The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (16 page)

“Oh, Joy, how do you know?” Emma asks as she sits forward to place her hand on Joy’s arm. She wonders why Joy is confiding in her and not with her soul sister Debra.

Rick, Joy tells her, has a non-traveling job, but he’s always going somewhere. He’s started working out and never has any gym clothes to wash and he’s gone a lot of the time.

Rick is absent.

She knows, Joy shares, because they have not had sex in almost two years.

She knows because he stopped showing up for Bo’s athletic games and when he does show up he sits quietly or text messages—someone.

She knows because during spring break he said he had to work two extra days and he met them at the beach house late.

She knows because a wife knows.

She knows, finally, because for the past six weeks Private Detective Joanne Watson from Charleston has been tailing Rick and unless Jennifer, a nurse from the hospital, is really an undercover agent trying to recruit Rick for counterintelligence operations, she’s been screwing his brains out at hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, and in several cars all over South Carolina and a few states south, east, west and north.

If you could pick six things that Emma Gilford thought she would never hear, and a person she thought she would never hear them from, this moment with Joy would bolt right to the top of that list. A random lightning strike, a message inside of a bottle rolling into Charleston Bay with her name on it, the cancellation of the family reunion, or a row of ducks speaking Greek in her backyard are more likely than this moment.

No wonder her sister looks like hell.

“Joy, I don’t know what to say.”

“You are the first person I’ve told. I came over here to tell you Stephie is my daughter and not yours and then I saw the way you were touching those plants and I realized that I don’t really know who you are.”

“You know me,” Emma says in a voice that has parked itself halfway down her throat so it sounds as if she can barely speak at all.

This, Emma realizes, is why, and when, people would stand up and cry “Holy shit” and then stand speechless while they wait for the Gift of Tongues.

If only she could move.

If only she could breathe or think or stand up or know what to do next.

If only she could take another bottle, mix something up inside of it, and pour it down her sad sister’s throat to make everything better.

The next few moments of silence are so exhausting it is a miracle that Emma can get up, put her hand out, say “Come with me,” and walk her shaking sister to the wicker swing on the back porch.

Emma orders Joy to sit until she comes back, and when she returns she has some stress tea, sweetened with honey and two fresh mint leaves that Emma plucked off her nest of herbs growing right next to her kitchen sink.

The two women sit while the fireflies start to dance under the streetlights in the alley and begin a slow parade through Emma’s yard until it looks like a minor holiday.

“Thanks for letting me talk, Emma,” Joy says as the gentle swaying of the porch swing helps her slow her aching heart. “You need this like a hole in your head. But there’s no one else to talk to.”

“Not Debra?” Emma asks, surprised. “You have always seemed like identical twins.”

“That’s not much of a compliment for either one of us lately.”

“Don’t tell me someone over at Debra’s is having an affair, too?”

“You mean with the drinking and screaming and control issues?”

“Two of those things are kick-started by the drinking.”

“The drinking,” Emma repeats very quietly.

And Joy doesn’t answer but turns away from her.

The weight of what Joy has told her, what Joy thinks she knows, what must possibly lie ahead churns through Emma—anger and sorrow and shock—frightening her.

If she felt as if she didn’t before know Joy or Debra or even the illusive Erika or their mother, she surely does not know them now.

If she felt helpless and on the verge of hysteria about the lack of progress on the reunion planning, now Emma feels totally bewildered. And yet she so wants to be able to laugh now, to clasp Joy’s hands between hers and say, “Thanks for trusting me, thanks for opening up a window to the edge of your heart, thanks for being honest, and for stepping over the fence you have built that I have so rarely dared to touch. Thanks especially for sharing your daughter with me—even if I have no idea what I am doing.”

Emma so desperately wants to be able to obliterate the years of assumptions and silences and wrong connections that have created this huge distance between her and Joy. But all she can do is to whisper silently, “What in the hell
is
going on around here?”

Emma’s mouthful of delicious, special-of-the-day French roast
flies past the face of a woman she does not recognize but who obviously knows exactly who she is.

“Oh my God!” Emma says apologetically as she wipes coffee off her own face and arms and the entire tabletop. “I’m so sorry! But you startled me.”

“No, I’m sorry,” the woman counters. “I’m the one who should apologize. I could have started by saying something like ‘Hi, aren’t our parents dating?’ or ‘Hello, are you Emma Gilford? I’m Susie Dell and you don’t know me so please don’t be startled.’ But no, I had to do what I always do, and that’s just bust right through the door and act like I own the dang place.”

“Sit,” Emma orders after she’s cleaned up her coffee, pushed her stack of envelopes to one side and cleared a spot at the end of the table. “You do know how to make an entrance, Susie Dell.”

Emma wonders, as Susie leaves for a few minutes to get her own cup of coffee, if someone has not been slowly poisoning her. Perhaps evil aliens have been slipping into her house and depositing some kind of rare substance into her food supply that makes people’s lives suddenly fall apart, explode, disintegrate, and spiral uncontrollably into a succession of weird and highly improbable circumstances.

Susie Dell? How in the world did she recognize me? Is this just a coincidence or has she been following me? Her father and my mother? What in the holy handbag hell is happening?

Ms. Dell
looks
normal. She’s a fairly attractive brunette, about Emma’s age, and smart enough to carry on a conversation after she’s not so quietly introduced herself and she’s already said she’s sorry. Susie is a lanky version of a young Sally Field. She’s got long dark hair that is streaked with red highlights, dark eyes, and a smile backed up by a set of very lovely and very white teeth. Her high cheekbones, long legs, and apparent quick wit and outgoing
personality make Emma wonder immediately if her father is equally attractive and charming.

It takes Emma three cups of coffee and a huge caffeine buzz to get the answers to at least a few of the questions that have without warning invaded her life. A few answers and about twice that many questions.

Susie Dell is the lovely thirty-eight-year-old daughter of a retired attorney from Charleston. Robert Dell, widowed himself for the past five years, is apparently not an ax murderer, but a well-heeled Southern gentleman who has been under the guidance of his single daughter and only child as he has been wooing—and falling in love with—Grandma Marty.

“I feel like an ass,” Emma admits, when Susie finishes. “How could I not know about this? How could I not know my mother is obviously one hot tamale?”

“Blame my father.” Susie throws up both hands as if she is going to catch a random ball. “He’s sort of swept your mom off her feet. After my mother died he fell into such a depression I thought he was going to die, too. He met your mom on a field trip with the Higgins senior center and somehow he worked up the courage to ask her to dance.”

Susie explains how she recognized Emma from a family photo that Marty gave to him. Then she announces that both she and her father have been invited to this year’s family reunion.

Just the mention of the words
family reunion
makes Emma weak in the knees. She wants to confess to Susie Dell. She wants to tell her to take her father and run because the entire Gilford family, present company included, are crazy as loons. There are so many red flags popping up to warn nice people like the Dells that when Emma closes her eyes even she can see a red flag farm.

Who in their right mind would want to dive in and join that parade?

But Susie Dell, bless her heart, is apparently dauntless. She says her father is suddenly one happy man and that is all she cares about.

Emma cannot help but laugh out loud and like this woman. She’s honest, she’s brash, and she has the ability to make Emma feel instantly at ease, as if they have just restarted a conversation they ended a week ago. Or maybe like sisters who have known and accepted each other for a very long time.

And as they share life stories Emma bravely reveals that she’s on emotional overload. She tells Susie that her shoulders ache for a variety of reasons, least of all the fact that she has three exceptionally difficult sisters, one wild niece, a reunion the size of the state fair to help plan … and other things that she almost—just almost—decides to share.

Susie Dell, an only child, says she would sell her favorite shoes for a sister and wants to know what is so wrong with all of that. Just what?

Nothing and everything.

Nothing because that’s what happens when you are born into a family, planted inside of a humming nest where everyone shares the same last name, blue eyes, blonde hair and a propensity for
overbearing attitudes that can overwhelm even the strongest outsider.

Everything because balancing a personal life, if you are lucky enough to have one, and living past the borders of your nuclear family lines is not as easy as it might seem on the surface.

Especially if you have a soft spot the size of a pond of water lilies inside your heart and are starting to think it may be time to drain the pool and fill it with fresh water. Or better yet fill in the whole damn thing with fabulous soil and plant yet another garden.