The Wrong Sister (11 page)

And it was better than anything else. For both of them.

****

The first fast pitch game for Ally since her dad left was scheduled for the coming Saturday. It was also the first time Tracy had to venture out in public, beyond everyday errands, since Micah left. Over the course of that time, she had about twenty conversations with various people she encountered, from Ally’s science teacher, to the grocery clerk, whom she often chatted with on and off for ten years. Everyone called to offer sympathy. More food appeared also, as if to nourish the grieving widow and children. Most asked how she was doing in subdued, quiet, and very unsure voices. No one knew what to say to her.

So today, she had to go out. She wasn’t sure how to do that. This group of team parents had been formed for three years since the team’s foundation. The team played almost year round, so it was a tightly knit group. Now, however, they surely must have known her husband was a fugitive from the law.

She finally decided to put makeup on. It had been four weeks since the last time. Four weeks since she got up to go to her school, wearing makeup, jeans and a sweater. Since Micah kissed her cheek and left for work as she made her kids’ lunches. That was the last day they hustled around the house to get ready for their day. That was also the last day she felt like she’d ever been normal.

She needed to make a public appearance without looking like the pathetic, sad, mass of raw emotions, and drudgingly incapable woman she embodied during the last few weeks. The kids were despondent. She was depressed. There was nothing happy inside their house except maybe, Julia, because she was too young to know better. Too young to clue in on the social cues that everyone around her was miserable.

But today, Tracy didn’t want to be judged. She wanted to appear strong and capable as though she were handling things well. She wanted to look the complete opposite of what she felt. She wasn’t sure even why this newfound spark of pride suddenly showed up now. Then again, she saw no one but her family and Donny since it happened. Even her kids were in school. She quit going to her bookkeeping program completely and finally made the call to withdraw from the class. It wasn’t working. Not now. Her next move, however, she couldn’t yet comprehend.

She smiled when she entered the kitchen and tried to regain the sane, normal, functioning mother image she used to have for her younger daughter, who was munching on bananas and yogurt.

“Mom! You look so pretty,” Kylie said. Her happiness pierced Tracy’s heart with guilt. Her younger, more fragile daughter looked positively relieved to see her looking how she used to. Clad in mere jeans and a sweatshirt, at least her hair was brushed and the makeup faintly camouflaged the dark rings from sleeplessness on her pale, drawn visage. Kylie stood up and hugged her tightly. Tracy rested her chin on her younger girl. Damn, she needed to do a better job and move past this.

She nudged Kylie with her toe. “Thank you, honey. You about ready? Where’s Ally?”

“Right here. Did you bother to wash my lucky socks?” Ally grumbled as she came shuffling in behind them. She was dressed in her team uniform and her hair was pulled up under the ball cap. She held her mitt and water bottle loosely in her hands.

The rude, demanding tone often edged Ally’s words of late, but since Micah left, it was all she used. “You will not talk to me like that regardless of what happened.”

Both girls froze and lifted their faces to hers, their shock apparent. She held their surprised gazes. “Okay, I’ve been a little out of it. But quit taking advantage of it, Ally. Talk to me with respect, or don’t bother talking to me at all; got it?”

Ally’s nod was fast and almost eager. Her heart shifted. All they wanted was her attention and care, the way she used to be. They even enjoyed her scolding and rules. They just wanted Tracy to act like the mother she used to be. They wanted everything to return to normal. Even though it couldn’t. She had to do a better job. She should not have been able to shock two girls by simply scolding them in a rude tone.

“And yes, I washed your socks. They’re on the dryer.”

Ally smiled and quickly passed by her without another complaint. Tracy stood there and finally smiled. This morning she was mothering them again. Just how she used to. It was a small step, but it was a start.

****

When they showed up at the game, there was a brief series of stares and people nudging one another at seeing them. Still, there was no outright pointing, and no one blatantly tried to corner them. There were a few polite inquiries about her health that were asked by parents Tracy frequently talked to. She smiled and said the requisite “fine.” She was unprepared to say anymore. For the first time since Micah left, she forgot about him. It only lasted for the final three innings of Ally’s game because the score was tied. For each play, the crowd and team held their breaths to see who would pull ahead. Still, for three blessed innings, Tracy wasn’t sad or mad or depressed, but cheering and hollering with the others around her, like she belonged. She temporarily returned to the present. And wasn’t lost inside her head. She was really getting tired of being cooped up in her own head. Kylie went off to talk to some of the siblings of other players. And for a few minutes, she felt normal. Micah didn’t make every game. So this dynamic was not so weird.

Just as the last inning was finishing up, a hand touched her shoulder. She jumped half a foot, or so it felt, and turned with her stomach in knots. She wondered who would now give her the sad-faced sympathy. Instead, a huge smile brightened her face.

“Donny. What are you doing here?”

“Your mom mentioned Ally had a game when she came by earlier to see Julia. She took Julia for the afternoon, so I decided to come see Ally play. I figured it might be a hard game. So here I am.”

She held her hands rigidly at her sides to keep from throwing her arms around him. “Everything is hard. But yes, all firsts are the worst.”

Tracy scooted over as he slid onto the cold, metal bleacher. She caught his eye the first time he let out a “Go, Ally! Bring it home!” when Ally came up to bat. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled out a deep, manly cheer that was loud and nothing she could have replicated. Smiling her appreciation, she nudged his shoulder with hers.

As the game finally came to an end, Ally’s team won. The girls gleefully circled each other in the dugout, screaming, before they crossed the field to give high fives to the opposing team. Ally’s smile was real and bright. It was the first time Tracy had seen her smile since her father left.

Kylie spotted Donny and came over timidly. She stopped short of reaching him, but he grabbed her in a feigned headlock and rubbed her hair with his knuckles, making her shriek about messing it up. That was the loudest and the most playful Tracy had heard or seen Kylie since this all started.

“Should we go get some ice cream or something? A win deserves something.”

“It’s four o’clock. It’ll ruin dinner.”

Donny grinned. “Don’t be such a mom. They don’t care, right, girls?”

They both giggled and smiled. For that, Tracy decided Donny was worth having around even if he were a nuisance at times with Julia and babysitting.

After the ice cream, Tracy stopped Donny beside his car. “Thank you. I know what you did here.”

He shrugged, his expression, formerly happy and cheerful around the girls, dimmed. “Yeah, well, it’s not their fault, and still not forgotten by me.”

“I hope it gets easier.”

“It can’t get any harder, right?”

“Sometimes, it kind of feels like it might.”

He raised a hand to her shoulder and squeezed. “Hang in there, Trace. You can do this. You are doing it already. Look at that, you even brushed your hair.” He tugged on an errant strand of hair near where he rested his hand. She batted his hand and rolled her eyes.

“Ha-ha, Donald Lindstrom. I brush my hair every day. And I have makeup on. You’re just too used to my sister’s heavy-handed, starlet makeup. Some of us wear it only to enhance our features, and not to completely paint a new face. I’ve seen her without hers, and she looks like a different woman.”

“You know, insulting her right now isn’t insulting me, right? And don’t call me Donald. I hate that name.”

“’Cause Donny sounds so much more responsible? I have often wondered, why don’t you go by Don? Or Donald?”

“I hate my full name. I was always Donny. It just stuck, I guess. Why? Not mature enough for you?”

She smiled. “No, I just wondered.”

He lifted his eyes from hers. “It’s weird how much we don’t know about each other. I was just noticing that.”

“I guess, we were just so generic as in-laws, we never bothered to really get to know each other.”

“I always thought you were nice, but didn’t realize how little I really knew about you.”

“Meaning, I’m not really nice?”

He grinned. “Yeah, kind of. I had you pegged in my head as a goody two-shoes, and kind of prudish.”

“Wow. How flattering.”

He shrugged. “Well, you are nice. And you do kind of present that girl-next-door, always happy façade.”

“Not so happy anymore.”

He smiled a gentle, kind smile. “No, not so anymore. But you were good with the girls today. Everything comes down to him being gone, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does. No matter what I do, or how well I do it, the one thing that dominates everything else is that he’s gone. He left us. Although I haven’t been doing all that much. But thank you. I mean, for today. It meant a lot to the girls.”

“Well, I know I’m not their father, nor am I trying to be, but I had to do something.”

“This was more than something.”

“Yeah, like you do more than something for my daughter.”

She sighed, knowing she did. He did too. How had they gotten here? They were barely more than passing acquaintances before, always polite and nice to each other, with little kidding around or any real connection. He’d see her at birthdays or Christmas, and she always served him with good manners and a banter of idle conversation. At her parents’ house, or on vacations with the family, that was fine. She had no opinion if he was even there or not. Now? Now, he was someone she saw daily. All the time. He knew what her life was really like. More so than even her parents.

She tapped her keys against her leg and stepped back. He was suddenly different to her. More interesting. More than just a polite acquaintance she called her brother-in-law. From the start, he was nice to her kids and fully accepted being their uncle without a moment’s hesitation or restraint. He kidded around and pretended to mess with them just to bug them until they were shrieking while he fake-wrestled with them or pretended to mess up their hair. It was his running joke: how long teenaged girls spent fixing their hair, and how quickly he could mess it up.

Now? His kidding around, teasing, and acting like a dad were all they had left.

****

Ally came home with two Fs in a row on her science and math test. She was missing three assignments in as many classes. Tracy explained the situation to her teachers, and their only solution was to give Ally a little extra time to do the work without incurring a penalty. Time she didn’t use wisely. Twice, Tracy grounded her from attending sleepovers with her friends. Twice more for not getting her homework done.

She was rude and viciously moody. She finally skipped school one day and went downtown with some eighth graders. Three different people spotted her and called Tracy at home. Tracy packed up Julia and went to collect her wayward daughter, still fielding calls from people who knew Ally. Drawbacks of a small town. Anyone who knew Micah and her would have known they didn’t allow Ally downtown during a school day. But Tracy sensed that Ally’s teenage angst had a point: she was in pain and looking for attention. The problem? It wasn’t Tracy’s attention that she wanted. Ally got plenty of that. All her acting out was for her absentee father. But what could Tracy as the mother do? She couldn’t be Micah. But neither could she allow Ally to skip school and risk falling behind, or continue to yell and scream and swear. She had to put her foot down. She talked to the school guidance counselor and set up meetings for Ally twice a week on top of the private counseling. She tried to talk to her every night and help her with her homework. On three separate occasions, that merely ended with Ally throwing down her pencil, book, calculator, you name it, in disgust and stomping away while shrieking as if in a fit because Tracy couldn’t “help” with her assignments. When it happened again with math, Tracy simply lay her head down on the table and hit it three times in frustration with her forehead. Why? Because she couldn’t do sixth grade math. Holy crap. She had no idea how stupid she was.

Meanwhile, Kylie withdrew more and more. The more frequently Ally fought with Tracy, while she tried to reason with her, the more Kylie retreated into silence. She was so quiet, and so withdrawn, Tracy became desperate to get her to simply interact with others. Kylie gave up completely on her friends. People started to make fun of her at school. She took to wandering around by herself at lunch, and didn’t seem to care anymore. Tracy couldn’t get her to talk about anything, especially her feelings, which she kept bottled up no matter how hard Tracy tried to intervene. Tracy couldn’t get any response, and she did try. Sitting on Kylie’s bed every night while begging her to talk, Tracy asked twenty questions at a time. She got no response. No new words beyond “fine” or “okay.” There were no smiles or tears. Micah’s desertion had ultimately reduced Ally to a screaming, irrational tyrant and Kylie to a mute, blank robot.