Zuri fell asleep at ten-forty across two folding chairs with Khalil’s suit jacket over her legs. She was still holding the plastic cake knife Dillon had given her as a badge of office. That’s how I knew the night had gone well. A six-year-old doesn’t sleep with a weapon at a party she hated.
We’d driven to Joplin’s American Legion post that Saturday, September 12th, expecting the worst. In July, Simone had phoned to announce her engagement to a man from “a church fish fry in June.” My sister has never been inside a church on purpose, and she picks fish out of fish sticks. For two months nobody met him. He was on a late job. His dad was in rehab. We’d meet him at the wedding.
Then we met him at the wedding, and Dillon turned out to be a thirty-seven-year-old electrician who knotted his own tie and let my daughter guard the cake. His parents, Jody and Teri, were lovely. Mom danced with Teri to Motown. Dad gave a short speech about Simone cutting the line since birth, and the whole room laughed, me included, the sister.
At about 11:50, out in the lot, Teri hugged Mom goodbye and said, “I hope nobody’s sore about how we did it.”
Mom had no idea what she meant. Teri looked at our faces and went pale.
“Wait. Nobody told you?”
They’d married at the courthouse in February. Dillon thought we knew. Simone came across the gravel barefoot with a beer, and Mom asked her if it was true, and she said they’d meant to tell us after the trip. Then Dad saw the bruise inside her elbow, old and going yellow, and all three of us looked at Dillon’s hands at once.
“That’s not what that is,” Dillon said.
My sister put her beer on the hood of Dad’s truck and looked only at me.
“I was sick.”
Table Six
Nobody said anything for a while. The DJ dropped a cord. One of Dillon’s cousins said “Jesus” under his breath and got in the truck.
The hall manager came out the side door at about a quarter after twelve. He was a heavy man in a Legion polo with a ring of keys on his belt the size of a dinner plate. He looked at us the way a man looks at a family standing in a parking lot at midnight with nobody moving, and he did the math.
“I’m locking up at twelve-forty,” he said. “Y’all can have twenty minutes inside. I’m not mopping around you, though.”
“Thank you,” Mom said, like he’d given her a kidney.
So we went back in. Eight of us at table six, under the paper bells. Me and Khalil, Mom and Dad, Simone and Dillon, Teri and Jody. Zuri was still asleep on her chairs by the wall with the cake knife. The chair covers were half off. Somebody’s corsage was in the punch.
Simone sat with her feet up on the rung, her dress bunched in her lap. Dillon sat next to her and didn’t touch her. I could see him not touching her. It looked like work.
“Sick how,” Dad said.
“Dad.”
“Sick how, Simone.”
She looked at the tablecloth. “Lymphoma. Hodgkin’s. Stage two.”
Mom made a sound I’ve never heard her make. It was like a laugh that fell down the stairs.
“Since when?” I said.
“They told me in December.”
December. I did the math the way you do math when you’re drowning, counting fingers in my head. Christmas. She came to Christmas. She brought store-bought rolls and said she had a cold and left before pie. I gave her a hard time about the rolls. I said, “Who brings Sister Schubert’s to a family Christmas.” I remember being pleased with that line.
“I started hurting in the summer before,” Simone said. “Last summer. My back, my chest. Itching like crazy. I thought it was stress. I’d lost the dentist job in the fall and I figured I was just a mess. Then I found a lump on my neck and I went in for bloodwork. September.”
“September last year,” Dillon said, quietly. Not to us. To her, like he was helping her keep her place.
“I was in the lab waiting room,” Simone said. “Outpatient. With a number in my hand. And he was there with Jody.”
Jody lifted two fingers off the table. “Cardiac rehab,” he said. “They draw blood on you every time you breathe.”
“Your dad’s in rehab,” Mom said. She said it slow. “That was true.”
“Some of it was true,” Simone said.
“The fish fry?”
“There’s a vending machine by the lab that sells Goldfish crackers,” Dillon said. “She was eating them. I said something stupid about a fish fry. That’s all that is.”
Khalil made a noise that might have been a laugh if anybody had let it. I kicked him under the table, and he took it like a man who’d earned it.
Simone talked for a while after that. She talked to the tablecloth mostly. Chemo started in January. ABVD, she said, like we’d know, and Teri nodded because Teri did know. Every two weeks. The bruise inside her elbow was from the last blood draw, Wednesday, three days ago. Her veins were shot, she said. They had to dig.
“Wednesday,” Dad said. He had his hands folded on the table like he was waiting to be called on. “What was Wednesday.”
“The scan,” Simone said. “The one after. To see if it worked.”
Nobody breathed. Even the manager, who was wiping down the bar with his back to us and his ears out like a satellite dish, stopped wiping.
“It’s clear,” Simone said. “It came back clear.”
Mom put both hands over her face.
I’d like to say I cried. I didn’t. I got mad. It came up from my feet. My sister had had cancer for nine months and had gotten better from it, and she’d done all of it without me, the whole thing start to finish, like a movie I’d been told about later.
“And the courthouse,” I said. “February. Why.”
Simone finally looked up.
“Because I lost my insurance with the job,” she said. “And the bills were already forty-something thousand by January and they were going to stop scheduling me. Dillon has the union plan. You can’t get on it if you’re not married. So we got married.”
“Thursday the twenty-sixth,” Teri said. She said it like it was a birthday. “Jody and I signed as witnesses. I brought carnations from the Price Cutter. She wore black pants. He wore his work boots because he had a job at two.”
“I took a long lunch,” Dillon said.
Dad turned his head and looked at Dillon for a long time. Dillon let him.
“You married my daughter so she could have chemo,” Dad said.
“Yes sir.”
“Was that all it was?”
“No sir,” Dillon said. “That was the excuse.”
Dad nodded, once, and looked back down at his hands.
Mom took her hands off her face. Her mascara had gone everywhere, and she looked like a raccoon who’d been through something. She reached across Teri to take Simone’s wrist, the arm with the bruise, very carefully, like it might go off.
“Why didn’t you call me,” she said. “Honey. Why didn’t you just call me.”
Simone pulled her wrist back.
“I did, Mom,” she said. “I called you in February.”
Rosario’s Brunch
Mom sat back in her chair.
“No you didn’t,” she said.
“I did.”
“I would remember that.”
“It was a Saturday,” Simone said. “Aunt Rosario’s retirement brunch. You were at the Olive Garden. I could hear her laughing in the background.”
Mom’s mouth opened. I watched her go back and find it. You could see her walk into that Olive Garden in her head, and pick up her phone, and hear it.
“You said you were in a mess,” Mom said slowly. “You said you needed to talk about something big.”
“I said I was scared, Mom. I said I was scared and I needed to talk to you about something serious.”
“And I thought…”
“You said, ‘If this is about money, ask your father.'”
The manager set down his rag.
“And you hung up,” Mom said.
“I hung up,” Simone said. “Because it was about money. Kind of. It was about money and it was about dying, and you’d already told me which one to take to Dad.”
“That is not fair.”
“I know it’s not fair. I’m saying what you said.”
Mom stood up. Her chair went back and hit the one behind it, and the one behind that went over. Zuri stirred on her two folding chairs and said “the cake” in her sleep and went back down.
“I have given you money your whole life,” Mom said. Her voice was going up and up. “You lost the dentist job, I sent you rent. Your car, I paid for that transmission. Every time you called me it was a number, Simone, every single time, and I’m supposed to know that this one, at Rosario’s, in the middle of the toast, this one time it’s cancer?”
“Vicki,” Dad said.
“No. No, Percy. She lied to us for seven months. She let you stand up in front of eighty people and talk about cutting in line, and she let me dance with this woman who knew, and everybody knew but us, the ones who…”
She stopped. She was pointing at Teri. Teri, to her credit, didn’t move.
“I sat with her in the infusion room,” Teri said. “Every other Tuesday. Eight hours some days. She asked for you every time, Vicki.”
Mom’s hand came down.
“She’d get her phone out,” Teri said. “Halfway through. Look at it. Put it back. I’d say, honey, you want me to call her? And she’d say no, Mom’s at work, Mom’ll make the face.”
“What face?” Mom said.
Nobody answered her. Everybody at that table knew the face. I knew it best. I’ve made it. It’s the face our mother makes when one of us is a problem she’s going to solve. Lips together, eyes up, a little nod like she’s adding a column. You can feel yourself turn into a chore in front of her.
“I didn’t want the face,” Simone said. “Not about this. I couldn’t do this and also do you being disappointed in me for getting it.”
“I would never be disappointed in you for getting cancer,” Mom said.
“You were disappointed in me for store-bought rolls,” Simone said.
I put my hand up. “That was me.”
“It was both of you.”
Fair. That was fair. I took it.
“And the wedding,” I said. Because somebody had to. “Today. All this. Why.”
Simone put her bare feet down flat on the Legion’s carpet.
“Because I wanted one day,” she said, “where you all looked at me like a normal person. Like a bride. Not the sick one. If I told you in February, you’d have been at every appointment with a notebook. Dad would have read about it on the internet at four in the morning. Autumn would have cried in front of Zuri. And the second it was clear, I’d still be the one who had it. I’d be that forever. So I booked the Legion for after the scan, and I got my dress at the Dillard’s outlet, and I thought, I’ll get one day. Then I’ll tell them. After the trip.”
“After the trip,” Dad said.
“We’re driving to Eureka Springs Monday. Three nights. Then I was going to tell you.”
Dad stood up.
He didn’t knock anything over. He just stood, the way he used to stand at the end of his route when his knees told him about it. He walked over to the bar, and the manager stepped aside without anyone asking him, and Dad picked up the folded paper he’d left there after his speech. His speech. He’d written it on the back of a Casey’s receipt.
He came back and set it in front of my mother.
“Read the second line,” he said.
Mom picked it up. She read it out loud because she couldn’t help herself. “‘She doesn’t ask for help, which is how you know she needs it.'”
“I cut that,” Dad said. “Too sad for a wedding. That’s what you said, Vicki. You read it Thursday and said cut that.”
Mom held the receipt in both hands.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“You didn’t want to know,” Dad said. “She called. You told her to call me. And she didn’t call me, because I’m the one you send people to when you don’t want to be bothered, and she knows that, and she didn’t want to be a bother.”
That was the most words I’d heard my father say in a row since my wedding.
Mom looked at him, and then at Simone, and then, God help her, at Teri, who’d sat eight hours in a chair next to her daughter every other Tuesday while she was at work.
And my mother, who once argued a Walmart manager into tears over a coupon, folded in half.
She went down on her knees on the Legion carpet next to Simone’s chair, in her good dress, with her knees that need replacing. She put her face against Simone’s bare feet and she cried, out loud, the way you cry at a funeral when nobody’s watching you anymore. She said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby, I was eating breadsticks,” which is not a thing anybody should ever have to hear their mother say and which I will think about until I die.
Simone put her hand on the back of Mom’s head.
Dillon finally put his hand on Simone’s back. Flat. Same as during the speech. I understood it now. He’d been holding her up all night.
I got up, went around the table, and got down on the floor too, because I wasn’t going to be the only one in this family still sitting in a chair.
“Four minutes,” I said into my sister’s knee. “You had four minutes on me, and you used them all on this.”
“I know,” she said.
“You don’t get to do it alone again.”
“I know.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
She grabbed a fistful of my hair, hard, the way she did when we were nine.
“I won’t do it alone again, Autumn.”
The lights over the bar clicked off.
“Twelve-forty,” the manager said, and it was gentle, and I hated him and loved him for it.
Monday Morning
By Monday the bruise on her arm had gone mostly green.
They left from Mom and Dad’s driveway, because Mom said if they were taking a honeymoon somebody was going to see them off from a real house, not a parking lot. Dillon’s truck was backed up to the garage. The same garage where Mom sat in her car for twenty minutes in July with the engine off. She walked past it Monday morning with a cooler of ham sandwiches and didn’t look at it once.
I came over at seven with Zuri, who’d been promised she could put the JUST MARRIED sign in the back window, even though it was technically six months late. Khalil came because there was coffee.
Teri and Jody pulled up at a quarter after. Teri had a manila envelope.
“You asked,” she said to Mom.
Mom had asked. Sunday afternoon, on the phone, for an hour. Khalil heard it from the porch and said it was the longest Mom had ever spent talking to someone without telling them what to do. I said give her time.
Inside the envelope were pictures from the courthouse. Teri had printed them at Walgreens. There were four.
The first one was the clerk’s office, fluorescent light, a flag in the corner. The second was Dillon in his work boots signing something. The third was Jody holding the grocery-store carnations like they might bite him.
The fourth was Simone.
She was in black pants and a gray sweater. Her hair was gone. Not thin. Gone. There was a scarf in her lap like she’d taken it off just for the picture. She was eating Goldfish out of a bag, and she was laughing with her whole face, at something off to the side of the camera.
“What’s she laughing at?” I said.
“Jody,” Teri said. “He dropped the ring.”
“Rolled under a radiator,” Jody said. “County courthouse. Took two deputies.”
Mom held that picture for a long time. Her thumb went across Simone’s bald head, once, then back.
“She’s so skinny,” she said.
“She was,” Teri said. “She’s better.”
Mom didn’t make the face. I watched for it. It didn’t come. She just looked, the way you look at a picture of somebody you didn’t get to sit beside.
Then she did a thing I didn’t expect.
She took her phone out of her back pocket and peeled the case off. Mom has a clear case, the cheap kind, and behind the plastic for a year now has been Zuri’s kindergarten picture, the one where Zuri’s missing both front teeth and looks like a jack-o’-lantern who’s just done something wrong.
Mom slid the courthouse picture in on top of it.
“Grandma,” Zuri said. “That’s MY spot.”
“You’re still in there, baby,” Mom said. “You’re just underneath. You can be underneath your Aunt Simone for a little while.”
Zuri thought it over like a union negotiator. “Can I see the cake knife picture later?”
“You can see whatever you want.”
Mom snapped the case back on and put it in her pocket and patted it, and she didn’t take her hand off that pocket for the rest of the morning.
Simone came out of the house in jeans and flip-flops with a duffel bag over her shoulder. Her hair’s grown back a little. It’s dark and curly and short, and she’s been hiding it under a wig since spring because she didn’t want us asking. Monday she didn’t have the wig. She stood on the porch steps for a second like she was waiting for someone to say something.
Dad said, “Looks good.”
“It looks like a chia pet,” she said.
“It looks good,” Dad said again, louder, and that was the end of the discussion.
She came down the steps to me. She had a plastic Walgreens bag in her other hand, and she pushed it at my chest.
“What’s this?”
“Open it.”
Inside was a pair of black tights. L’eggs. Size B. Opened, worn, washed, folded small.
“Uncle Carson’s funeral,” Simone said. “2014. I told you they ran.”
“They didn’t run?”
“They didn’t run. I just liked them.”
I held up the tights. Twelve years. She’d had my tights for twelve years, through two apartments and a layoff and a cancer and a courthouse wedding, and the only thing she’d ever been able to give back was this.
“You’re unbelievable,” I said.
“I’m four minutes ahead of you,” she said. “I’m allowed.”
Dillon loaded the cooler. Teri cried and fixed her own collar like it had a corsage on it. Jody walked around the truck kicking the tires because that’s what men his age do in driveways. Khalil handed Zuri the JUST MARRIED sign and lifted her up to tape it in the back window, and she stuck it on upside down, and nobody fixed it.
Simone got in the passenger side. Mom came around to the window. I thought she’d say something about seatbelts. Or traffic on 62. Or calling when they got there. That’s what Mom says. That’s the face’s job.
Mom leaned into the window and took her phone out of her pocket. She held the case up against the glass so Simone could see herself, bald and laughing in a clerk’s office, eating Goldfish.
“Call me from Eureka Springs,” Mom said. “Not about money. About anything.”
Simone put her hand flat on the glass over the picture.
“I’ll call you about everything,” she said.
Dillon started the truck. Zuri ran after it to the end of the driveway, waving the plastic cake knife over her head like she was still on duty.
If this one got to you, send it to the sister you haven’t called in a while.
For another painful father-daughter wedding moment, read “My Father Held Out His Hand and I Shook It Like a Stranger”. And for more twin-sister family drama, see the story of my twin taking my condo key and her move into my condo.
