The Sisters (6 page)

“Afternoon, Bertie.” Alice turned the knob and stepped inside without being asked. “Cooked cabbage?” She walked over to the stove and lifted the lid on the pot. “My little Harry just loves cabbage. Specially with corned beef. I can’t think when the last time was we had some.”

Again, Bertie held her tongue. Only last week she’d seen Alice coming out of the relief office with an order of groceries, and there was a tin of corned beef peeking right out of the top. Ever since President Roosevelt had taken over, all those men who’d been let go from the mill—between the grocery orders and the checks—were doing about as well as they were. It hardly paid for Hans to wear himself out with working. All he had to do was put in as disabled, but he would have died before he quit and went on the relief.

“Would you have a cup of flour to spare?” Alice asked.

“Used the last for the bread yesterday,” Bertie said. It was a lie, but it might just as easy be the truth.

“It’s Sue’s birthday, you see.” Sue was Alma’s age. “And if I just had a little more flour, I could make her a cake. I’ve been saving the sugar for months.” Alice had something in her hand, a piece of paper, and she kept running her fingers along the edge of it, over and over.

“I wasn’t able to do a cake for Alma’s last birthday.” Instead of closing the door, Bertie opened it wider and said to Alice, “A child that age is really too little to know any different.”

Alice pulled out a chair and sat down, tapping the paper she was holding on the table. “That wind sure is cold, Bertie. But nice you’re able to have the house good and warm.”

Nothing to do but shut the door and go on over to the table. She wouldn’t sit down, though. Standing beside Alice, Bertie could see what she had in her hand. An envelope. The same pale yellow, the same blue ink. It had gone to Alice’s box by mistake and now here was Alice, come to pry.

“What’s that you’ve got there?” Bertie asked.

“Well, I swear,” said Alice. “I think I must have left my head right behind me on the pillow this morning.” She laughed at her own joke, and Bertie did her best to force a smile. “This came to my house. It looks like it might be for you.” She held it up before her face, as if to read it for the first time. “But really I don’t see how it can be. Those people at the post office have got you mixed up with somebody named Alberta Fischer.”

Bertie didn’t have to see the address on the envelope to know how it was written:
Miss Alberta Fischer, General Delivery, Juniper, Kentucky
. The return address was someplace in Chicago. Mabel never put her name on it, just a single
M,
but even without that, Bertie would have known who it was from. She could always pick out Mabel’s handwriting, as delicate and pretty as she was. Up above the original address, somebody at the Juniper post office would have printed
Mrs. Imogene Jorgensen, 738 Clark Street, Newman, Indiana.
She wished she could take back the note she had scribbled to the Juniper postmaster right after she was married, telling him how to send on any mail that might come to her. He must have thought it an odd thing for her to do, since she’d never had a letter in her life, but right away he sent out an envelope that had been sitting with the dead letters for four or five months, paying extra out of his own pocket for the postman to bring it straight out to the house. She’d even had to sign for it.

“I was Fischer before I was married,” she said to Alice. “And there’s some who’ve always called me Alberta.” She held out her hand for the letter.

“This one’s come a long way,” Alice said, pretending again like she hadn’t spent a long while studying the envelope’s details before she ever stepped out of her house. “Postmark says Chicago, Illinois. You got family in Chicago?”

“Now I think of it, Alice, I believe I did save back a little flour. You said you needed a cup?”

“Two cups would be better.”

Getting up from the table, Alice scraped her chair across the floor, and Bertie pointed at Alma sleeping in the rocker. She opened the cabinet door just enough to reach in and get the flour canister. No reason to let Alice see what else was inside. She could have put the flour into a sack, but instead she scooped it up in two coffee cups, so Alice would have to put the letter down.

“I thank you for bringing the mail by,” Bertie said, leading Alice back to the door. “Hope your cake turns out.”

Alice turned to look at her over the cups of flour. “I’ll be anxious to hear all about your letter.”

“Bye,” Bertie said, closing the door just a little too fast so Alice had to quick-step out of the way.

Back in the kitchen, she closed off the hall door to keep the heat in, then sat down at the table and picked up the envelope. Most folks looked forward to letters, but like all the ones that had found her before in Newman, this wasn’t the one she wanted.

Hans had stood up and looked solemn when that first letter came, like it was some important telegram, and she’d made up a story quick, showing him how it had been forwarded. She told him it was nothing but a letter from her grandmother’s sister, who didn’t write too often, then she folded it into her apron pocket so he’d forget about it. When she and Hans were getting to know each other, she had told him that because she shared her mother’s name, Imogene, the family had all called her by her middle name, Alberta—Bertie for short. It had surprised her how easily the lie had come, once she made it up, and how it felt almost true, right from the start. As far as Hans was concerned, her given name was Imogene Alberta Fischer and she had just passed her twenty-sixth birthday instead of her twenty-first. When she’d left Juniper behind her, she’d taken her mother’s Christian name and her sister’s age and told everyone she was an only child whose parents had both died of the flu in ’18, taken in by the preacher of the Baptist Church until she was old enough to earn her keep. There was a piece of truth in all of it. Daddy had died of the flu, and after Jim Butcher hanged himself, the preacher did take her in until Nellie Perkins was ready to have her at the boardinghouse. Bertie wished now that she’d decided to take her mother’s full maiden name, Imogene East, when she was on the train out of Juniper, the greasy dollars from Jim Butcher’s strongbox in her pocket, but then there had still been a little part of her that wanted to leave a trail in case Wallace took a notion to follow it.

Odd how even that first letter had the same address as this one, not directed to the old house. Maybe Mabel had somehow heard the news about Jim Butcher. Or maybe she just figured with her gone, Bertie wouldn’t stay there. Well, she was right about that. A sour burn pricked the back of Bertie’s throat. Time and again she’d tried to work out some other reason for Mabel to leave her like she did. But in the end it didn’t matter. That’s what she’d done. And that’s how she’d shown herself for what she really was.

Every time a new letter came—this one made the eighth or ninth—Bertie prayed it would be the last, but Mabel wasn’t one to give up. Lucky thing that after the first, all the rest had come with the regular post while Hans was at work. But now Bertie had Alice Conrad to worry about, with her big mouth. No knowing who she might tell. At least she hadn’t opened it—the seal was still tight—but Alice could sure start the questions going if she wanted to.

Well, the letters had to stop. But how to do that without writing back?

The day after that first letter had come, after Hans had gone to work, Bertie had almost opened it, hoping for some news about Wallace, but she couldn’t bring herself to read anything Mabel had to say. There was nothing to say. Nothing but lies. Even an apology would leave too bitter a taste—not that she believed Mabel would ever apologize.

“Mother.” Alma was scooting her way out of the rocker, pale cheeks drawn in, thin brown curls sticking all over her head, her daddy’s faded green cardigan slipping off her shoulder, not looking any better for her nap. When Alma was born, she was plump as a dumpling and Bertie had worried the girl would tend to heavy like herself—well, like she used to be—but now she couldn’t imagine her daughter as anything but rickety. She didn’t even seem to want things, not like a four-year-old should, and Bertie reckoned this was because Alma had learned wanting didn’t do a bit of good. Even now she knew the child wasn’t calling for her so much as just letting her know she was awake again.

“Come on over here.” Bertie sat down at the table and pulled Alma onto her lap, folding the sleeves of the sweater up around her daughter’s tiny wrists. “Let’s count things.” Alma lifted her arms to wind them around her mother’s neck, but Bertie caught her hands and pushed her arms back down, then twisted the child around again to face the table. She spread her own hands flat and said, “Count,” and Alma touched each of her mother’s fingers, calling off the numbers without energy. “Now the buttons,” Bertie said, leaning back to reach to the low shelf for the old tobacco can, filled with buttons from clothes long gone. She dropped a handful onto the table to keep Alma busy.

“Flower,” Alma said, rolling between her fingers a small, carved silver button.

“Rose,” said Bertie, taking the button from her daughter. “A rose is a kind of flower.” She handed Alma a tortoiseshell button and pointed out the different colors, then lifted Alma into another chair and stood up. “Find me two more like that,” she said, and while Alma sorted, Bertie slipped the rose button into her pocket. She ought not to have kept them, and she really ought to go through the button tin to find the other one and just throw them out—but then, it seemed wrong to waste them. They’d look pretty on a dress for Alma when she got a little older. Besides, no one in Newman, not even Hans, knew anything about that pink dress except that she’d worn it when they married in the judge’s office.

Not too long ago, out of the blue, Hans had asked about the dress. “You never wear it,” he said.

“Nothing to wear it to.” She shoved her fist deep into the bread dough she was working on the counter. “It’s too fancy for church.”

“We got an anniversary coming up. You could wear it then.”

“Can’t,” she said. “I gave it away in a church drive a while back. It never did fit right.” She was afraid to turn to look at his face, so she lifted the dough with both hands and flipped it over. It sounded like a slap, coming down. She wouldn’t have thought Hans would remember that dress. Every now and again he would shake her up with some tenderhearted feeling she didn’t think he had. She sure couldn’t tell him the truth—that she’d cut that dress to pieces the day after they were married.

The wedding hadn’t been anything like what she used to dream of, though life before Hans had been so long ago, she was finding it harder all the time remembering what her dreams had been. More than anything before or since, she’d wanted to marry Wallace. That much she knew. There wouldn’t have been the money for a grand wedding, of course, but they would have been married in the Emmanuel Baptist Church in front of everybody they knew, and when they kissed, everyone would have teared up, seeing such love.

And afterwards? What was it she had wanted afterwards? They’d talked of children, lots of children, and Bertie had seen herself wiping small faces, had seen Wallace laughing beneath a tumble of little bodies on snowy mornings, had imagined year after year cupping a new tiny hand in hers to show just how far to poke a bean seed into the ground.

Storybook notions of a foolish girl, those were. Even so, she would have liked to be able to say she loved Hans, that in six years she had come to love him, but she didn’t think that was true, not unless the warm, solid feeling she had for him was love. It was respect, she thought. And appreciation. But love? She’d loved Wallace, had felt a tingling and leaping inside her, and even now when she thought about him for more than a minute or two, that feeling came back.

Of course she wasn’t sure Hans loved her either. He’d never said he did. He hadn’t even courted her, really. He was already one of the customers at the restaurant when she was hired on to wait tables, and at first she steered clear because she thought he was one of those men who played with girls’ feelings. He was always laughing and teasing with the waitresses and asking young women who came in by themselves or in pairs to sit down and let him buy them pie and coffee, but then Bertie started noticing how, when those same girls came in later and Hans was there, they’d nod or wave at him real quick, then look away. If he’d treated them badly, they would have pretended not to see him or they would have walked out. None of it made any sense—not until she saw him get up one day to pay his ticket. Not a minute before, Bertie had heard the girl who had sat down at his table agree to go to the pictures with him, but as soon as he stood up, she was falling all over herself to make up some excuse about just remembering a promise to help her mother. Hans had nodded, offered her his hand to shake, and then waited for her to scurry out the door before he moved painfully in his leg-swinging limp toward the cash register. Bertie felt so bad for him that the next day when he was in for lunch, she scooped up an extra-big helping of mashed potatoes for him, and before she knew it they were talking. She wasn’t allowed to sit down with him while she worked her shift, but when he asked her to the pictures, she said yes right off.

He was friendly and kind, but there had never been anything romantic between them. That first evening, when he walked her ever so slowly home after the pictures, she’d reeled off her lie about being nineteen, which was probably the main reason he asked to marry her just a few weeks later. He was twenty-four—a whole ten years older than she was, if she had confessed to her right age—and ready to settle down. He’d made no secret of that. All his brothers and sisters, older and younger, had married—there were ten of them, counting Hans—and because he was the one left without a family, it had fallen to him to look after his parents, but they were gone now. She noticed he got fidgety whenever the picture at the theater was a love story, and when he told her how his own parents’ marriage had been arranged before they came over from Denmark, she understood he hadn’t come up thinking that people had to love each other to be married, only that they needed to stick together and help each other along once they were. He’d managed to save a bit of money, he told her, and when he finally did say, “I’d like to marry you if you’ll have me,” he added right away, “I’ll buy you a house, and you can stop working. I’d like us to have four or five children, but I’ll accept whatever the Lord brings.”