The Sisters (13 page)

“It’s for charity,” Hans said, but that wasn’t why he was standing there, his face nearly buried in a big spruce, trying to hide that he was laughing with the salesman.

Laughing at her.

If she hadn’t insisted on going with him, he’d have come back with a tree that touched the ceiling. She was still upset with how, right in front of that man in the hat, Hans had argued that an eight-foot tree cost only a couple of dollars more than a three-foot tree, forcing her to remind him they needed to put away as much as they could, what with Alma’s baby coming. Hans would never admit it, but the truth was that a little tree sitting on a table was much prettier than one that took up half the floor. It wasn’t her fault if some of the ornaments had to go back to the attic.

Bertie heard the car and looked out the window. Hans and Rainey were together in the front seat, smiling and jabbering over something. When they got inside and saw she’d started on the tree, they wouldn’t like it, but that was just too bad. She had too much to do to stay up half the night decorating just so Rainey could have a minute’s pleasure seeing the tree for the first time on Christmas morning. That was the way Hans liked to do things, and it was all right when the girls were children, but Rainey was as good as grown now. Besides, Alma and Gordon would expect the tree to be up when they got in.

Rainey was giggling when she pushed open the door. She clutched a Woolworth’s sack in one arm. Hans limped in behind her, hugging two more stuffed bags against his chest. Bertie had sent him to the grocery for sage.

“What’s all this, then?” she said. An ornament shaped like a bunch of grapes dangled from her fingers.

Hans passed her, set the bags down on the dining room table, and started pulling out package after package of lights—blue, green, red, white. “Half price,” he said, like it made any difference. “There’s two extra strings for the tree.” He looked back at her over his shoulder and noticed then that Bertie had already started the trimming. She hadn’t put on any lights. “The rest are for outside,” Hans said. “I start now, I can have ’em up before Alma gets here.”

“And just how do think you’re going to do that? You’re telling me you’re going to start climbing around on the roof in this cold?”

Rainey shook the packages out of her bag now and started sorting the lights by color. “I’ll help, Daddy.”

“You stay off that ladder,” Hans said. “But you can watch and help me keep ’em even.”

“Where’s my sage?” Bertie held out her hand, not really expecting him to put anything in it. “I can’t make my dressing without the sage.”

“Not
sage
dressing!” cried Rainey. “I don’t like sage.”

Hans rooted in the bottom of one of the bags and brought out a smaller one, torn and wrinkled. He handed it to Bertie.

She pulled out the tin to make sure he’d picked up the right thing. When those two got together, it seemed like Hans forgot everything she said. She was sure she had Rainey to thank for the extra stop at the Woolworth’s and all that money wasted on the lights, and now there’d be the expense of burning them.
Sage Leaves
was written in red on the tin. “It’s Alma’s favorite,” Bertie said, turning toward the kitchen. “You two can finish up that tree yourselves. I have work to do.”

She’d laid out the bread to dry yesterday, so now she gathered up the slices and started breaking them into the big mixing bowl. On the stove, the turkey neck and giblets had been simmering all morning, and the kitchen smelled of good strong broth. When the bread was done, she set out the onions and celery to chop. Hans passed under the window with the ladder and a moment later she heard the sound of it banging up against the house, followed by Hans’ thumping, lopsided climbing. He was singing—not even a proper carol, but the piece they’d done in church on Sunday, something about Emmanuel coming to help Israel, which they pronounced
ISS-rye-elle
when they sang. That was Dorothy Ansen’s doing. She’d gone to some college and studied music, and ever since she’d joined the First Baptist Church, it was thought too plain for the choir just to sing the hymns, kind of leading everybody else along. Now every week they had to learn special music, which kept Hans out practicing Wednesday nights way past nine o’clock, and then he’d come home singing and not be able to settle down. Dorothy Ansen might be able to sleep in, but Hans had to be up at 5:00
A.M.
, and Bertie had to be up even earlier to get his breakfast.

Hans did have a nice voice, soothing and deep. When she was a girl, Bertie had liked it when he sang “Side by Side” to her, walking back from the movies. He would lean in close, crooning in her ear about how the two of them would travel down the road together, helping each other along the way, no matter what kind of trouble or sadness might come. After they were married, he still sang it to her every once in a while, especially through the Depression, but it was never the same. It wasn’t until one night, late, when Hans had gotten up to tend Rainey, that Bertie realized he’d stopped singing to her altogether, just to her—probably a year or more—and after that, the only time she heard their song was when he creaked across the floor, singing to the baby in his arms. She’d heard Rainey humming that tune, so Hans must still sing it to her special, like when they were out in the car together.

Hans always told people it pleased him to sing for the glory of God, but sometimes Bertie had the feeling it wasn’t just the Lord he was singing for. On Sundays, the women quieted down and gave him all their attention whenever he had a solo. They ought to be ashamed to stare at him like that, with her sitting right there in the back of the church. Finally she’d had enough and stopped going to the service, tending the nursery instead, listening to the choir over the intercom. She’d hoped Hans would get the idea—say something, ask her back—but he didn’t.

He stood up straighter around those women and cocked his smile, laughing and joking with them, telling funny stories. If they weren’t too young, twenty-five or more, they didn’t seem to mind about his bad leg. For years now, Bertie had had to force a smile when they would come up just to tell her how lucky she was to have such a wonderful husband. Dorothy Ansen, blond, slim, red-lipped, had raved about him. “He really could have been a professional singer, Mrs. Jorgensen,” she said, “if his voice had been trained.” It was a silly thing to say about a voice, Bertie thought, but she knew the woman was just throwing around her learning, trying to cover up that she fancied Hans. She made that clear enough by giving him a main part in the special music nearly every week.

Hans had never said so, but it was Bertie’s belief that Dorothy Ansen was behind his wanting to take up with that traveling singing group, the Gospel Wind, that had come for Revival last year. Everybody talked about how good they were, but she never heard them because she was too busy with the babies. The way Hans told it, three of the singers walked up to him after they heard his solo, asking him to replace their baritone, who was retiring and moving down to Florida. Hans was so proud when he came to tell her, his eyes glowing like she’d never seen them, even brighter than when the girls were born, but she’d had to put her foot down. She couldn’t manage with him traveling just about every weekend, she told him. The house and the yard would fall to pieces if he ran off and left her. He couldn’t expect her to do everything. He never said anything more about it after that, but he did once leave the church bulletin beside the radio, folded open to an announcement about how the Gospel Wind was going to make a record.

Hans was singing a different song now—“Good Christian Men, Rejoice,” it sounded like—somehow managing to keep time in spite of the uneven pounding of the hammer and the tapping of the light strings against the house as he pulled them up. Rainey was singing along with him. Her voice wasn’t nearly as good, and Bertie was sure Rainey knew it, but that child would do anything she thought would get her daddy’s attention. Shameful. She was too old to be making up to Hans the way she did, laughing at everything he said, smiling too much, twitching her skirts, changing her ways to whatever she thought would please him.

Just like Mabel used to do
. “Yes, Daddy,” she’d say. “Thank you, Daddy.”
Daddy.

More than once, Bertie had had to clench her fists and breathe deep to get hold of her anger at Rainey for causing her to think of Mabel. Sometimes she’d have to close herself in the bathroom until it passed. More than twenty-five years, and she was still torn up about it. There’d been a time or two when she’d almost told Hans about Mabel, but then she’d look at him close, knowing that though he would never say it to another soul, he thought she was hard, cold. What would he say, then, about all those letters that got forwarded—letters she never answered, never even opened? How would she explain about how the letters found her? She’d have to tell him about taking her mother’s name, and then he’d want to know what for and why she’d even left Juniper, and then in time he’d come around to wanting to know why she’d sent the Juniper postmaster her married name and address if she wasn’t going to answer any letters. No way to untangle all those mixed-up lies without telling him about Wallace, and that wouldn’t do.

She couldn’t remember now how long ago she’d given up hoping to hear from Wallace. He must be dead, long dead; otherwise, in time he would have seen his mistake and come looking for her. That pale green hair ribbon he’d given her—it was a Christmas present—still lay, almost like new, inside one of Mama’s silk gloves, tucked in a plain gray box, way back in the cupboard up above the hall closet, the one she had to get up on a chair to reach. Besides a few dresses and the family Bible with Mabel’s picture inside it, the ribbon and the glove were the only things she’d brought with her from Juniper, and the only things she’d really been afraid of losing when the flood came. She’d saved the Bible from the rising water because she thought Hans would expect it, but the picture had been lost years before. It didn’t matter. She didn’t know why she’d brought Mabel’s portrait from Juniper in the first place, shoving it into the Bible as an afterthought. But Wallace’s ribbon and Mama’s glove—on the day of the flood, she’d packed them before anything else, while Alma was getting her own things, then kept them safe all those months she’d had to stay with that Murchison woman in Greenwood, carried them back to the house on Clark Street and then to this one, all without anybody else ever knowing about them.

Bertie tucked her head down and wiped her cheek against her shoulder. That onion was making the tears run, but she kept on chopping because Alma liked a lot of onion in her dressing. She could hardly wait to get hold of her grandbaby. The first time she said that, right after Alma called to say she was expecting in June, Hans had looked at her funny, his mouth hanging open. Bertie couldn’t see a way to make him understand. She’d been so young when Alma came, not quite sixteen—another truth Hans didn’t know—and then with Rainey it had been all that upset with the flood, living with a snooty woman, trying to take care of the baby and Alma too, and then having to get the house back together without any money to do it with. Until she started working Sundays in the church nursery, she hadn’t known herself what a comfort a baby could be, all quiet and warm, snuggled up against her bosom, trusting her to take care of it. Loving her.

Alma would have an easier time of it. She was twenty-four, plenty old enough for a first baby. She had a doctor husband, enough money, and a nice little house, but even so she’d be scared being alone with the baby all day—all new mothers were—so Bertie had made up her mind that Hans would have to drive her up to Ohio as soon as the baby came, and she’d stay for two or three months, helping out until Alma got on her feet, longer if Alma wanted.

Bertie covered the dressing, shoving the bowl far back in the refrigerator so it wouldn’t get knocked around, then sat down at the table to pick out the walnuts Hans had cracked for her earlier. Black-walnut fudge. Another of Alma’s favorites. She hadn’t made it in years.

From outside, she could still hear Hans and Rainey’s muffled singing, but she didn’t listen closely enough to catch the tunes. When she finished with the walnuts and looked up, she was surprised to see it was getting dark. Soon, she’d need to get out what was left of the roast from last night’s supper and heat it up.

Alma and Gordon were probably at the Crisps by now. They were odd, the Crisps, having their Christmas on Christmas Eve, but it was just as well, since she’d never had to put up a fight with them over where the kids would spend Christmas Day. It meant they got in a little later than Bertie would have liked, going on to ten o’clock sometimes, but as long as they were there for Christmas breakfast, she could accept it. She’d picked up a box of Cream of Wheat special, because if Alma took after her, she wouldn’t be able to stomach the eggs in the morning.

Outside, the singing had stopped, but she could hear Rainey chirping and cheering, and a moment later the girl was clattering in the door and hollering, “Come see! Come see!” Rainey stopped short in the kitchen and stood breathless, impatient. “
Mother.
”

“Your daddy’s going to be hungry and so will you be,” Bertie said, “so just give me a minute.” She scooped up the walnuts, wiped her hands, then got the kettle with the roast out of the refrigerator and set it going on the stove.

Rainey had already gone back outside and was standing with her arm linked through her father’s when Bertie came down the steps. “Come way out in the yard,” Rainey said, waving for Bertie to follow. When she was nearly to the maple tree, Bertie turned.