As Close as Sisters (21 page)

“It’s not a big deal.” She hesitated, looking down at the table. “But I get tired of it, you know. Because she gets all the attention and pretty soon—” She stopped and started again. I could tell this was hard for her to say. “You know.
I won’t have you
.”

“Mom, pick up. Mom, pick up,” came a voice from inside my bag.

For a second I didn’t move.

“Mom, pick up. Mom, pick up,” my handbag repeated.

Mia reached for the menu again. “That’s
really
obnoxious.”

I slipped my hand into my bag, wrapped my fingers around the cell phone, and pulled it out. “Tell me about it,” I said to Mia. Then to Maura, “You on your way?”

“Be there in a minute. I borrowed Viktor’s bike,” Maura told me cheerfully. “You think you could get me a bike? This is way easier than trying to find a place to park the car.”

“See you in a minute.” I hung up and looked at my daughter across the table. “I’m sorry, Mia. I never meant to make you feel as if you mattered less. I’m always telling other people how great you are, your good grades, how responsible you’ve been since I got sick.”

She just sat there for a minute, then stole a glance in my direction. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but the look Lilly gave me made me bite back my words. We all sat there silent for a minute, then I got to my feet. “Be right back.”

As I went by, Lilly grabbed my hand. “You want me to come with you?” she asked quietly.

“It’s one of those teeny-tiny bathrooms.” Mia was studying the menu again. “You know, the kind you have to back into. I know this girl Theresa, and she’s so big, I don’t know how she fits in there.”

I met Lilly’s gaze, sunglasses to sunglasses. “I’m fine,” I told her, adjusting my head scarf. “I’ll be right back.”

Lilly let go of my hand, and I ducked inside, past the counter where our waiter was picking up plates of sandwiches. There was no one in the teeny-tiny bathroom. I backed in, as Mia had instructed.

I closed the lid on the toilet and sat down and had a good cry. I never, ever intended to neglect Mia. It was just that Maura . . . Maura took up so much damned time. And here I’d been, feeling like I’d done a pretty good job raising my girls, feeling like they were going to be okay when I died. And now . . . now the guilt, piled on all the other guilt I already had, was almost overwhelming. I had totally screwed things up and hadn’t even known it. How could I die now? How could I leave Mia, thinking for one second that she was somehow less to me, that I loved her less?

28

Lilly

“W
hat does buffalo mozzarella
taste
like?” Mia asked me, nose in the paper menu again.

There was emotion in her voice, not related to cheese. Her mother had just excused herself for the bathroom. To have a good cry I was sure.

“Not like . . . buffalo . . . right?” Mia asked.

I had to laugh. “Not like buffalo. It’s a cheese made from milk that just happens to come from buffalo. They raise them in Italy to specifically make this kind of cheese. It’s supposed to be really creamy, and it has a robust flavor.” I was quiet for a minute, and then I laid down my menu. “Mia, are you okay?”

“Sure.” She continued to study the lunch selections, or at least pretend to.

“You know your mom loves you.”

“Of course.”

“Very much. And moms don’t have favorites. It’s just that Maura—”

“Is a pain in the ass.” Mia finally put down the menu. “I know. You think I don’t know that? But did it ever occur to any of you that maybe that’s
why
she’s a pain in the ass?”

“To get your mom’s attention?” I asked.

Mia folded her arms over her chest. “To get more of it than me.”

I thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that your mom has always tried to be fair. You’re the one she depends on. I think she worries about Maura because . . .” I tried to search for the right words. This was so hard for me—to talk with Mia about McKenzie dying. I couldn’t imagine how hard it had to be for McKenzie. “Because she knows you’re going to be okay when she passes. But Maura—”

“I’ll take care of her. Mom knows I will.”

Hearing a seventeen-year-old say such a thing hurt me so much that I almost felt a physical pain. “She does know that.” I brushed my hand over her head, smoothing her pretty ponytail. Her hair was exactly the color McKenzie’s had been. I remembered McKenzie’s ponytail looking identical when we were Mia’s age. Which seems so crazy—that I knew McKenzie when she was the age Mia is now.

“How are you doing?” I asked. “With your mom being sick?”

Mia reached out and took my glass of iced tea and stirred it with the straw. “Good. I mean . . . okay.”

“Nobody is
okay
with their mom dying, Mia.”

“I bet Aunt Janine was okay with her dad dying. With Aunt Aurora blowing him away.”

“Different circumstances,” I said, seeing through her ploy. Redirection. I’d been reading all about it in a parenting book. I wasn’t going to let her get away with it. “We’re not talking about Buddy right now, so no changing the subject. I’m serious. You seem to be handling your mom’s cancer very well. Maybe too well.”

Mia leaned forward and sipped my tea from the straw. “I guess I’m dealing fine. What’s my choice?” She looked at me. “She’s going to die whether I deal with it or not. Right?”

I pressed my lips together, not sure if I wanted to laugh or cry. Mia was so her mother’s child. Logical. Practical. Tough. But not afraid of her own emotions. “Do you talk with your mom much?” I asked. “About her dying?”

“Not really. Some.” She took another sip of my tea and pushed it away from her. “When we do, I try to keep it about dumb stuff. Stuff that’s not that important, like staying in Newark until we graduate next year. Which pieces of her jewelry we want. Stuff like that.”

“You don’t talk to her about how sad you are?”

Mia chewed on her lower lip. “Not really, because”—her voice caught in her throat—“because I don’t want her to worry.” She nibbled on her lower lip. “You know, about us.”

I didn’t know what to say, what to do, so I just listened.

“I don’t want her to know how scared I am,” Mia continued, “about what’s going to happen. What it’s going to be like not to”—she stopped and started again—“have her. I mean, what right do I have to be scared, Aunt Lilly? I get to stay here.” She turned to look at me, her eyes full of tears. “Mom’s the one who’s going to die and get put in the ground.”

Mia’s last words came out in a sob, and I pulled her to me. She wrapped her arms around me and rested her cheek somewhere between my breast and my baby belly.

“Oh, Mia. Mia,” I soothed, stroking her gorgeous red hair. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. If there was any way I could take this from you, I would. Any one of us would.”

Mia didn’t say anything else and neither did I. Instead, I just held her until we heard a bicycle bell dinging and Maura went flying by us on the sidewalk below. “Check this out,” she hollered, lifting her hands off the handlebars and managing to swerve around a large trash receptacle.

“You’re going to feel stupid if you crash Viktor’s bike,” Mia hollered after her, wiping her eyes.

Maura brought the bike to a halt, whipping it around to nose into a bike rack at the end of the building. “You order yet?” She got off the bike and left it without a lock, coming down the sidewalk and up the steps. “I’m starving.” She slid into her mother’s chair and looked at her sister. “What’s going on?” She looked at me, then back at Mia. “We’re not having a cry fest, are we?”

Mia sniffed and picked up the menu, ignoring her sister’s comment. “I think I’m getting this grilled panini made with buffalo cheese. What are you going to get, Aunt Lilly?”

Just then, McKenzie came out of the restaurant. “What did I miss?” she asked, leaning over to kiss Mia on the top of the head before she pointed to Maura and directed, “Slide in.”

“It’s too sunny in that spot. You can slide in.” She stood up to let her by.

There was a moment of palpable tension when McKenzie didn’t do what all three of us expected her to do—which was slide in.

“Slide in, Maura. The medication I’m taking doesn’t allow me to sit in direct sun.”

“Well, you’re at the beach,” she muttered under her breath. And slid over to the other chair.

I could have sworn I saw Mia smile behind her menu.

“And give your sister back her phone,” McKenzie said.

“Yeah, did Mia tell you? Mine got wet. I don’t think it’s going to work again. I went to the phone store this morning. I can definitely get the upgrade. It’s only like a hundred dollars.”

“Sorry it took me so long to get back.” The waiter walked up to the end of our table. He was a college-aged boy: clean-cut, with a goofy smile. “What drinks can I get for you ladies?”

McKenzie waited until the waiter took her girls’ drink orders and went back into the restaurant. “Give your sister back her phone,” she repeated calmly.

“Okay, okay.” Maura pulled it out of her pocket and pushed it across the table to Mia. “But I’m expecting a call. Answer if it’s a 222, but not if it’s 234,” she told her sister. She glanced at her mother. “I was thinking that after lunch Mia could ride the bike back to work and we could go to the phone store and get my new phone. My numbers are uploaded onto iCloud, so I won’t lose anything.”

McKenzie placed her menu on the edge of the table. “I’m not buying you another phone, Maura. I told you that last time.”

“Mom, I have to have a phone.”

“I’m not buying you another. You’ll have to buy the replacement yourself or get your father’s spare.”

“He’s got a nice flip phone you can use,” Mia put in.

I would have laughed, but I could tell Maura was getting angry. It was nice to see McKenzie stand up to her daughter and not allow herself to be taken advantage of or bullied.

“Mom, I have to have a phone. What if you need us? What if you have to go to the hospital or something?” Maura was obviously flabbergasted.

“I can call a flip phone,” McKenzie said. She looked at Mia. “I was thinking I’d get the sandwich with the buffalo mozzarella. If you’re on the fence, you could get something else and we’ll share.”

“Mom, I can’t use a
flip phone
.” Maura said it as if her mother had suggested she communicate by ham radio. “I need a smartphone for . . . for school and stuff.”

“Then I suggest that you take better care of the phone you buy yourself.”

I looked up to see Mia’s and McKenzie’s gazes meet and caught a hint of identical smiles.

29

Janine

“W
ho’s got the Goldfish crackers?” Lilly leaned forward, eyeing me on the end.

We were lined up side by side in beach chairs in the sand. The tide was coming in fast. It would be high tide in less than two hours. It was time to go in and shower and let Aurora decide whether she was having Mexican or Chinese food delivered. (Her turn to make dinner.) But none of us were in a hurry to go.

I took another handful of cheese crackers and passed the bag to McKenzie, who passed it to Aurora, who passed it to Lilly.

Lilly thrust her hand into the bag. “These things are addictive. I should have never opened the bag.”

It was nice this time of evening. The beach always cleared after the lifeguards went home, especially after a hot day like today had been. The thermometer outside the kitchen window had hit ninety-six at lunchtime. By this time of day, families had packed up their coolers and sand toys and umbrellas and dragged their sunburned, whining kids off the beach.

We hadn’t come down today until four. McKenzie had needed to rest. She’d slept a lot of the day or read in her room, which wasn’t something she’d been doing.

I had suspected, from day one, that maybe she was pretending to feel better than she did, to keep things upbeat. I’d been suspicious enough that yesterday, when she and Lilly were shopping, I had gone into her room to see if she was using the oxygen tank. It had been full, though, and seemed to be in the same place where I’d left it when I carried it in the house almost two weeks ago.

I glanced at McKenzie as I tossed a cracker into the air and caught it with my mouth. She looked fine to me. She looked pretty good, in fact. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt so she didn’t look so bony. And a canvas bucket hat and new wraparound sunglasses.

“I need to talk to you guys about something,” McKenzie said. “It’s kind of serious.”

I groaned out loud and glanced at her. I tossed another cracker into my mouth. “Can it wait?”

Chris had said the same thing to me last night. I hate these kinds of conversations, the kind that people feel the need to introduce. We’d gotten into it on the phone. One of the only real arguments we’ve had since we moved in together. It was stupid. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Chris to meet McKenzie and Aurora and Lilly, it was just that . . . I didn’t know if I was ready. It seemed like such a big step. Bigger than moving in together. Everyone had liked Betsy so much. (Including me.) I knew they were disappointed when I screwed things up; I guess I didn’t want to disappoint them again.

“Can it wait until after cocktail hour?” Aurora asked. She was drinking a beer, covered by a neoprene Koozie, advertising the Dogfish Head brewery. Not exactly subtle—alcohol wasn’t permitted on the beach. We didn’t pay much attention to the rule.

“Looks like you started an hour ago,” McKenzie teased, eyeing the open cooler of empties.

“Beer doesn’t count.”

“I’m going to need more munchies if we’re going to have a serious conversation,” I put in, trying to continue to keep things light.

“I’ve got licorice.” Lilly produced a two-pound bag of red licorice from her canvas beach bag. She opened the package, took two pieces, and passed it down.

Aurora took a piece. (Beer and red licorice?) McKenzie took two. I was afraid this was going to be a three-piece chat. My eating habits were slipping fast; I was drinking too much. Eating too much sugar, too much fat. I don’t like how it makes me feel, which was out of control.

“I want to talk to you about my funeral.”

I knew this was coming. Honestly, I’m surprised she hasn’t brought the subject up sooner. McKenzie has always been the one who likes to organize things. Why would her death be any different?

I began to peel off strips of licorice. “Do we have to?” I asked.

“You promised, no more morbid talk today,” Lilly pouted, sticking the piece of licorice in her mouth as she folded up the top of the cracker bag. “We already talked about where you wanted us to take Mia and Maura out for dinner after their high school graduation. I don’t think I can stand any more of this today.”

“This is important,” McKenzie said, taking a bite of licorice. “It’s important to me that you know what I want. I can’t ask my parents; they’re going to be a mess. And obviously, I don’t want Jared doing it.” She pulled off her sunglasses, looking at me on one side of her, then at Aurora and Lilly on the other. “Which leaves you guys.”

A big wave washed onto the shore, and the water almost reached our feet. We’d have to pull our chairs back or go up to the house soon.

None of us said anything.

“Come on,” McKenzie begged. “I have to know you’ll take care of the details. I’ve written out instructions. They’re on my laptop in a folder called
Fini Opus
. I need one of you to be the contact person. I’ve already chosen the funeral home. I’m going to be cremated. I don’t want my girls looking at my dead body. I wrote down what songs I wanted for the memorial service, the contact person for Mom’s church, everything you need to know.” She paused. “I’d do it for you.”

Knife in the gut. I looked past McKenzie to Aurora.

Lilly was looking at her, too. “Aurora can do it,” she said. “I’ll be too big of a mess. You know I won’t be able to do it.”

I wanted to be able to tell McKenzie not to worry about it. I really did. That I’ll make sure everything is done to her specifications. It makes sense that it would be me; I live the closest to her and I don’t have a baby and I’m not famous. Who knows what country Aurora will be in when McKenzie passes? I mean, I hope we’ll all be together when it’s really . . . time. But that’s one thing not even McKenzie can plan. Her exact time of death.

I just can’t imagine myself making those phone calls: the funeral home, the fucking florist. I don’t know anything about grave blankets. Lilly is right. Aurora is the best choice. She’s the strong one. She was the only one of us we can depend on when the time comes.

McKenzie looked at Aurora.

Aurora stared straight out at the water rolling in. “Fine.” She took a gulp of beer. “Thanks, guys,” she said, resentment in her voice. Which surprised me.

McKenzie rubbed Aurora’s bare arm. “I knew I could count on you. I’ll send you the file. You don’t even have to open it until . . . you have to.”

Aurora just sat there, staring out at the water, drinking her beer, and I just sat there looking at her. We all did. No one said it, but I knew what the three of us were thinking. It was certainly what I thought of every day of my life. How thankful I was to have Aurora. She’s my hero. Our hero.