Chapter Two
Twelve hours later, lights from a car in the driveway roll across my bedroom ceiling. That’s been my wakeup call, like a Bat
Signal, ever since Annie got her driver’s license; me waiting, not able to sleep until she was tucked up in her own bed. I
pad downstairs in my bare feet, knowing both my kids are in for the night, sure there is only one other person it could be.
Lily is at my front door. She looks like shit and smells like a brewery. I glance over her shoulder and am relieved to see
a ride service pull out of the driveway and head down the street.
“Where have you been?” I ask, pulling her into the house by her sleeve. “I’ve been calling and texting you.”
When Lily and I left the coffee shop, she was going to Sweet Dreams with the CVS receipt she’d picked up off the floor, smoothed
out, and shoved back into her pocket. She was planning to have it out with Eric then and there. I hadn’t heard from her since,
and I’d been getting worried.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she grumbles, throwing her bag on the floor and kicking off her shoes.
One skitters across the foyer and lands with a thud against the metal baseboard, waking up our cat Tiger, who had been sleeping on his chair next to the fireplace.
He decides he wants no part of my sister’s mood and saunters off up the stairs, flicking his tail as a reprimand for disturbing him.
Lily throws herself into Tiger’s vacated chair.
I follow her into the living room, but not before I pick up the shoes and the bag and place them on the bench by the door, where shoes and bags go.
Lily puts her hands up to her face. “Can you get me a drink?”
“I’ll put up some water for tea.”
“Big, come on,” she groans.
I take a beer out of the fridge and bring it to her, passing her a coaster from the stack on the coffee table. She makes a
fist around the neck of the bottle and takes a long drink.
“Lil. Please tell me what’s going on.”
She puts the bottle on a side table—sans coaster, mind you—and wipes the condensation from the glass on the arm of the chair.
I die a little inside. Focus, Bridget, that’s not important now.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” she yells.
I flinch. She’s going to rouse the whole house. I walk to her chair, slowly, like Tiger stalking a bird in the yard, and kneel
next to her, putting my hands on her knees and speaking in a quiet tone I hope she’ll mimic.
“Lil, tell me what’s going on.”
She wraps her hands around the beer bottle again. She looks both so young and so very tired. “I went to the store. Mad as
hell. I was so stupid. I thought buying these stupid condoms was his way of telling me he didn’t want to try anymore. Like
he’s over it. Doesn’t care if we ever have a baby.” She wipes her nose on the back of her sleeve. “He doesn’t get to just
decide that.”
My heart breaks for her in the same million ways it’s been breaking over and over again all these years.
“We’ve been trying for so long. I’m sick of it too. I’m sick of the disappointment every damn month. But this was a shitty
way to tell me. Buy a box of condoms? That’s cruel. So, I was going to go straight to the shop and tell him. Tell him it was
fucking cruel.”
“Yes, that’s what we decided you should do. You should go talk to Eric before you jumped to any conclusions. And?”
“And I got there and asked him to go out into the back parking lot with me, and he told me he was too busy. Told me that I was late, and why wasn’t I dressed for work, and they really needed me on the floor.”
“Did you show him the receipt?”
“No, I did not show him the fucking receipt. He was being an asshole. And who the hell did he think he was talking to? I’m
not one of his employees. It’s my business, if you recall. My concept. I got us the funding.” She pauses for a flash, and
I want to assume it’s because she knows exactly whose concept and funding it was. “So, I told him to fuck off, and I left.
Let him deal with the fucking customers, and he can go fuck himself.”
“Bridge? You okay down there?” Tim is at the top of the stairs. I can see his bare feet and the bottom of his pajamas from
where I’m kneeling by my sister’s chair.
“All good, hon. Lil is here. I’ll be up in a sec.”
Tim knows better than to wander into the fray, especially when the f-bombs are flying. This isn’t the first time Lily’s midnight
visits have woken him up.
“Hey, Lil,” he says as if she’s stopped by for a morning coffee.
“Hey, Tim,” she grumbles. We wait to hear the bedroom door close.
“Then what happened? That was still, like, twelve hours ago. What have you been doing?”
“Then I went back to the condo to find the damn condoms and put a pin through every single one of them.”
I snort. I can’t help it. Lily shoots me a look. She isn’t being funny. I regain my composure. “Go on,” I say as if I were
a detective taking notes. All business.
“They weren’t anywhere. No condoms anywhere.
And, believe me, I looked. I tore the place apart.
Emptied every one of his drawers. His dresser, his closest, his desk.
Tossed all his shit on the ground. The more I looked, the more furious I got.
Especially because I finally figured out where they were. ”
“Where?”
Lily takes the last long drink of her beer and hands me the empty bottle. She leans back into the chair and folds her arms
across her chest. For a second I think she’s going to make me guess. His car? His gym locker?
“Where were they?”
“At another woman’s place.”
My gut twists as if this is my news, my story.
“No, Lily. Not Eric.”
Eric can be an ass. He can think too highly of himself as young handsome men who have the ability to talk anyone into anything
can. He and my sister have always been far from yin and yang. They are two yangs living under the same roof. Sparks—no, hand
grenades—are known to fly. But not this.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Big,” she says bitterly.
“You’re making an assumption,” I say, fighting for this not to be true. “We talked about this. You know, when you assume,
you make an ass—”
My sister holds up her hand. “Stop.”
We sit in a moment of silence. I wait for Lily. Finally, she says, “It turns out I am right.”
“What? No!”
Lily stands up and starts pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace. Her face reddens. Her fists clench. Her hair hangs
in chunks over her eyes.
“He came home and flipped out when he saw what I did to his shit. I should have set it all on fire. I pulled out the receipt.
Shook it at him. Told him to explain himself. He didn’t even have a lie ready.”
Now she is crying. Tears stream down her face, still beautiful despite this ugly moment.
I’ve spent years of my life trying to protect my little sister from harm.
It was a task handed to me early, and I took it seriously.
Still do. But Lily’s spent as many years eluding me, going out into the dangerous world and living, disregarding my advice, my pleas, my warnings, as she’d laugh, “Big, you’re not the mother of me. ”
“Guess who it is,” she demands. “Guess.”
“Lily, I don’t want to—”
“It’s Willa.” Willa. Willa, whose parents live down the street from us. Willa, who babysat Annie and Cameron. Willa, who I
recommended for the job at Sweet Dreams. “Christ, he’s such a cliché! I hate him. I fucking hate him.”
I step forward and stop her pacing. I wrap my arms tightly around my sister, who stiffens but then gives in. There is so much
to talk about, so many questions I’m sure Lily doesn’t have the answers to right now. I pull her into the kitchen, toss the
empty beer bottle in the recycling bin, put up a kettle for tea. We sit quietly in my dark kitchen with only the light over
the stove casting shadows across our faces. We drink silently, and then around two I throw a sheet and comforter on the couch
that’s been her makeshift bed for all the years Tim and I have lived in this house and something in Lily’s life has fallen
apart.
“Try to get some sleep,” I say. “We can talk about this in the morning.”
“Ugh. I don’t want to talk about it when Mom’s here.”
“Well, there’s not a lot of ways around that. She does live here.”
“You mean she lives in your backyard. I still think that’s weird as f. A dog lives in your backyard, not your mother.”
My sister knows that my mother doesn’t live in my backyard like a dog, but she’s tired and she’s mad, and I’m the target standing in front of her.
She knows that, after all the trouble our mom caused in the assisted living where she had moved a few years after her second husband, Phil, died and their house had become too much for her, Tim had built her what they call a “Granny Pod” on an open piece of property behind our house under a dogwood tree and next to his raised vegetable garden/deer buffet.
What was she supposed to do after the Sunshine Retirement Community suggested my mother’s personality was better suited for more, er, independent living?
Move into the condo with Lily and Eric? Tim created a lovely space, like an HGTV tiny house, with a bay window and a front porch.
I’m jealous as hell, to be honest. Some days, when the chaos of having a newly retired husband at loose ends, two grown children back in their childhood bedrooms, and a piece of work mother with a list of daily demands, I’d trade places with her in a heartbeat.
“Well, Mom’s going to be in this kitchen bright and early. If you don’t want her two cents, either get up and out before six,
or put on a good show until Annie drives her to water aerobics. You choose.”
After tucking my sister in, I go back to bed and stare at the ceiling. I listen to Tim’s uneven breathing and try to recall,
scene by scene, the last television show I watched—the trick I play with myself to quiet my mind long enough to fall asleep.
Unfortunately, the biscuit episode of The Great British Baking Show is interrupted time and again by my sister’s face as she realizes her marriage and her dreams for the life she always wanted—my
life, to put it plainly—are dashed.