Chapter 2
BIRDIE
The next time I came into the studio, there was a pomegranate on the desk.
I set down my bag and stared at it. I was hungry that night—trying to stretch the last thirty dollars in my account until the end of the week—and I loved pomegranates, and what could it hurt? Did I really think it was poisoned? Tainted with some unseen evil, like the fruit in the garden?
A student was trying to be kind, and I should honor that kindness, shouldn’t I?
And I was so hungry.
I sat and picked it up. It was heavy and cool in my palm.
Looking back, I wish I remembered more about that first pomegranate.
If it had been more red or more pink, if the spiked calyx at the top had been tall like a crown or shallow like a dish.
But all I remember now is the hunger and how I fumbled in the desk drawer for one of the utility knives that wash up on the banks of fine arts classrooms everywhere and how quickly I was able to score the fruit into equal quarters and slice off the top, just like my grandmother showed me.
I remember how easily the rind yielded as I tore it apart.
Red juice dripped off my fingers, down my chin. I would need to wash up at the paint-splattered sink before the students came, but I didn’t care. After three days of carefully portioned rice and beans, the pomegranate tasted like indulgence itself. Tart and succulent.
I ate every last seed.
“I hate to ask, but…”
“I know,” I said quietly. “I know.”
I was sitting at the table in our kitchen, staring at a glass of water while Kaitlyn leaned against the counter with her arms folded.
She was my best friend—my only friend—but when she’d offered to let me live with her six months ago, she had made her boundaries exceptionally clear: half the mortgage and half the utilities on the last Friday of every month.
Most friendships don’t survive money troubles, she’d informed me matter-of-factly, I guessed even the ones made at Immaculate Conception’s half-day preschool.
It was the last Friday of January now, close to 10:00 p.m. I’d given her everything I had, but I’d been a couple hundred short.
“Boundaries are important,” she said. “My therapist and I have been working on this. I’m too forgiving, she thinks, and that’s why it’s so easy for people to take advantage of me.”
I nodded as she went on, my eyes sliding to the table and lingering there.
Walnut with a live edge, clear epoxy in the bark inclusions.
An oil finish, because varnish might last longer, but a kitchen table will get beaten up no matter what you do, and you don’t want anything too tricky to repair.
I made it for her as a housewarming present.
“…and don’t try to protect her. I know it’s her fault. You need boundaries too, Birdie!”
I glanced up then guiltily, blood rushing hot to my cheeks and neck. “It’s not—it’s not like that this time. She’s just waiting for the cabin to sell, that’s all. Just like I’m waiting for the farm to sell. Then everything will be different.”
Kaitlyn threw up her hands. “You can’t believe that.
When has it ever been different? When in your entire lives?
Every fresh start, every new leaf—abandoned or not even begun in the first place.
It’s not going to be different when she sells the property down at the lake, Birdie.
The money will last a year or two, and then it will be gone.
And then she’ll come looking for your money again, and it won’t matter if you’ve sold the farm because she’ll suck you dry like she always does.
She’s your own twin. How do you not know her better by now? ”
My lips parted, but I didn’t have a rebuttal, not an honest one.
My sister—my twin—had never been able to settle into a normal, peaceful kind of life and had never even tried, as far as anyone knew.
From the moment our parents had tacked the low-resolution ultrasound photo to their fridge and decided on our names, they’d known I’d be nicknamed Birdie, but she was meant to stay plain old Mary.
Until she’d been placed wriggling and fidgeting in the plastic hospital bassinette next to me, and then she’d earned the name we’d called her ever since: Busy.
Busy would tell you that trouble always found her rather than the other way around, but it was more reciprocal than that, I think. If trouble were an ocean, then you’d find Busy gathering shells with sand stuck to her feet.
It had been the typical things in high school—smoking, sneaking out, drinking, sex—but then the bad things got worse.
Instead of smoking, it was pills; instead of sneaking out, it was crashing in the half-condemned townhome of someone very bad.
The sex turned into convoluted knots of exes and hookups that occasionally led to a black eye or a snatched purse while she slept.
She was smart. There’d never been any doubt about that—we’d both gotten thirty-fives on our ACTs, but I got mine after weeks of studying and she’d shown up to the test late, hungover, and defiant and did just as well as me—but she’d hated the thought of college, of a career.
She’d hated the thought of just a job, being one of those people on the interstate in the morning with bags under their eyes and a podcast playing while they start-stop-started their way to do work they didn’t care about just so they could buy things they didn’t need.
But what she wanted in lieu of that was something she could never quite articulate.
She worked in food service and then at various bars from Topeka to Sedalia, and about once a year, she’d tell me that she had a friend who did something—maybe they were a massage therapist and made really good money; maybe they’d gone to beauty school and now had their own station at a salon—and she was going to apply to a program at some school I’d never heard of, and could I cover the course’s tuition fee? Just this once?
They never happened: the programs, the courses, the stable jobs with better pay.
They always fell through, and sometimes it wasn’t her fault.
Sometimes it was the flimsy people around her.
Sometimes it was just bad luck. But as tiring as it could be to take each thing seriously, to match her optimism, the alternatives were worse.
The days when she didn’t care at all, when she couldn’t make herself leave wherever she was living to go to work, when she treated getting fired like an event so far outside herself that it didn’t matter, that it couldn’t begin to matter.
Kaitlyn thought it was the stain of sin on my sister.
The rumor that Busy had gotten an abortion in high school had stuck, despite me trying to explain to everyone that it had been a miscarriage, that I’d been there, that I’d been the one holding her on the bathroom floor while she bled and cried.
Kaitlyn and the other students assumed I was lying to protect my twin from the rightful censure of our town, and their judgment had only made Busy even wilder, as if to prove to them that she didn’t give a damn what they thought.
Twelve years later and almost nothing had changed.
“Sunday,” I said to Kaitlyn now. I had my right hand on my chest, chafing at the spot above my heart, with my left arm wrapped around my middle. Almost like a hug, almost like a warm cage between me and the world. “I’m delivering a coffee table to a family in Missouri. They’re paying me in cash.”
“You’re not going to miss Mass, are you?” Kaitlyn asked. “The last time you had a delivery on a Sunday, you missed the service and weren’t able to make it up.”
“I’m going Saturday evening,” I reassured her.
She was mollified but only for a moment.
She was frowning, most of her mouth long bare of the lipstick she’d worn to work that day, but the upper and lower curves of her lips were still tinted with a brownish mauve that made her pale skin look sallow.
Her hair—a washed-out color that reminded me of vintage pine—was up in a no-nonsense bun, so I could see where the brown thread of her scapular had slid closer to the base of her neck.
“You need to stop doing these kinds of jobs. You’re the artist in residence at Evelyn College!
They’re going to renew your grant for another year!
You need to be spending your time making art so you can build a strong portfolio and start selling your work outside the Midwest. Not making chairs and tables that only a few people will ever know exist.”
I smoothed my hand over the table I’d painstakingly sawn, sanded, and finished for her. Considered my words. “The residency stipend isn’t very large, Kaitlyn. And the adjunct pay isn’t that much either. I need the money.”
She snorted and turned away and then turned back again. “You netted three thousand dollars for that Saint Joseph statue last year, but you could have taken home double that if you’d listened to me.”
“I don’t feel right charging a small church much more than that…” I started, but she wasn’t listening. She was turning away again, walking to the sink and flipping on the water with an annoyed gesture.
Kaitlyn was a lawyer—for Evelyn College actually, an associate in the Office of General Counsel—and although she was deeply and rigidly pious, she had a lawyer’s mind when it came to money.
A negotiation was about how much you could extract from any given situation, and it was up to the other party to defend themselves, even if they were a group of beer-brewing Benedictines or the kindly old priest of a rural parish.
Kaitlyn thought I left money on the table whenever I sold my carvings, and that, to her, felt like a sin as willful as giving my sister money when she clearly didn’t deserve help for the umpteenth time.
I didn’t think it was a willful sin to undercharge churches and monasteries for my work, and I truly didn’t mind making furniture as small, one-off projects, but I couldn’t argue with Kaitlyn about how much of my time went to things that weren’t art.
It was necessary but it was also a burden, a purgatory of sorts.
I wanted so desperately to commit myself fully to my work, to live and breathe it, to have the sawdust and splinters made holy because of what they were for.
Faith made manifest in wooden robes and wooden hands and wooden eyes.
This scraping, grasping, workhorse life wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but that didn’t mean life would be this way forever. Every morning, I woke and prayed the rosary with one whisper in my heart—Please, please don’t be forever. Please let it be different.
The Virgin would intercede for me, I was sure of it.
She would see how faithful I was, how diligent, how hardworking.
She would make sure that Busy managed to hang on to any money that came from the sale of the cabin.
She would ask her eternally loving son to help the farm sell after months of languishing on the market.
She would make it different. All I had to do was have faith.
There was a pomegranate on my desk that next Tuesday.
Another one on Thursday.
I ate them both.