The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (29 page)

“Well, hire a cop or something, Debra, if you think the teenagers are going to sneak beer, but I think there are better ways to spend our money,” Joy had snapped.

“And I suppose you’d rather buy vodka for the punch,” Debra had fired back.

“Come on already,” Erika threw in. “How many Gilford teenagers have had their first beer at the family reunion? It’s a rite of passage. Don’t we have better things to worry about?”

That’s when a discussion about purchasing paper products turned into an environmental crusade that had them saving an entire rain forest by using plastic and washing it all the following day.

“I’m not washing any damn plates!” Joy shouted.

“So you’re too
good
to wash plates?” Debra sniped.

Emma longed to run outside, away from this chaos, temperament, and insanity. Instead, she stayed and listened and was allowed to say something every few minutes but chose not to, avoiding eye contact with Erika, until another brassy sister or her mother started all over again. The Gilford reunion, Emma realized as if she had finally fallen on her head, was the tipping point
in her life—it was the one thing that could make her run screaming and possibly naked down the main street of Higgins.

Now in her garden, Emma tries with her eyes closed to make one of her plants move. And nothing happens. It is the calm before the storm. The Bermuda Triangle. The years some women spend waiting for the right man. The seven-day wait in the hospital room. The long echo of a train that never quite seems to get where it is going. The longer wail of sorrow that seeps from the lungs of wild birds who have lost their mates.

She does not know how to dig back thirty years to uncover memories of her parents that may reveal something else she should, but does not, know.

She does not know if she has really ever stopped long enough to choose.

She does not know at this moment what she would choose.

She does not know if she is tired of being a Gilford.

She does not know what she will do when she sees brother-in-law Rick for the first time since he ran away with his redhead.

She does not know how she feels about Erika and her family moving back to Higgins.

She does not know how she will live through next week’s family reunion.

She does not know what to do about the fact that it seems as if getting out of the car to walk into her stress-filled office has probably caused her period to come five days early and is also making her think about drinking wine for lunch, dinner and sometimes breakfast.

She does not know what in the hell she is going to do when Stephie comes over to talk about the Miss Higgins pageant and ask her about eye shadow and saving the whales and whatever else she has up her lovely hooded sweatshirt sleeves.

And her sisters. What to do about their secret rescue, Erika’s confession, the admittance without her final approval of Susie Dell into the sister circle?

Emma wonders what she has chosen, if she has chosen, and whether or not she will ever choose again, and then beyond that, if you can choose. Can you choose who you are, what family you claim, if you even
want
to claim a family? Can you choose the direction of your heart?

The Susans dip just a fraction of an inch during the last question, mind readers that they are, and Emma cannot tell if it is a yes or a no dip. She raises her head when she feels the tiny breeze from their heads and she wishes she could be angry at them for being so silent, for making certain that she answers her own question, for listening like they have never listened before.

What she thinks of as her mother’s secrets have wounded her in a way that has given her an ache that runs from the center of her throat, right down the middle of her body, and out through her big toe. Emma has been struggling to stop imagining what it must have been like for her mother, not much older than Stephie is now when her own mother died, to carry the load that she carried.

In this quiet moment the truth rises softly and hovers just above Emma’s face. She can see it.

The truth is that there were many times when Emma may have made a different decision if her father had not died, her mother had not been alone, if her sisters had not already had their chances to choose. There were also times when Emma would not have exchanged her life and world for anything. She would not have traded it with all the girls whose parents divorced, the ones whose parents did not divorce and sometimes lived in misery, the ones
who had no sisters, the ones who ran away, and those who never felt as if they were loved.

The truth that Emma can see as clearly as if she was watching a movie being played just above her face is that she did choose to believe everything that she was told, everything she saw, everything that she wanted to see.

Emma turns on her side and what she sees is her gardening shed. A lovely three-sided shed that Joy, of all people, helped her build one Saturday just after she had moved into her house. Before the shower stall and the floor that needed to be fixed and the light in the basement and the plumbing in the kitchen—it was the shed so that she could start her gardens. And Joy worked like a dog to help her.

Behind the shed is the small garage where she parks her car. The car that Debra helped her buy when she was scared to go to the car dealer alone. Debra had been like a pit bull. She’d actually made the car salesman weep as she talked about warranties, and single women, and their dead father. Emma remembers thinking that in another twenty minutes the poor guy would have given her the car for free.

And the house itself that Erika co-signed for when Emma found it, absolutely had to have it, barely had the minimum down payment and Marty could not co-sign because of Social Security and the fact that she didn’t have much beyond that anyway.

“What didn’t I choose?” Emma whispers as she moves her gaze around her yard, past the shed, and down the sidewalk that surrounds her beloved home. “Why all these years have I not so much floated as drifted?”

The Susans shift towards Emma when a very slight morning breeze rounds the corner of her gardens and knows exactly where
to ride through her yard. One very brave Susan takes a chance and leans over so far it is amazing its stem does not break.

Emma feels the flower brush against her arm and it is all she can do to not break it off and press it to her lips and then carry it into the house so that she can look at it all of the time. But there are no cut flowers in Emma’s kitchen. She can never bear to cut them, to take them away from their friends, to not watch them grow as tall as they might and then wave to her from the other side of the windows.

Instead she quickly brushes her fingers across its golden petals and gently pushes the flower back in place.

And then she covers her face with her arm and she thinks that if her flowers or anyone could see her just now that they would know that she has been a coward and judgmental and unforgiving and unforgivably afraid.

So damn afraid.

Emma rises up then as if someone has just thrown a gallon of organic fertilizer on top of her. She suddenly sees this lovely space of green on the left side of the porch that is crying for something remarkable. It is the largest unplanted section of grass in her entire yard. And suddenly Emma can see exactly what it is, how it will fit against the nest of passion flowers that have popped up uninvited against the barnwood fence her neighbor uses to separate their properties, and what might happen there as soon as she can make it all happen.

And it will be something potentially magnificent.

Something that has not happened in a very long time.

Something that will prove to everyone that she has chosen.

Something that will help heal her wounds and the wounds her three sisters have purposefully and not so purposefully inflicted on one another.

Emma cannot see her mother but she imagines Marty with her lips pressed tightly together, one hand on her wrought-iron gate handle, the other braced against her hip, her neck raised high to
make herself look even taller and terribly sharp make-believe daggers shooting from each eye.

“Dang,” Emma whispers to the long tree branch dangling in front of her face. “Al beat me here.”

A truck rolls past but Emma hears the gate open and muffled voices. She imagines that her mother is trying to escort Al from her yard so she can hunt Emma down and ask her why in the hell she has to find out what is happening in her very own family from the loud-mouthed town gossip.

Emma leans into the tree and is suddenly slapped upside the head by a small limb that has managed to free itself from behind her shoulder.

And the slap feels as real as if the tree branch was actually the hand of someone who is trying to tell her she should have known better.

Emma jumps out from behind the tree partly out of fear, partly because she feels like a damn fool, and partly because she knows she must save her mother and herself from the wretched hands of the gossip queen of the South.

“Hey!” she shouts as she walks towards Marty and Al.

Marty looks more relieved than angry to see her, which Emma takes as a good sign. And Al looks startled, which is even better.

“Where did you come from?” Al demands to know.

“Marty is my mother, Joyce,” Emma says, struggling not to call the woman Al. “That’s where this mess started.”

“You know what I mean!” Al snaps back.

“I was hiding behind the tree because you scared me. And I decided I should tell you that I’m sick of you sneaking around outside my house and then showing up like this in my mother’s yard without an invitation,” Emma snarls back, like a madwoman unleashed.

“Well …” Al manages to say as if she’s just been struck in the face with an elegant and very soft leather glove.

“Look, Joyce,” Emma says, “we all know you think your job is to know everything that happens in Higgins and you have a particularly keen interest in knowing what is happening in the Gilford family at all times but, really, sometimes things that happen in families are not supposed to be spread all over town.”

“But …” Al tries to continue.

“Let me finish,” Emma demands, surprising even herself, and obviously startling Marty, who is now standing with both hands on her hips and staring at Emma with pure amazement.