The Wednesday Sisters(83)

“But I want you to come with me,” Arlene said.

Kath felt herself sinking into her high heels. “With you?”

“With me,” Arlene said. “I'm glad to see you've learned to stand up for yourself, by the way, Kath. Literally.”

Kath sat back in her chair, remembering her daddy's voice: You keep letting your mouth overload your tail, Katherine Claire, and you surely will live to regret.

“Don't look so sheepish,” Arlene said. “I still want you to come with me. Yes, even after that. Good thing I stopped you before you started telling me what you really think of me, eh?” She laughed her genuine laugh, the one Kath would sometimes hear when Arlene was reading a manuscript that Kath, too, had found laugh-out-loud funny, which was the rarest of finds.

“On second thought, go ahead, look sheepish,” Arlene said, still laughing. Then a moment later, “‘Cocks my pistol’? Damn, Kath, if only my authors could express themselves half as colorfully as you!”

Kath was flattered, she really was, but she couldn't possibly move to New York, not with Lee here. True, part of her thought that might be a great solution—move to New York and start over by herself. Leave Lee behind. But she couldn't bear to move Anna Page and Lee-Lee and Lacy away from their daddy. And how would she survive without the Wednesday Sisters?

“Gosh, I would just about move a mountain to keep working for you, Arlene. But I can't move to New York. I just can't.”

“New York?” Arlene smiled, not the professional smile she pasted on when she met with the most unpleasant of her authors, but a genuine one that went with her laugh. “I'm not going to New York,” she said. “I thought you knew that. I'm opening a West Coast office. Here. And I have plans for you, Kath. Plans that do not include letting you go off to work for someone else.”



IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to celebrate anything that spring with Hope's fragile little future overshadowing everything in the Wednesday Sisters' lives. How can you bear to feel good for even a moment when your friend is in so much pain? Still, when I received the Michelangelo's Ghost galley proofs—my typeset novel, the way it would look between hard covers—I did feel something. I turned to the dedication page: “to Danny and Maggie and Davy, and to the Wednesday Sisters.” Then to the first page: “Chapter One.” I read the opening sentence. It read like a novel.

I thought of Ally as I sat wiping my face to keep tears from dripping on the pages. I imagined her sitting at the hospital with Hope, reading quietly to her. I imagined what her book would look like when it was set, too, after it had sold, which I decided then it had to, it really had to. And I imagined Brett's book, too, and Linda's stories gathered into a collection, and even something by Kath. I imagined walking into Kepler's or Books Inc. or Stacey's and finding our beautiful books all on the shelves. I imagined the five of us on the bestseller list, numbers one through five. I imagined myself at the top first, but then I put Ally there instead, and my own name second. I wondered if I'd be jealous. I wondered if the other Wednesday Sisters were really, deep in their hearts where they wouldn't even admit it to themselves, jealous. I knew I would have been. I knew I would have felt the same way I'd felt watching my brothers drive off to college. Not jealous as in wanting to take it away from them, but jealous as in wanting it for myself as well.

I began to read aloud, my words in my voice like Ally's words in hers. It's a surprisingly different way of reading. You become more focused on the rhythms. You find all sorts of places where you stumble. You even see typos you never saw before. I remember how silly I felt at first, how I closed myself in the bathroom and turned on the fan lest Danny or the kids hear me and think I'd gone off my rocker. But then I imagined Ally reading in that intensive care unit, and I read on.



THE SURFACTANT the doctors were giving Hope would not help her breathe, though no one knew that then; it would be another ten years before effective artificial surfactants were developed, far too late to help Hope. But she was one of the lucky ones. Slowly, gradually, she turned the corner, needing less and less oxygen from the machine until, finally, she was breathing on her own.

Ally had not yet done anything to get ready for the baby when she found out Hope was going to be released. She didn't have a crib or a changing table or even diapers. We'd thought we'd have a baby shower for her, but then she'd gone into the hospital and it wasn't clear the baby would be born alive, then if she would survive. So the minute we learned Hope was coming home, we all just started bringing things to Ally's house. Brett brought her changing table, because she was done with it, or if it turned out she wasn't, she could always get it back. I loaned her my crib and my baby buggy. Kath had the most beautiful little antique bassinet that she insisted Ally use for this special child of hers. We all chipped in money, too, and Linda and I went out and bought everything you could need for a baby: diapers and baby powder and pacifiers, a receiving blanket, pajamas, a cute little baby hat. And bottles. We knew Ally's milk would have come in while Hope was in intensive care, and it would have dried up. But most mothers used bottles then, anyway. We didn't know things like how very good that first stuff that comes before the milk, the colostrum, is for babies. We assumed the formulas developed by male scientists in jackets and ties must be better for our babies than anything we girls could produce.