17. Lori #2
I hear my mother: you handle this or you are be a burden.
I drive to the feed store at nine. Two trucks and a flatbed in the lot.
Inside, it smells like grain dust, leather conditioner and the space heater Tina keeps under the register, which she kicks when it rattles.
She looks up when the bell goes and smiles at me like she expects me. Like I am not an interruption.
“Hey, honey. Coffee’s on the burner if you want some.”
I do not want coffee. What I want is to turn around, leave the way I came, and handle it myself, because that is what I do since I am nineteen. Instead, I stand at the counter in Carson’s flannel that I never give back, with my hands in the pockets, and I say it.
“Tina, will you watch Junie tomorrow? I need to take Ella to her appointment.”
It comes out plain. No explanation. No apology. No offer to trade shifts or repay the favor.
My voice in her feed store at nine in the morning, asking a woman — who is not my mother — for the help my actual mother taught me never to need.
Tina takes off her reading glasses and sets them on the receipts book. “Of course, sweetheart. What time?”
“I need to go around 1:30 p.m. Could you come at 1 p.m.?”
She picks up her pen and writes Junie: Thursday, 1:00 p.m. on the corner of the page, same as a feed delivery, and goes back to her numbers. No fuss or speech about how I should have asked sooner.
Every person who helps in the last three months is exactly like this, and I am so busy tallying what I owe that I miss it every single time.
Help, in this town, does not come with a bill. It comes with a pen on a receipts page and a woman who does not make you feel small for needing it.
I stand in the aisle with my hands shaking in my pockets.
I blink away tears by looking at the bags of chicken feed against the wall and the horse supplement on the end cap and the jar of peppermints Tina keeps by the register for Cadie.
So this is what asking feels like. It feels like standing in a room with your hands empty and finding out the floor holds.
“Thank you, Tina.”
“Go on. I see you tomorrow.”
The drive to the clinic is quiet, the winter landscape blurring past the windows as we both process the weight of the morning.
On Thursday, I drive Ella to the doctor alone. Junie is at Tina’s and the truck cab feels hollow without her. Ella sits with her knees drawn up, hands in her sleeves, watching Hill Country pass by without seeing it.
I drive and do not try to fill the quiet, because if this winter has taught me anything, it is that sometimes the most useful thing you can do for someone you love is to shut up and just be present.
Ella comes out of the appointment after an hour, looking scraped clean, same as every session before this one, like the hour loosened something she has not decided whether to let go. She crosses the waiting room and sits down next to me, shoulder against mine.
“The doctor says I’m making progress.”
“Okay.”
“It doesn’t feel like progress.”
“It’s okay. The important thing is that you’re trying.”
She lets out a breath that sounds like it weighs ten pounds. “Can we get tacos on the way home?”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.”
We stop at a taqueria on the way and eat al pastor in the truck with the heater running.
Ella eats the whole taco.
I watch my sister feed herself and my throat closes over a taco, which is not a sentence I ever expected to think.
On the drive back, she falls asleep with her cheek against the window.
I drive through gray-green cedar and pale live oaks and feel, for the first time in a very long time, like a person who does one thing right today.
The house settles into its evening quiet, the kind of stillness that only comes after a long day of survival.
Late on a Friday, Ella and I are in the guest room with Junie asleep between us on the bed.
She is on her back with her arms flung wide, trusting everything underneath her.
The lamp is off. A stripe of hall light comes through the cracked door.
Ella has been quiet for a long time and not asleep. I can tell by her breathing.
“Lori.”
“Yeah?”
A long silence. The furnace hums on.
“I should have called you.” Her voice is barely there. She is looking at the ceiling. “I’m sorry. I think you don’t want to hear from me.”
Three years of silence between us that I call pride and she mistakes for the same thing.
I think she doesn’t need me. She thinks I don’t want her.
Our mother’s voice in both of us: don’t be heavy, don’t be a load, don’t call first, because calling first means you need something and needing something means you lose.
I open my mouth and nothing comes out.
Then it does, and it is not words. It’s unshed tears from deep in my childhood.
Ella rolls toward me in the dark. Her hand finds mine over Junie’s sleeping body and holds on.
“I miss you,” she says. “I miss you the whole time. I don’t know how to come back.”
I hold my sister’s hand over her sleeping baby and cry as quietly as I can so Junie stays asleep between us, this small warm person who started everything, who ends up on a porch in November because two sisters are too afraid to pick up the phone.
Ella cries, too. Quieter than me.
We are our mother’s daughters, still — crying quietly so we don’t take up too much room.
But we don’t let go. Neither of us leaves.
The baby sleeps on, trusting us both to be there when she opens her eyes.