes. I’m coming to dinner tonight, and Logan invited me to stay here.”
“If you weren’t staying here, I was going to tell you that you could stay at our house.”
Her offer was earnest. “Thank you, Fiona.”
“Maybe sometime we’ll have a sleepover.” I caught Logan grinning, and obviously so did Fiona. She glared at him. “I just met my sister for the first time. You can’t blame me for being excited.”
He pulled her braid. “No, I can’t, squirt. But I’m guessing that this is very overwhelming for your sister.”
I nodded. “I was an only child when I woke up this morning. My stepmom doesn’t even have kids, so no stepsiblings,” I admitted. “I’m not sure I know how to be a sister.”
“Oh, it’s easy. I’ve given it a lot of thought. You think that everything I do is wonderful, and if I’m fighting Mom and Dad over something, you’re always on my side.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “Is that so?”
She nodded so hard her braid audibly thwacked against her back. “Yeah. I have plenty of friends with older siblings, so I know how it’s supposed to go.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I promised her.
“I’m actually here to see if you have anything you won’t eat, or can’t eat.”
“Nope. No allergies or anything. And for won’t—I’m pretty good with most normal foods.”
“What’s an abnormal food?”
“Things that have eyes and look at you while you eat them. Snails. Snakes . . .”
“Logan’s eaten all kinds of creepy food, but I’m with you. So’s Dad. He’s not a great cook, but he’s making spaghetti so we’re pretty safe.” She turned to Logan. “You’re supposed to come over, too.”
He shook his head. “This is for family.”
“You’re family,” Fiona informed him.
“I know, but tonight I think it should be the four of you. I’ll come over for dinner next time.”
“Mom’s not going to like your answer.” She turned to me. “Everyone thinks Mom’s so easygoing, but she has very firm opinions on things. Like finding you. Dad’s going to be in the doghouse for a long time for this one.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because she didn’t want to bother you. She didn’t want to make you feel guilty, like you had to come. She wanted to wait for you to come on your own.”
“But if I can help her?” I asked.
Fiona scoffed and sounded decades older than she was. “One of the first things you need to know about our mom is she’ll help anyone she can, but she would never ask for help for herself.”
Logan nodded his agreement.
“I’ll see you at five. Both of you,” Fiona warned Logan, and then she scampered back out of the house as quickly as she had come.
“Fi’s right. Ms. Piper would do whatever it took to help someone. But asking for help? She’s not very good at that.”
I suddenly didn’t want to learn more about Piper George. A woman who’d given me up for adoption. A woman who was a nurse, a writer, an altruistic do-gooder, a mother, a wife. A woman who was battling cancer. A woman who knew I might be able to help but didn’t want to bother me.
“I’m going to go get the rest of my stuff out of the car and then go upstairs until dinner, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all,” he said.
I started to leave the room then Logan called, “Siobhan, you should call someone.”
“Who?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. A family member, some friend. Just someone. This is a lot to take on. A lot to deal with.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I was going to take his advice. I mean, how could I explain what was going on to someone else when I wasn’t sure I could articulate it to myself? Meeting Piper and knowing she’d never forgotten me felt good. But meeting her and seeing her with Fiona made me miss my mother more than ever.
And though I knew it was crazy, it still made me feel guilty.
Chapter Three
“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” Belle told her mother.
“But you can judge a girl by her holey jeans. Go change,” her mother insisted. Her mother wore an expression that brooked no arguments.
It looked like Belle was going out to dinner, and her holey jeans were not.
—Beautiful Belle, by Pip
I don’t own many dresses—any dresses, to be honest. Most of my business meetings are on Skype. All that’s really required for that is a halfway decent shirt and a scarf. I have half a dozen scarves in a variety of colors. My style mantra is, you can’t go wrong with a scarf.
Jaylin does not share my casual dress style. When we were college roommates, she was forever trying to dress me up like some doll. I normally balked at her attempts, but today I would give anything if she were here in Erie instead of Asheville. She’d know what to wear to a first meal with your biological mother.
Or what not to wear.
It seemed as if I had more nots than possibilities in my suitcases.
I’d brought one carry-on and one bigger suitcase with me. I thought I had plenty of clothes to last me however long I stayed in Erie. They were all casual. And I’d only packed one scarf. It was a black-and-brown patterned one. I hadn’t really thought my packing through.
There was a knock on my door.
“Siobhan? Is everything okay?” Logan called.
“I don’t have anything nice to wear.”
Okay, that was a whine. I know it was a whine, but I couldn’t help it. I was nervous. Piper had seemed nice enough. So had Ned and Fiona. Still, I couldn’t shake the butterflies that were cartwheeling around in my stomach.
“Wear whatever you’re comfortable in,” Logan called through the door. “Ms. Pip won’t care. I swear; she doesn’t own jeans without holes in the knees.”
I tried to remember what she had been wearing earlier. I couldn’t. I remembered the scarf around her head—it was robin’s-egg blue. And I remembered how gaunt her face looked, but I couldn’t remember her clothes.
Thinking of Piper’s scarf, I dropped my own back on the pile. I wasn’t going to wear one tonight, I decided.
I looked down at my jeans. At least they didn’t have holes in the knees, though my favorite pair in the pile of clothing on the bed did. And the white T-shirt and black cardie were dressy enough. I slipped my feet into my ballet flats and opened the door. “I want to make a good impression.”
Logan was wearing jeans and a polo shirt. “They’re not dressy people. And they’re family. You’d look beautiful to them in Ms. Pip’s holey jeans.”
My accidental roommate was a very nice man. He nodded toward the stairs. “Are you ready?”
I nodded. “Thank you for coming with me. I know we’ve just met, but I feel like I have an ally.”
“This isn’t a battle, Siobhan. You don’t need an ally, but maybe you need a friend. I can be that.” He reached out and took my hand. It was simply for moral support—I go
t that. I took comfort in it as we walked across the driveway and up onto Piper’s porch. I dropped his hand as I knocked.
“This is her office,” he said conversationally, nodding at the chair on the porch. “Every year, as soon as the weather is even halfway warm enough, she’s out here working every day. In the winter, she moves inside by the front window. I know that most people count robins as a true sign of spring, but everyone at school looked for Ms. Pip on the porch. That’s how we marked the change of seasons.”
“I work on my porch, too,” I said.
In a world of nine-to-fivers, it was weird to find someone else who worked for themselves. Jaylin was the only other person I’d ever met who understood that sometimes having no boss was worse than working for a tyrant. I mean, when I got hung up on an encroaching deadline, I only had myself to blame.
I bet Piper would understand that.
It was a tangible connection to my birth mother that I hadn’t considered before.
“Thanks,” I told Logan just as Ned opened the door.
“Welcome home,” Ned said as he threw the door open wide.
Logan and I stepped inside the house. Again, I was thankful for Logan’s presence. He didn’t wait for further invitation. He walked toward the back of the house—which I guessed was the kitchen—as if he’d done it hundreds of times.
He probably had.
But I hadn’t. I stood, rooted to the spot, trying to catch my breath.
“It’s overwhelming for Pip, too,” Ned told me softly. “But I swear we don’t bite.”
Suddenly a giant hairy dog ran into the foyer and jumped at me. I had just enough time to brace myself before he hit me like a ton of bricks. There was no menace in him. He was tall enough that he began to lick my face, doing his part to assure me I was his new best friend.
Ned grabbed at his collar, but the dog wouldn’t be denied. He wrestled to stay close to me.
“Killer watchdog?” I asked Ned, laughing as they battled.
He laughed. “Archie, down.”
The dog thumped down to the floor, swinging his giant tail from side to side like some huge dust mop, seemingly not carrying that he was whacking it against the newel post.
I leaned down and patted his head, which made his tail wag even faster. “He seems sweet. What kind of dog is he?”
“A shepoodle,” Ned answered. “At least that’s what Fi calls him.”
He looked like a dust mop. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that.”
“Part sheepdog, part standard poodle. I think there might be an official name for them, but Fi has firm opinions on everything,” Ned supplied. He paused a moment as the dog flopped on to his back, telling me a stomach scratch was in order without saying a word. “He’s obviously king of the castle.”
Fiona came barreling into the living room so quickly she almost made Archie seem sedate. The dog jumped back up and ran over to kiss her and then came back to me.
“Mom said there’s ten minutes till dinner, so you have time to come see my room before we eat,” she blurted out in one breathless stream of words.
“Fiona, I don’t think—” Ned started.
“It’s okay. I’d love to see your room,” I told her.
She took my hand, pulled me up the stairs as Ned called after us, “I’m going to help finish things up.”
“I’ll bring her down in a minute, Dad,” Fiona called back to him.
She led me down a narrow hall to a bedroom door.
“My room,” Fiona said, opening it with a flourish.
There was a huge stuffed horse in one corner, a dollhouse in another, bunk beds, and a dresser that looked as if a rainbow had exploded on it. Every available section of wall space was covered with bookshelves. “This is amazing.”
I walked closer and noticed that the horse was wearing a cardboard horn. “Flo likes to disguise herself as a unicorn,” Fiona said with a laugh. “When Mom’s Fi Fly Flo hit its third month on the bestseller’s list, her publisher sent her the horse.”
“I didn’t read that one. I reread all the ones I had, but I know she’s written a lot since I outgrew them. I plan on buying them.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” Fiona said with a laugh. “Mom gets author copies. She’s got a ton in the attic. She gives them away for fundraising auctions all the time. Once she even let a fundraiser auction her off. Well, a date with her. It was a girl from Meadville who won. Mom took her out to lunch. Anyway, you don’t have to buy ’em. She’ll give you any of the new ones. I get copies of all of them.” She led me to one of the shelves that was filled with Pip books. The other shelves were filled with books by a lot of authors I recognized. Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Madeleine L’Engle. C. S. Lewis. Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I picked up William McCleery’s Wolf Story. “I’ve never met anyone else who read this. I loved it when I was a kid. My mom read it to me so many times.”
“Mom read it to me, too. She loves books. She used to be the kindergarten story lady at the school across the street. She did it the year I was in kindergarten but stopped after that.”
“Why did she stop?” I asked.
“Because she was sick,” Fiona answered sadly.
What might that have been like? To grow up with a mother who was so sick? To have the specter of death always lurking in the background?
It was hard enough to walk into that situation for me as an adult, but for a little girl?
I reached out and patted Fiona’s shoulder. What I really wanted to do was hug her and tell her everything would be all right, but I wasn’t sure that was true.
“Dinner,” Ned called from downstairs.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Fiona. I didn’t know what else to say to this girl who was my sister and yet also a stranger. I gave her shoulder another squeeze for good measure before she led me to the dining room.
Ned was putting serving plates on the table, and Piper was sitting next to Logan, listening to whatever he was saying, and smiling. But her smile seemed thin, like a veneer. As if she were physically forcing her lips into that upturned position. She was wearing a purple scarf over her head and looked even paler than she had that afternoon.
“Piper, are you okay?” I asked.
She turned that smile on me, and it was even more apparent that she was forcing it. “I’m fine. I’m just so glad you’re here and that Logan’s home.”
“I was telling her about our introduction,” Logan said in a chipper—too chipper—voice. “And assuring Ms. Pip that you are a much more preferable roommate than the last batch. One we called Pen. Short for Pigpen, which is exactly what he smelled like.”
“Ew,” Fiona said as she dropped into a chair across from Logan.
Piper patted the vacant chair next to her, and I obligingly sat down as well.
Logan didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah, ew. I got a shower maybe once a week, but I washed. Water was scarce and hot water unheard of, but you could still wash. Pen claimed he couldn’t stand the cold water. He also claimed he didn’t smell. He was wrong. One day it had to have been over a hundred with ninety percent humidity. The smell got so bad that we moved his bed into the yard while he slept—on it.”
“Nuh-uh,” Fiona said.
“Honest to Pete.” Logan held up his fingers in a scouting sign. “We moved his mosquito netting, too, so it was all good. The house smelled so much better.”
“How big a house was it?” Fiona asked.
“A bedroom-size house. There was enough room for two sets of bunk beds and Pen’s single bed. There wasn’t room for much else. We kept our clothes in the suitcases, which we stored under the bottom bunk.”
Fiona and Logan saved the early part of the dinner. Every time his story wound down, the conversation ground to a halt until Fiona asked him another question and he wound back up again.
He was a natural storyteller. Some might think that it was the fact he’d traveled all over the world that gave him fodder for his tales, but as I listened, I would have to di
sagree. He had a way with words. He painted pictures out of his memories. Pictures that were so vivid it was easy to imagine being there.
Piper did more pushing of the pasta than eating it. I noticed her hand was trembling. I wasn’t sure if it was me or her illness.
I reached over and patted her hand without thinking. She turned to me and smiled. She didn’t turn her hand over and demand more from me. She simply accepted the comfort I was trying to give.
As Logan finished a story about his last trip, Piper asked me, “Have you traveled?”
“My parents were teachers. We went on vacations in the summer but not to Africa or South America like Logan. We went to national parks and historic cities. One year we rented a place on Prince Edward Island for a couple of weeks because I’d read L. M. Montgomery’s books and wanted to see it.”
“I’ve read all the Anne books,” Fiona cried. “I figure with our hair, she’s a kindred spirit for sure.”
I nodded. “I think that’s why I loved her so much. That was such a special vacation. I loved being on the beaches there. I imagined walking along with Diana and Gilbert. I recited poems as I walked along the water’s edge.”
“The Lady of Shalott,” Piper and Fiona said together.
The three of us laughed while Ned and Logan looked confused.
“We’ll have to take you to the peninsula while you’re here,” Piper said.
I didn’t want to hurt her by talking about my parents, so I admitted I’d visit the peninsula but tried not to mention Mom and Dad. “I came here one year—to Erie. We rented a place at the mouth of the peninsula. I took pontoon boats through the lagoons and spent the days hiking and swimming.”
“You were in Erie?” Piper asked shakily.
“Yes. And when I found out you were here, I . . .” I shrugged. I didn’t know how to explain just how I felt. “We’ve always lived so close. Both of us on Lake Erie.”
She smiled. “I find the thought comforting.”
I patted her hand again, and she smiled. It looked more natural than her forced one. She had the kind of smile that looked as if it were her default expression—at least before she’d become so sick.
