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You know those moments where everything is fine one moment and then the next things are utter chaos? For the Elliot Sisters, it was their mother’s cancer diagnosis. It shattered their lives completely.
For Anne Elliot, it meant that everything changed. There were more things to do around the house while her sisters – almost twenty and fifteen – did relatively nothing to keep things flowing smoothly.
She barely noticed her mother watching as Anne handled the laundry, cooking, and cleaning up the dishes afterward. Eliza Elliot let out an inner sigh as her middle daughter balanced taking care of everybody and her school work, letting her personal life flounder.
One afternoon, after hearing Anne on the phone with her best friend, Robin, as yet another excuse for canceling their movie plans slipped through her daughter’s lips, Eliza Elliot began to plan.
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“I don’t want to go to some beach house for the summer,” Anne explained as she picked up the dishes her sisters had left on the counters and in the sink and put them in the dishwasher. “I have too much to do.”
“This is the summer before your senior year,” her aunt and mother’s sister, Cassandra Russell, had countered. “You need to get some sun; you have been looking entirely too pale lately.”
“Mama needs me at home,” Anne retorted, ignoring her internal sarcastic rebuttal about always being pale.
“Beth can drive her to her appointments when your father is working.” She left unsaid, “... or whatever it is your father does in his home office all day.”
“Mary...”
“Mary is fifteen years old. She can pick up after herself.”
Anne looked pointedly around the room at the mess her sisters had left behind.
“They know you are going to clean up after them so they have no reason to do it themselves,” Aunt Cassie countered. Sadly, even to her own ears, the reassurance sounded hollow.
Shaking her head, Anne pointed out, “I had to start cleaning up after them because they weren’t doing it to begin with. I can’t let them overwhelm Mama with all of this. She needs to focus on getting better. She doesn’t need to worry if Mary put her cereal bowl in the sink like she was told or if Elizabeth is out looking for a job.”
Letting out a sigh, her aunt shook her head in frustration. “Anne Katarina Elliot, you are going out of town with me on your mother’s orders. Do you really think I want to be leaving my sister alone right now? No, I don’t. But I have business to attend to and my dear Eliza wants me to take you with me.”
“I don’t want to go,” Anne protested, again.
A cleared throat from the doorway interrupted their conversation. “Anne Elliot,” her mother stated in her commanding tone, “you are going to go with your aunt even if I have to pack your bags for you and shove you out the door.”
Anne paled even further. “I don’t want to leave you here.”
“Look,” Eliza Elliot maneuvered into the kitchen before sitting on one of the kitchen chairs. “Beth has dropped out of school in order to help out and all she is doing is helping your father. She can take on some of the responsibilities that you have taken it upon yourself to handle. She’s twenty. You are only seventeen...”
“I’ll be eighteen in August...” Anne interjected.
“Yes, two months from now.” Shaking her head, Eliza studied her daughter. “You are too young to be taking care of your sisters like this. Mary is fifteen and she can put her own dishes in the dishwasher. Beth can unload the dishwasher. They can cook and clean and do everything else that you have been doing.”
Soft-spoken Anne said nothing. What could she say? No matter what her mother said, they all knew that Beth and Mary would not do their share of the work. Instead, she whispered, “Why do you want me to go so badly?’
Drawing a breath deep enough to cause her to start coughing, Eliza took the opportunity to consider her words carefully. “Because,” she started to say when she had gotten her coughing under control, “you are the one this is going to hurt the most and I don’t want you to watch this.”
“I’m weak,” was all Anne took from her mother’s words.
“Sensitive,” Eliza corrected.
“You take things harder than the others,” Aunt Cassandra added.
“Your father is the same way,” Eliza tried to add.
Anne snorted. “Father is like Beth. He is all business and only cares about appearances.”
Once upon a time, Anne had considered working with her father in his law offices until the business relationship he’d had with his former business partner and brother had been dissolved. Elliot and Elliot, Attorneys at Law was no more. Now it was merely W. Elliot, Attorney at Law and A. Elliot, Attorney at Law. Two signs on one building as the brothers divided the building in half – an inheritance from their own lawyer father – and their Uncle Warren had installed a new door on his half of the building. One brother would handle Business Law and the other brother would handle Family Law.
This also meant that the Elliot Sisters no longer saw their cousin, William Elliot, that much anymore either.
Anne suspected that Beth had chosen the college she was attending in an attempt to run into Will; her sister had harbored a crush on the guy until the rift in the partnership meant that the two brothers never dined together anymore.
Once, trying to understand, she had asked Beth about it. “He’s our cousin,” she pointed out.
Beth, with her habitual eye roll, had retorted, “He’s adopted. We aren’t related by blood.”
“It’s still gross,” Anne replied.
It wasn’t until halfway through the second semester of her freshman year that Beth learned that Will had transferred to a school with a better medical program. He had decided against being a lawyer like his father.
“Your father is many things,” Eliza hedged, regaining her daughter’s distracted train of thought. “He is a good provider as long as he remembers the budget.” She didn’t say that he had become focused on his career over his family after their son had died when he was five. Anne and Cassandra both knew it.
“So, you want me to go to the beach for the summer...”
“Just four weeks,” her aunt interrupted. “Or so. Just until my business there is concluded.”
“... And hope that nothing happens to you, that Beth and Mary learn how to cook and clean, and that Father doesn’t blow the budget too badly.”
“You are seventeen,” her mother stated, again. “You are too young for all of this to be weighing down so heavily on your shoulders. I will be fine; the doctors even said that I’m reacting positively towards the chemo. I’ll still be here when you come back. I’ll still be here for your Senior year. I will be here to see you go to your prom, graduate, go off to college, get married, and have children of your own.”
“Okay,” Anne conceded after several long moments. “I’ll go, but only because I can’t win with the two of you teamed up against me.”
“Great!” Aunt Cassandra moved to hug her. “We leave in three days!”
“Three days!” Anne exclaimed. “I won’t be ready in three days!”
“That’s okay, dear,” her aunt purred. “I already took the liberty of packing some of your clothes and buying you a few new bathing suits.”
Anne closed her eyes, almost missing her mother’s laugh. “I want you to return happy and tanned. No more overworked, tired, and pasty Anne Elliot in my house.”
“Yes, Mama,” Anne sighed.
