The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (4 page)

And Emma cannot say no—especially to Stephanie.

“Well …” Al says, shaking her head as she finally begins backing out of Emma’s yard, “I need to go.”

Emma’s heart is dancing the tango with great joy as Al just about jogs like a high school track star out of her yard and leaves her with hours of planting yet to do, an ex-lover to ignore, and a niece who looks as if she is on her way to a heavy metal recital.

“She is beyond a trip,” Stephanie offers. “Was she over here gossiping about someone? We should send her ass to one of those afternoon reality shows.”

“Don’t swear.”

“Someone in this bizarre family has to swear.”

Stephanie falls obediently into the strong arms of her auntie and immediately becomes an eight-year-old girl who wants to sit on the porch swing and rope her legs through the bars, suck her thumb, and ask for a plate of warm cookies.

When Emma feels the silky wisp of her niece’s breath on her neck, her mothering instincts explode as if someone has set her on fire just below the top of her breastbone and the flames have spontaneously ignited both sides of her skin. She wants to yank the new piercing right out of Stephie’s nose, cut off her orange and yellow hair, and put her in a nice pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She wants to drag her inside of the house, cook her pasta, turn on some mindless music video station and then stand in the corner while Stephie calls her best friend to talk about the boy in Spanish class. She wants to lie down next to her in bed and tell her what it was like when she was sixteen and so wanted to be someone else and how she still thinks, sometimes when she has a moment, about the person she wanted to be, created in her mind, and never quite seemed to capture. She wants to tell Stephie that she will drive her to the bus depot and give her every penny she has any time she wants to escape from Higgins and her family. But she doesn’t say or do any of those things.

She simply waits and finally Stephanie pulls away and asks, “So why was the town gossip here anyway?”

Emma hesitates for as long as it takes her to realize that Stephanie probably knows a lot more than she thinks she does.

“She wanted to know if your grandmother is sleeping with two men at the same time.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That I have no clue.”

Emma moves her eyes, finally, off the nose ring and towards all her unplanted flowers. She could swear she hears them crying, sobbing, begging her to get them into the ground. But then Stephanie the Wise pulls Emma’s chin around so she can look her straight in the eye.

“What?” Emma asks.

“She is.”

“Is what?”

“Sleeping with a mess of men.”

“What’s a
mess?”

“Who knows?”

“Apparently
I
know nothing.”

“She probably didn’t think you could take it.”

“What do you think?”

“I think that if I am not home in like ten minutes your oldest sister is going to kick my ass.”

“Stop swearing.”

“I’ll try … if you try to live a little bit more like Grandma and a little less like a grandma.”

Emma opens her mouth to call her niece an impertinent brat, when her left eye catches the corner of the house and sees that all her dying-to-get-planted flowers and bulbs and shrubs have slipped into the half-mast position.

Her natural impulse, as Stephie turns to leave, is to throw her hands to her heart and rush to them without thinking again about wild septuagenarian sex, pierced noses, family reunion planning sessions, annoying phone messages or the last twenty, and very true, words her niece has just spoken.

But Emma does not do that.

Instead she stands silently in front of the whimpering plants while she carefully rolls off her leather gloves, throws them into
the old wooden crate next to what seems like a mile-long garden hose, and then walks into her house, pours herself a huge glass of almost stale cooking sherry, does
not
let herself worry about the as yet undecided theme for the family reunion, and wonders what it would feel like to get a fern tattooed on her left hip because a nose ring is not allowed where she is employed.

And of course ignores, with great success, the notion that she lives like a woman twice her age.

The sister siblings. The Gilford girls. Joy, Erika, Debra and Emma.

The entire room, which today includes only three of the sisters and unfortunate Stephie, pauses while Debra’s question hangs in the air. Emma puts her elbows on the table, rests her chin on the palm of her hands, closes her eyes for just a moment and sees all four of them lined up, oldest to youngest, which amazingly also meant tallest to shortest. Even as girls growing up, there was no mistaking that they were sisters. There were four sets of blue eyes, four shades of blonde hair, four sets of long Gilford fingers, and when they stood in line for all those family photographs, the two oldest, Joy and Erika, would always tip their heads to the right and the last two, Debra and Emma, to the left. You would think the left leaners would be a team and the right leaners another, but it was always Joy and Debra pitted against Erika and Emma.

Joy, the oldest, who never, ever, let anyone forget that fact. And Debra, who as the third in line admitted feeling lost in the crowd on occasion but not lost enough not to let Emma, the baby, know that she knew more and could prove it.

Erika and Emma became a team during the years that Erika was home and the ten-and-a-half-year difference in their ages could have turned them into something more like mother and daughter but Emma always considered Erika a true sister, her one ally, a friend—even as Erika moved away and became the only sister brave enough to settle away from Higgins.

Somehow they have all managed to stay fairly trim and even though Emma is the only Gilford sister who has kept her hair long they have all also stayed blonde. There was that one year when Joy tried to be a redhead and Debra, of course, then had to try something new and briefly experienced the life of a brunette. The whole experiment lasted only through one dyeing cycle.

The four of them have also managed to keep their oldest-to-youngest height differential intact and even as Emma has always wished that she’d been taller, or maybe even the tallest, when she turned forty she felt as if she had joined some secret new sisters club because they suddenly all stopped calling her Shorty. Emma knows bodies start to shrink as they get a little older and she’s secretly waiting for the day when Debra’s two-inch difference evaporates.

They all have well-earned lines that move from the edges of their eyes and head south in varying degrees and to a variety of places. Emma has always considered laugh and eye lines sexy but she stands alone in the Gilford sisters’ parade on that opinion. She’s almost positive that Debra has had a little work done but she’s equally as certain that she’ll never have the courage to ask her.

The long beautiful fingers have scars, but all forty of them are still there and there is also this one other thing. All four of them have a series of freckles somewhere on the top half of their backs that Marty has always told them is the Gilford brand. She said their father had it, his father and sister, and his grandfather, too, and she’s proven that it’s some kind of funky family trait by finding similar freckle patterns on several other relatives.

Sometimes, like now when Debra is being an ass, Emma
reminds herself of those freckles and that no matter what Debra or Joy or Erika say or do they are still sisters. Sisters who have so much of the same stuff they have always had.

Erika was always the most daring. Number Two sister is the one who protested in high school when girls were not allowed to play sports, went to college out of state, dared to marry a divorced man with a child, and became a respected high school teacher. Debra, Sister Number Three, who always had the biggest mouth, became a bossy investment expert, mother of two strikingly lovely daughters, and managed to marry a man who doesn’t mind if she stands up at brunch and asks embarrassing questions.

Joy, the darling oldest daughter, still played that card way too often as she bossed around her quiet husband, Stephie and her two brothers, and pretty much anyone else, including the three hundred men and women Sister Number One supervises as a department head at a company in Charleston.

Before she dares to analyze herself, Emma drops her hands and looks at the two other Gilford sisters at the brunch, who are obviously now women. As Marty bangs cupboards in the kitchen, Emma
really
looks at them like she has not looked at them in a long time.

Debra is still standing with her empty glass in her hand, looking as if she might die of thirst. She’s also looking like she has missed about three appointments with her hairstylist. Emma is shocked to see gray hair cascading from Debra’s center part and three inches into her brown-and-blonde highlights. She’s either been too busy investing money and worrying about her next drink or she’s broken every mirror in the house. Emma decides it would be hard for anyone, even a close friend or a sister, to tell Debra she looks like hell.

When she looks closer, Emma realizes that the usually put-together Debra looks like hell everywhere. She’s normally dressed
to the nines, because God forbid you can’t not look like you are meeting the Queen of England in ten minutes. Today, however, she’s wearing an old white tank top, brown elastic-waisted shorts, and she doesn’t even have on earrings. Hungover, perhaps?

Joy looks a little better but she’s got bags under her eyes the size of quarters. Why isn’t she sleeping? Her right hand, as always, is hovering above her cell phone, which seems to beep every ten seconds with a new text message, presumably from one of her employees because after all, even on Sunday, Joy is indispensable. At least this sister dressed up a bit for the obligatory planning brunch. But under her lovely aqua blue sundress that matches her eyes, Emma can see her collarbones. Joy has lost weight.
A ton of weight
. Emma is suddenly so worried about Joy she almost misses the dried-up spider plant sitting on the table behind her that cannot go one more second without being watered.

Emma leaps up, grabs Stephie’s glass of water, and saves the plant as Debra says, “You just can’t control yourself, can you?” to Emma who wisely ignores her but silently agrees that yes, it’s impossible for her not to save a dying plant.