Chapter 9
nine
sister hugs
E lissa paced restlessly from the kitchen to the picture window in the living room. Her boss had been sweet and given her a couple hours off so she could be at home when her parents returned from the doctor. Today was the day their fortunes changed. For better or for worse.
Elissa didn’t know which she preferred—no, that wasn’t right. She wanted her mother to be okay. But if she was okay, something else might go wrong. Life had taught her it likely would. What and when were the only questions left.
A car door slammed outside, announcing Leo was home from school. With the cost of the cancer treatments, they hadn’t been able to afford another car or the insurance premiums, and Mom usually took him to and from school since it was on her route to work. He got a ride from a friend today.
“Is it them?” Ami called from the living room, nose in her phone.
“No, it’s Leo.”
Elissa pounced as soon as Leo walked in, pulling him in for a hug.
“Ugh.” He stiffened in her arms. “Sister hugs.”
“Don’t worry, dumbass.” Ami slid her phone into her pocket. “I won’t hug your stinky teenage self.”
“Thanks, Ami. You’re the best.”
Elissa released him, and her younger siblings did their stupid handshake, a confusing dance of fists and fingers that ended in a butt-bump.
“You two are weird,” she said with an eye roll as she walked to the kitchen.
She poured water for them both, sliding the glasses over the kitchen island. Leo dumped his backpack onto a bar stool and chugged the water. Ami toyed with hers absently.
Elissa was nearly a carbon copy of their mom, sharing the same short and curvy build and blue eyes.
So much so, her dad still joked she was an immaculate conception clone.
Ami and Leo were both blond, built more like their dad, slender and several inches taller than Elissa.
Ami’s eyes were hazel, as were Dad’s, but Leo had blue eyes like Elissa, though his were a couple shades lighter. And he had Dad’s dimpled chin.
Elissa broke the heavy silence. “It’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that,” Ami snapped at her.
“Ames…” Leo slung an arm around her shoulders.
The creak of the old garage door, which had needed to be replaced for at least two years, drew all three sets of eyes to the entry off the kitchen. The air grew still with anticipation.
Peter Wright opened the door with a smile on his face she hadn’t seen since the love of his life had been diagnosed.
Relief flooded through her, and Elissa took a breath that seemed deeper and more cleansing than any before this moment. Her mom was going to be okay. Everything was going to be okay. Oh please, let everything be okay.
Dana walked in carrying a bag from their favorite Chinese restaurant and a bottle of bubbly. Because, after all, sparkling wine goes with everything.
As soon as their mom dropped the food on the dining room table, the three kids wrapped her in a group hug, all their bickering forgotten in the pure, unadulterated joy of this moment.
Her father’s arms wrapped around her, around all of them, completing the moment. They stood like a big Wright ball of love, for who knew how long.
“Is that moo shu?” Leo muttered finally.
Trust the teenage boy to crack first.
“Of course,” Mom said, half laugh and half sob.
“Good, I’m hungry.”
Dad ruffled his hair and the hug broke. Mom took a step to the kitchen, but Elissa put a hand on her arm.
“We’ve got it, Mom. Leo, plates and forks.”
“I’ll take chopsticks,” Ami called.
“And chopsticks. Ami, you pop the wine and I’ll get the glasses.”
“Oh, don’t fuss, Lissa.” Her mom waved a dismissal.
“You know she wouldn’t have it any other way, Mom.” Ami pulled the foil off the bottle.
Elissa shook her head as she pulled out the champagne flutes from the cabinet. Unlike at New Year’s, she didn’t have to blow out the dust from a year of disuse.
Leo returned, carrying paper plates and utensils. Ami worked the cork out of the bottle with a quiet pop .
“What about me?” he asked, a grin on his face. He knew he wasn’t getting any wine, but it was becoming a family joke.
“You know where the soda is, young man,” her mom said. “You’re only seventeen.”
Seventeen. And a junior in high school. With a driver’s license.
Going on dates. With girls. A kid with a mom who would now make it to graduation.
And weddings and the birth of grandbabies, if anyone decided to have those.
Elissa brushed the tears away. They’d all have a chance to do those things with their mom around.
The prognosis may have been good, but there was always the possibility the odds would not be with them.
Ami hovered the bottle over the last empty glass, her brows raised.
“Maybe this once, Dana.” Their dad sat in the chair at the far end.
Leo practiced his best puppy-dog eyes and folded his hands in front of him in supplication.
“Please? Just a tiny bit?”
“Ugh, fine.” Mom turned her sharp eyes on Ami. “If it’s over half full, you’re on dish duty at the next four Sunday dinners.”
“I got this. Don’t worry.”
Ami poured the perfect under-half-full glass, and everyone took their places at the table.
Dad raised his glass. “To my beautiful wife.”
Everyone clinked their glasses and sipped, then passed around the containers of Chinese food.
“Are you gonna keep the whole story to yourselves?” Ami demanded when plates were full.
“Not much to tell,” Mom said. “Bloodwork came back with all markers exactly where the doctor wanted them. I’m in remission. I have to go in for testing every few months for another year or so. After that, I can drop to once a year. We can resume normal activities.”
“That’s it?” Leo asked around a bite of food. Teenage boys could be so gross.
“Yes,” Dad said.
“Boring.”
“Yeah. Isn’t that something?” He leaned over and kissed Dana on the cheek.
He wasn’t wrong. This past year had been far too exciting.
With the cancer treatments, Elissa moving in after her breakup with Victor, Ami’s academic and other issues at the university, and Leo’s two trips to the hospital for pneumonia and bronchitis.
Boring sounded darn good, a nice change of pace.
Leo rolled his eyes, and an impish grin spread over his face.
“Hey, Ami, did you hear about Elissa’s date?”
The blood drained from Elissa’s face. She loved Ami, truly, but they had a more antagonistic relationship.
Her sister knew every one of her buttons and pressed them as often and as hard as she could.
Elissa couldn’t do much about it except try to disengage.
Someday, though, stuff would get real and Ami wouldn’t know what hit her.
“Oh? Spill the tea.” Ami tapped her fingers together in front of her face like a supervillain from a movie.
“It was a disaster! Like, epic.”
“Really?” She nudged Elissa with her elbow. “Was he ugly?”
“No.” Elissa took a gulp of her wine. She was going to need it.
“Poor?”
“No!”
“Then why don’t you want his babies, Lissa?” Ami’s voice was all saccharine sweet.
“Stop teasing your sister,” Dad said, as he had at nearly every family dinner for the past ten years.
“I wouldn’t have to tease her if she’d tell me sh—stuff.”
“It’s fine, Dad. I met the wrong guy,” Elissa answered, refusing to meet her sister’s gaze. She twirled some lo mein on her fork. “Not just wrong for me, but the wrong guy. I found out later the guy I was supposed to meet couldn’t make it.”
“You went on a blind date with a total stranger? The unpredictable disappointment box has already been filled. Stay in your own!”
“You are not a disappointment, Ami,” their mother said.
Ami waved away her words, laser focused on Elissa. She was much more interested in getting the details of this sub-Reddit worthy disaster of a date.
“The guy I met expected different things from a relationship. I called Nice-Ryan, and we rescheduled to Tuesday. A funny story to tell someday.”
She still didn’t find it funny, especially since Jerk-Ryan still insisted on giving her erotic dreams every night. It would stop, she was sure, once she met Nice-Ryan. She would request a picture this time, and she wouldn’t turn off her phone until he walked into the restaurant.
“Nice-Ryan?” Ami asked, a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin on her face.
Elissa hadn’t met to let that slip.
“The other guy’s name was Ryan, too,” she mumbled.
“So what do you call him? Not-quite-right-Ryan? Wrong-Ryan? Creep-Ryan?”
“Shut up. It’s not my fault. He said his name was Ryan and seemed pleasant enough until the end.”
“What? Did he say lewd things to you? Whisper in your ear, tell you what he’d do to you in the bedroom? You could use some lewdness in your life,” Ami teased.
Elissa’s face heated.
“Ami…” Mom said, and their dad cleared his throat.
Ami closed her mouth with a click of the teeth. Her cheeks reddened. She’d forgotten their parents were in the room. Ami always itched to push the envelope, but she usually waited until the two of them were alone.
“Sorry,” her sister mumbled. “So why did Nice-Ryan stand you up?”
“Family emergency.”
“You two will be the perfect match. Before long, Mom will have those grandchildren she refuses to acknowledge she wants.”
“I am too young to be a grandmother,” Mom protested, but there was a hint of a blush on her cheeks.
“You’d be the most beautiful grandmother in the room.” Dad intertwined their fingers and gazed adoringly at her.
“Eww,” Leo said.
“Yeah, I’m with stinky boy. Eww,” Ami chimed in, doing a fist bump with Leo.
“Oh, Elissa, on the way back from the doctor’s, your mom and I talked about a getaway to celebrate the good news. Will you be around to stay with Leo sometime in the next month?”
“I don’t need anyone to stay with me. I’m almost eighteen,” Leo said.
“In nine months,” Dad reminded him.
“If she can’t, I can.” Ami took a long sip of her wine.
“No!” their parents said in unison.
“I’m hurt, truly hurt.” No actual hurt on her face, Ami winked at Leo and plastered a pout on her lips.
Her parents missed it in their shock. “You don’t think I’m capable of watching my baby brother?
You left both of us with Elissa when she was only eighteen, and now you don’t want to leave the twenty-one-year-old in charge? ”
“Ami, the one time we left you alone because you insisted you could handle it, we came back to find Elissa cleaning all the trash from the party you threw. She’s the responsible one.”
“And I’m the eternal fuckup, never able to live up to Miss Perfect, Elissa Wright, who never does anything wrong.”
“Swear jar, Ami,” Mom said automatically.
Now her sister looked hurt. Ami made mistakes, and Elissa envied her sister that ability.
Because Elissa never could make mistakes.
The stakes were too high. If she messed up, the carefully scaffolded world her parents built around this family, built around Leo, would come tumbling down.
So Elissa became the reliable one, the one you called in a crisis, the one who always did the right thing and put family first.
Sometimes, she hated being the reliable one.
“Yeah, of course I’ll do it. I live here, after all.”
She hoped her offer would distract them from dredging up more of Ami’s poor choices.
“And you don’t have a social life, except for Jules,” Leo said. “She’ll just hang out here and raid the liquor cabinet.”
True. But also… “Hey!”
Ami dropped her chopsticks with a loud clatter. “And there’s Elissa, coming to the rescue. I don’t need you to rescue me anymore. I’m a big girl now. I’m done. No swear jar. I don’t live here anymore.”
She pushed her chair back.
“How about we forget the swear jar today?” Their dad covered Mom’s hand and sent a pleading glance at Ami. “We have a lot to celebrate.”
Ami froze, and all three kids looked at their mom.
“Yeah.” A tremulous smile formed on Dana’s lips. “We can forget the swear jar today. Please stay, Ami.”
Leo opened his mouth, about to let some four-letter word drop to test the waters.
Elissa kicked him in the shin. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Think about what?” He looked all to innocent.
“Yeah, don’t push it, doofus.” Ami ruffled his hair, and the tension left the room.
After dinner, Elissa cleared the table, then dashed off a quick note to Jules, letting her know Dana would be fine.
She chuckled as a screen full of happy emojis greeted the news.