The Wednesday Sisters(92)

“WHAT IF I SOUND like a blithering idiot?” Brett said the following Sunday, a foggy morning that made it impossible to tell when the sun had actually risen. Each great new development on her book—she was going to be in the Book-of-the-Month Club, and her publisher was planning to run ads—was no longer cause for celebration but rather cause for more anxiety. She was so stressed that it was hard to imagine she'd ever thought she might be calm enough to make it all the way to the moon, much less to sleep before sticking her little piggy toes out. Not that you couldn't fall off a cliff when everything seemed to be going your way. Look at the Cubs that season: first place going into the All-Star break, and they ended the season in fifth, a late-season slide if ever there was one. Which I supposed could still happen to Brett, though I couldn't really imagine it would.

“What if I make a complete fool of myself right there on national television?” Brett said. “What if I open my mouth and nothing comes out?”

We leaned in closer over the rough wood table, the fog moist against our faces.

“You're going to be a star, Brett,” Linda said. “I know you are.”

Which was what I wanted to say, but the words were stuck deep in my gut, beside my disappointment over Michelangelo's Ghost.

“You are,” Kath agreed. “You're one of the most articulate people I know. And your book is wonderful. It's going to sell like hotcakes at the county fair. How could such a fine li'l book not sell like hotcakes?”

Brett's green eyes under that strawberry hair flicked to me, and just as quickly flicked away.

“You're going to do great,” I said, working the words over the thick clay of my tongue. That look of Brett's was the closest any of the Wednesday Sisters had ever come to confronting the fact that my novel had bombed. And my college applications were faring no better: I'd been wait-listed at Stanford, and UC Berkeley somehow had failed to receive my second recommendation until after the deadline. (“I'm sorry, Mrs. O'Mara, but our deadlines must be firm.”)

“Just be yourself and we'll all be bumping along on your coattails, Brett,” Linda said.

“If you start to get the jitters, just remember the coffin photo,” Ally said.

“Just think of that big ol' memorial that will be standing right here in this park someday,” Kath said. “The one that says the Wednesday Sisters first started scribbling in this very spot.”





JUST AS THE SUN was lightening the horizon a few Sundays later, with the park still deep in shadow, Kath said, out of nowhere, “The lady's stepson, her husband's son? He hauled that poor lonely ol' widow right into the courtroom.” She was staring off into space, to where it seemed you could almost see the mansion still standing there in the dim morning light, behind the majestic palm. “With her husband, his own father, barely cold in the grave,” she said. “And her daughter barely dead, too. He liked to left her without a penny.”

Linda, sitting next to Kath, put her arm around her and rested her head on Kath's shoulder. She'd abandoned the braid but still wore the cap, her hair perfectly cut underneath. “Lee's not going to leave you with nothing, Kath,” she said. “And even if—”

But Kath was already pulling away, shrugging Linda's friendly head from her shoulder. Linda's hat shifted. And so did her hair.

Brett said, “Oh,” her small mouth puckering as she stared, startled, at Linda, who was grabbing at her shifted hair as if Kath had wounded her.

Kath, not noticing, looked wounded, too, her face screwing up so that her big chin stuck out bigger, almost as though she wanted someone to take a swing so she could swing back. “You don't have any idea, Linda!” she said. “You and your perfect relationship with your perfect husband, you don't—”

She stopped as suddenly as she'd started, and, like the rest of us, stared at Linda still grasping her cap.

“Linda?” Kath said. “Oh, Linda.”

The first hint of sun cut through the branches of the trees lining the east side of the park, subtle red across the eyesore of rocky dirt. It was Linda's hair under that cap, but it wasn't. It sat not quite straight on her head.

I saw then how gaunt her face had become, how hard her cheekbones jutted against her skin.

She straightened her cap and her hair together, then crossed her arms in front of her. “It's from the chemotherapy. It makes you lose your hair sometimes.”

She didn't cry. She just sat there, a defiant look in her blue-green-purple-gold eyes.

I didn't cry, either. None of us dared cry.

“So,” she said. “So.”

The lump hadn't been nothing; she'd lied to us about that.