I pulled Moby Van into the driveway of my mother’s house, right behind a silver Chevy compact with a rental car sticker. Home. The yard had been mowed—Aunt Mercy must have hired a neighborhood kid—but my mother’s beloved flower garden across the front was thick with weeds.
No, no, can’t let the weeds take over! Heading straight for the flower bed, I started yanking weeds right and left.
Dandy tumbled out of the driver’s side door I’d left open and ran all around the yard, sniffing and whining. “He knows he’s home,” Jodi murmured, climbing rather stiffly out of the front seat and sliding the side door open so Lucy could get out.
The front door opened. “You made it!” Aunt Mercy beamed. Her silver-rinsed hair was cut in its usual youthful pixie cut. “Quit pulling those weeds, Gabby Fairbanks, and come give me a hug . . . Oh, oh, Dandy, yes, yes, you can come in too . . .” She turned and called into the house. “Celeste! Honor! Gabby is here!”
My oldest sister appeared two seconds later, suntanned and freckled, wavy brunette hair caught at the back of her neck with a wooden barrette, wearing a black tank top and khaki cargo pants cropped at the knee. She gave me a quick hug. “Hey there, Gabby. Talk about timing. We just got here thirty minutes ago . . . Oh! Who’s this?” Celeste’s hazel eyes looked over my shoulder, and I realized Jodi and Lucy were still standing on the front walk.
Uh-oh. Didn’t I tell my sisters I wasn’t driving alone? “Come on up here, you guys. Celeste, this is Jodi Baxter, my friend who graciously offered to help me drive the van from Chicago . . . and, uh, Lucy Tucker, a friend of Mom’s who’s been taking care of Dandy—kind of a long story. Jodi and Lucy, this is my dad’s baby sister, Aunt Mercy, and my sister Celeste . . . Say, where’s Honor?”
Celeste nodded a mute greeting to my guests and jerked a thumb inward. “Living room. Kinda broken up.”
Aunt Mercy, bless her, rose to the occasion. “Well, come in, come in, girls. We’ve got the air on; it’s cooler inside. Did you all eat? Because I’ve got a pasta salad in the refrigerator and garlic bread in the oven. Would you all like some iced tea?”
“Oh, good,” I heard Lucy mumble, as we trailed my aunt inside. “Been a couple hours since I et.”
I let Aunt Mercy herd Jodi and Lucy into the kitchen at the back of the house, while I detoured into the living room. My sister Honor was curled up on the couch, her face a blotchy red, a pile of tissues in her lap. Her screaming blonde hair, complete with green and red streaks, was even longer than the last time I’d seen her. She’d added skinny braids hanging down in front of her ears with tiny feathers and beads tied at the ends. A graceful blue dolphin tattoo dove from the top of her shoulder halfway down her bare upper arm. Probably had some mystical meaning. I wanted to shake my head. She looked like a cross between an aging hippie and a runaway kid on Rush Street in Chicago.
“Oh, Gabby,” Honor wailed, throwing both arms around my neck as I bent down. “Can you bear it, coming home, and Mama not being here?”
I endured Honor’s awkward hug for half a minute, then untangled myself. I could hear Dandy’s nails clicking on the wood floors, going from room to room, whining, then scrambling upstairs to the second floor. At that moment, I felt worse for Dandy’s loss than I did for me and my sisters.
“We’ve got company,” Celeste informed Honor, raising an eyebrow at me reproachfully.
Honor’s red-rimmed eyes flew open. “Who?”
I tipped my chin up defensively. “I couldn’t drive Mom’s casket all the way from Chicago by myself.”
Celeste flopped in an easy chair, frowning. “But who’s the old lady? I mean, she looks like something you found on the street.”
I almost laughed. Bingo. “It’s a long story. But please, be kind—”
We heard the dog scrambling back down the stairs, and then he appeared in the living room, staring up at me, brow wrinkled, whimpering. “Oh!” Honor gasped. “What happened to Dandy? Where’d those long scars come from?”
I sighed, settled down on the carpet with my back against Celeste’s easy chair, and pulled Dandy down beside me. “Like I said, it’s a really long story.”
We talked until midnight, my sisters and I—me doing most of the talking as I tried to tell my far-flung siblings what had hap pened since I’d realized Mom couldn’t stay alone any longer and had taken her back to Chicago with me for an indefinite visit.
Aunt Mercy graciously entertained Jodi and Lucy while we talked, put Lucy in the small “summer bedroom” off the back porch, made up the pull-out couch in my dad’s study upstairs for Jodi, leaving the two bedrooms we girls had shared growing up for Celeste, Honor, and me. “I’ll be back in the morning,” she’d whispered, poking her head into the living room to explain the sleeping arrangements. I heard Lucy calling Dandy, and the dog disappeared. I wondered if he’d sleep in my mom’s bedroom, as he’d always done before, or with Lucy.
I bet on Lucy tonight.
“Wish you had let us know what was going on.” Celeste’s scowl was in danger of becoming a permanent fixture. “It’s bad enough that Philip threw you out, but Mom . . . !” She cocked an imaginary rifle and “aimed” it at a picture on the wall. “I think I want to kill him.”
I gaped at her. “Let you know?! Not like I didn’t try. Neither of you guys is very good at returning phone calls. Or living within reach of a cell phone signal.”
“Mom was really staying in a homeless shelter?” Honor said it like she’d just driven out of the fog. “That’s . . . that’s awful. You should have sent her to live with me, or . . . or something.”
I grabbed a throw pillow and smacked my California-dreaming sister with it. “Hey! I tried to get both of you out here in June for a family reunion. If you’d made half an effort, we could have made a decision about Mom together. But that didn’t work out, did it? So quit blaming me. I did what I had to do.” I folded my arms tight across my chest. Both my sisters stared at me. The wall clock ticked in the silence that followed. Finally I let my arms fall to my lap, along with the tears I’d been pushing down all evening. “Didn’t know my whole life was going to unravel.”
Our emotions spent, we finally flicked off lights and crept upstairs to our bedrooms—Celeste to her old room with the double bed that she’d earned as the “eldest” child, Honor and me to our old bedroom with the single beds and matching faded bedspreads. It had been a really, really long day . . . but somehow all the frayed and frazzled ends of my life felt tucked in for the moment, like the loose ends of yarn my mother used to tuck into her knitting.
Aunt Mercy showed up at ten the next morning with a manila folder tucked under her arm. “Hope you girls got a chance to sleep in.” She poured herself a cup of coffee, pulled out a chair at the kitchen table where Honor, Celeste, and I sat in the rumpled T-shirts and shorts we’d slept in, and pushed the folder toward us.
“Your parents’ will. Your dad left a copy with me, and I suppose the lawyer has the original. I made an appointment for you girls at his office on Monday at ten.” She looked from one to the other of us. “Hope no one has to leave before then.”
Honor groaned. “My plane leaves from Billings late Tuesday afternoon, and it took us eight hours to drive from the airport—right, Celeste?”
Celeste nodded and picked up the manila envelope. “Yeah, but we can leave early Tuesday. Monday’s fine.”
“Oh, brother,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. “It’s going to take longer than that to deal with”—I waved my hand in a big circle that took in the whole house—“all this stuff.”
“It’s only Saturday, Gabby. That’s practically three days.” Celeste frowned. “Where are your city buddies? They could help, you know.”
“They are helping! Who do you think made the coffee before we came down? And they’ve taken Dandy . . . somewhere. Probably to stay out of our way.”
“Girls.” Aunt Mercy eyed us. “You should look at the will. You will have some decisions to make.”
Celeste slid the will out of the folder. “Okay, they named me executor when Mom died—but I understand you’ve got power of attorney, Gabby?” She frowned at me. “How does that work?”
“Don’t worry, Celeste. That was just because of Mom’s dementia.” I sighed. “Just read the will. The lawyer can figure it out.”
The will held no surprises. Divide everything equally three ways after paying any outstanding bills and funeral expenses. That sounded hopeful. Maybe my account could get reimbursed for the trip after all. I could sure use that.
Celeste stuffed the simple form back in the envelope. “Mom had . . . what? An annuity she was living on? Maybe some savings . . .” Her eyes roved around the house. “The big thing will be selling the house. Can’t do that in a day.”
Honor stuck out her lip. “Wish I could buy it. Seems like it oughta stay in the family.”
Celeste and I both stared at her. “You buy it? Would you really move back to Minot?”
Honor shrugged. “Maybe. River and Ryan . . . I dunno. They’ve been hanging with a pretty fast crowd—River especially. He’ll be a junior next year, Ryan a sophomore. Maybe they could finish high school here. But . . .” She shrugged again.
It was hard to imagine my tattooed middle sister, with her green-and-red-streaked hair and feather-and-beads, skinny braids, fitting back into small-town life in North Dakota. But it was a moot point. She couldn’t afford the house anyway. Me either. And Celeste wasn’t about to trade her log cabin outpost and park ranger husband in Denali National Forest for an old, two-story frame house in sagebrush country.
We spent the rest of the day making an inventory of furniture and household stuff. It felt weird, trying to decide what to leave with the house—we could sell it furnished—and what to divide between us. As long as Mom and Dad were alive, it had been sweet to come home to this house full of childhood memories. But, no, I didn’t want to move back to Minot. I’d been gone too long. Besides, we had to sell it. Closest thing to an inheritance we three girls had.
I felt a tad guilty wishing we could sell it tomorrow. But, I told Jodi later, as she helped me count the china, glassware, and ironed tablecloths in the dining room hutch, I could sure use my third to help me rent that apartment in Wrigleyville and get back on my feet. My ticket to getting an actual address to prop up my custody petition.
Lucy shut herself into the downstairs bathroom and scrubbed it until floor, sink, tub, and wall tiles sparkled, then repeated the process in the second-floor bathroom—which seemed odd to me, since the Lucy I first met had been living under a bush, and housekeeping wasn’t exactly a necessity. But it knocked the chips off my sisters’ shoulders, and they started warming up to Lucy in little ways—a smile, a nod, an invitation to “come sit down, we’re making some lemonade . . . want some?”
Four o’clock rolled around much too soon, when we were supposed to go to the funeral home for the family viewing. “You go on,” Jodi said, when Aunt Mercy invited her and Lucy to go along. “This is your time.” I wished I could stay home too. I’d been through this once before at the funeral at Manna House. The memory was bittersweet, sad but satisfying, too, and I didn’t really want to go through it again. But this was the first time for Celeste and Honor, so I climbed into Aunt Mercy’s car.
The viewing room at the funeral home felt like a different planet from the multipurpose room at Manna House. Piped-in organ music instead of SouledOut’s electronic keyboard. The funeral home staff talking in discreet, low tones instead of Precious loudly scolding the girls wearing low-cut tops and tight skirts. Tomorrow at the funeral, church folks and former patrons of Dad’s carpet store would come to pay their respects, their faces pale or sunburned instead of the black, brown, and tan skin tones that populated Manna House. And we’d all speak North Dakota’s flat, Midwestern English, instead of the street slang peppering most conversations at the shelter, with bits of Spanish, Italian, Asian, and Jamaican patois thrown in.
Still, standing with Aunt Mercy and my sisters beside the open casket, looking at the still, peaceful form that was our mother, we melded, sharing tissues and hugs. The tears came, fresh and cleansing. I was glad I came for this sacred moment . . . just us. Celeste and Honor and I had been apart too long—not just in distance and lifestyles, but letting our everyday lives and thoughts and care for one another drift further and further apart, like flotsam at sea.
I wanted my sisters back. I needed all the family I could get. I didn’t know how to tell them, but I reached out my arms and slid one around each sister’s waist as I made a silent vow. Mom, I’m going to do whatever I can to keep our family together, I promise—
“What is that?” Honor suddenly spluttered, pulling away from my embrace. She reached into the casket under the folds of my mother’s pastel flower-print Sunday dress and pulled out a wadded-up purple knit hat with a crocheted flower bobbing on the brim.
Lucy’s hat.
Her final gift to her friend.
I collapsed in a chair and laughed. And then I cried. And then I made my sisters put the hat back in the casket again, tucked beneath the folds of Mom’s dress.