The Sisters (2 page)

Only because of Mabel, who did everything Butcher wanted—tending the house and working a job, too—had Bertie been able to go back to school. Her sister had just stepped into Mama’s shoes, seeing to all the cooking, the washing, and the dreaming for Bertie’s future. How could she tell Mabel that going on to high school didn’t matter to her? She wasn’t quick like her sister was—Mabel loved everything about books and learning—but Bertie struggled mightily whenever she had to read something. All she really wanted was to make a life with Wallace, to stand by him, and raise his children, and smile on him until death.

Bertie reached again into the open drawer until her hand found the fold of tissue paper protecting Wallace’s ribbon. Mabel would be in the kitchen now getting breakfast, and Jim Butcher would be sitting on the chair beside the bed that used to be Mama’s bed, pulling on his work boots, probably figuring up some new way he could make Bertie feel small, some reason to call her stupid and clumsy, like the way he did when he saw her slosh a little milk out of the pail after stumbling in a rut outside the barn.

But Bertie didn’t care. She stood before the mirror, drawing the ribbon out to its full length. It
was
beautiful against the dress. She might wear the ribbon as a band, leaving her hair loose as a waterfall down her back. Or she might gather the hair at her neck to show off the ribbon in a shimmery bow. What mattered was that, however she wore the ribbon, Wallace would see, and then—at the party after the commencement service, since no dancing would be allowed in the church hall—then Wallace would keep his promise to her by dancing her outside, and he would glide her in circles across the grass, and, flushed and dizzy, they would stop and he would look right at her, touch the ribbon, and tell her she was beautiful.

She picked up Mabel’s portrait again, turning it to face the mirror, just to see how she measured against her sister. But no—
she would not look
. She was done comparing herself with Mabel. And she was done trying to work out why Mabel hated this picture of herself, why she’d cut off her hair the night after it had been taken, why she had wanted to burn the card the very day Jim Butcher had brought it back from that Louisville photographer.

Right now, this moment, Bertie was determined to be happy. She had made it through Saturday and Sunday, and now it was Monday again and she had only to make it through the school day until she would see Wallace, waiting for her on the stoop like he always did, ready to hold her hand on their slow walk away from school, through town, and to the corner, where he would kiss her cheek before leaving her to turn for home.

“Alberta!” Butcher’s growl flung out ahead of his familiar heavy step.

She dropped the ribbon into the open drawer and pushed it closed, waiting to answer her stepfather until he appeared in the doorway. “Sir?’

He pulled back a little when he saw her, and stared. Raking his eyes up and down her body, up and down, like he didn’t know her. For a moment, Bertie stopped breathing and reached out a hand to steady herself on the dresser. She’d been caught trying on the dress when she ought to have been checking the water for the cow or pulling any little weeds that might have come up around the tomato sets during the night. He might be angry enough to tell her she couldn’t go to graduation. He might even tell her she couldn’t go to school today to sit for her final examinations, and if she didn’t take them, the school might fail her and she’d be forever without her eighth-grade diploma. Terrified as she was of what Butcher might say, she felt a flash of anger at herself for not having thought through the possibilities. She should have left the dress alone until evening.

Butcher looked past her and out the window at the empty clotheslines. Bertie couldn’t remember a time when he’d broken a hard stare at her, and the change made her more nervous.

“You finish all your chores?” He was looking toward her again, but somehow not quite at her.

“Almost, sir,” she said, struggling to relax her throat enough to get a breath. “I’m going now, just as soon as I change my dress. I had to make sure it fit.”

Still he stood in the doorway, watching her. Did he expect her to take it off then and there?

Bertie took a step toward the door. “I’ll be right out, sir. Soon as I change.”

“How long’s that program Saturday?”

She didn’t dare go any closer. He might see her trembling. “The ceremony’s at three,” she said. “At the church. There’s a light supper after. And after that…” How could such a cold stare burn a hole in her? She should just give up the party, not even mention it, come right home after she got her diploma. No hair ribbon. No dance with Wallace on the lawn. But Wallace would understand, wouldn’t he? She was almost sure he would.

“After that,” Bertie began again, but suddenly Mabel appeared behind Butcher.

“Daddy,” she said, touching his arm lightly, “your breakfast’s ready. Will chicken be all right for supper?”

Daddy,
Bertie thought. She loved her sister but despised her for calling him that.

Butcher turned his head slightly toward Mabel, then looked down at his arm, where her fingers still rested. Without looking up, he spoke in Bertie’s direction: “Saturday, you be in by eight-thirty. Not a minute later.”

He walked off to the kitchen, Mabel calling after him, “I’ll be right there, Daddy.”

With a quick look behind her, Mabel slipped inside the bedroom and closed the door. “Let me help you with the back buttons.”

Bertie turned toward the mirror. “Why do you call him that?”

Instead of answering, Mabel took the brush from the dresser and drew it through Bertie’s hair in long, firm strokes. “It fits just right,” Mabel said. “The dress. Like it was made for you.” She smiled over Bertie’s shoulder at their paired reflections. “Just look how beautiful you are.”

Bertie closed her eyes, enjoying the way her scalp tingled with every stroke of the brush. After Mama died, it was the way Mabel—fourteen then, the same age Bertie was now—had stilled Bertie’s sobbing. That, and spending hours with her on their shared bed, looking at pictures in the stereopticon, just like they’d done with Mama, long before Jim Butcher spent a few weeks of rough charm on her, drawing her out of her widow’s loneliness, persuading her that, without a man, she’d surely lose the little patch of land left to her, along with the only security she had for her girls.

In the months after Mama’s passing, they’d hear Butcher round the back of the house, throwing rocks or dried-up corncobs, sticks of kindling or empty bottles—whatever he could find—at the side of the barn, raging at the sky, calling God a filthy bastard for breaking his promise. Sometimes, to cover up the sound, Mabel would read out loud to Bertie, or they’d sing songs Mama had liked, but always, before long, they’d get out the photo cards Mama had collected since she was a girl, and Mabel would fit them, one at a time, into the clamps on the stereopticon.

Bertie’s favorite was “The Mother’s Tender Kiss,” from a set Mama had been given a year or two before she married their father. Dated 1905, it showed a wedding party against what seemed a wall of huge blossoms, even a ceiling, like a cave of lilies. Everyone in the photo—the women in their layers of lace and the men in their slim black suits—looked toward the bride, almost obscured by her mother, who leaned in for a final kiss before her daughter became a wife. When Bertie was very small, she thought the picture was of her parents’ wedding, and even though she knew now it wasn’t true, in her mind, that’s just how it had been: a day of flowers, of lovely women and handsome men, all happy and loving each other.

“Mabel,” Bertie said now, placing her hand over the brush and taking it from her sister. “What’ll I do when you get married?”

“Who says I’m getting married?”

“It’s bound to happen. Boys like you.”

With her quick and gentle hands, Mabel separated Bertie’s hair into three sections and started braiding it. “That’s not for me,” she said. “So don’t you worry about it.”

“Do you still think about Freddy?”

All last year, Bertie had been terrified that Mabel would leave her to marry Freddy Porter. It seemed then that everywhere she went people had something to say about how Mabel Fischer ought to snap up her chance before it got away from her. Freddy had an uncle who owned a furniture store in Louisville, and it was said he was planning to get Freddy started in the business. Of course the older girls were jealous—the girls that used to be Mabel’s friends before she had to leave school—saying the only reason Freddy liked her at all was for her looks, but Bertie knew that wasn’t true. Maybe she hadn’t seen it then, but now, when she remembered, she could see that Freddy had looked at Mabel the way Wallace sometimes looked at her. Suddenly, now that it seemed possible
she
might be the one to get married, the one to leave her sister alone with a hateful man, Bertie was ashamed that she hadn’t really been sorry—sorry in her heart—when Butcher ran Freddy off. The idea of being left behind with her stepfather had been so terrible that she had refused even to ask herself if Mabel’s heart might be broken.

“Did you like him very much?” Bertie asked. “Freddy?”

Mabel finished the braid and held the end secure in her hand. “I did,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter now. Should I pin this up, or would you like me to tie it?”

“I have something.” Carefully, so as not to pull the braid from Mabel’s hand, Bertie bent to open the bottom drawer again. The unfurled ribbon was in easy reach. “Will this work?”

“It’s more the length for braiding in,” Mabel said, “but I can fix it some way.”

“No, just pin it,” Bertie said, stroking the ribbon. “I want to save this for something special.” She was surprised, when she looked at Mabel’s reflection, to see her sister smiling at her.

“That’s the one Wallace bought for you, isn’t it?”

Bertie flushed with the discovery, and for a moment all she could think of was how ugly the pink chiffon looked on her now, with her change of color. “How did you…”

Mabel laughed. “Did you forget the store’s on the way home from school? I’ve seen you two going past for months—since October at least.” She wrapped an arm across her sister’s chest and pressed her cheek over the very spot Wallace kissed. “I’m happy for you, Bertie,” she said. “I like Wallace.”

Quickly, Mabel fastened up the braid in a loop, then picked up the brush, sweeping it through her own hair in rough, short strokes. Meeting Bertie’s eyes in the mirror, Mabel tipped her head toward the closed bedroom door and whispered, “You mustn’t let on to
him,
though. He wouldn’t like it.” She laid the brush on the dresser. “I’d better get in there before he hollers. And you’d better get changed or you won’t finish your chores in time to get to school.”

With her everyday dress on, the looped braid was too fancy—people would laugh, say she was putting on airs—so Bertie plucked out the pins and shook her hair loose, tying it back from her face with piece of twine. What was it Wallace saw in her? She was so plain, she might as well have been invisible.

Around the house, that was the best way to be. If not for Mabel, she might have run away a dozen times over, but her sister always smoothed things, seeming to know the way to talk to calm Butcher down. Then, late at night, after they had heard him go down the hall to bed, Mabel would relight the lamp and get out the stereopticon. They’d take turns with it, spreading the cards across the rug.

Mabel might hold out a view of downtown San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago and say, “Let’s you and me go there.”

And Bertie would gaze at the gray city and try to imagine herself there. She couldn’t—she’d never been out of Juniper. “What about money?” she would say. “He expects me to go to work soon as school’s out.”

Mabel would smile—always a smile shadowed with secrets, but a shadow that stilled Bertie’s worries, as if the things she didn’t know were what kept her safe. “Whenever he sends me to the store,” Mabel told her once, “I keep back a nickel or a dime—whatever I think he won’t notice. That I save. I’ll work extra when I can, like I’ve been doing for your commencement dress. By the time you finish high school, there’ll be enough to get us out of Juniper, to get us started somewhere else.”

There was plenty of money in Butcher’s strongbox, the one he kept back of the low cabinet behind the whiskey bottles. Surely Mabel knew about that. Or maybe she didn’t. Bertie hadn’t known about it for long—only since she’d stepped around the corner early one morning last winter while he was loading up his pockets for his trip to the bootlegger. He didn’t see her, but she saw him put the box back in its hiding place.

Just a week or two ago, while studying a view of New York, Mabel had again said, “We’ll go there. You and me. Someday.”

“Oh, Mabel, let’s go now.” She could surprise Mabel with the money. Make up some story about how she’d earned it. Or about how Mama had hidden it away for them. A gift. “Let’s go right after graduation. I can work, too.” Bertie had meant it when she said it, caught up in the idea of getting away from Jim Butcher, meant it until she remembered Wallace. Leaving Juniper would mean leaving Wallace, and she didn’t want to do that.

“One of us should finish school.” Mabel squeezed Bertie’s hand. “For Mama’s sake. Besides, right now I don’t have enough to get you or me to the other side of town. When we go, we need to get at least as far as Indianapolis—the bigger the city and the farther away the better.” She stretched back across the bed and gazed at the ceiling. “When you start a new life, everything has to be different.”