CHAPTER THREE
Jill
Tuesday Afternoon
Jill edged the last of the farmers’ market items—a flat of strawberries—onto the crowded countertop, casting a wary glance at the kitchen handset wedged between two jars of blackberry preserves and a bundle of asparagus. She wasn’t looking forward to the conversation with her sister. There was a part of her that wanted to wait until evening, have a bracer glass of wine first. Then again, it was always best to have your wits about you when dealing with Jocelyn. Besides, if Jill waited until evening, Jocelyn might already have two or three drinks in her, even allowing for the two-hour head start an Iowa Happy Hour had over California.
Just get it over with. She looked at her watch: a Swiss-made work of precision and industry that had been her father’s. In the fifteen years since his death, she’d had three cars, two washing machines, five vacuums, but only one watch. It was an Art Deco piece, rectangular in shape with applied Arabic numerals and golden arrow-shaped hands. She particularly liked the sub–second hand in the six position, a tireless minidial that measured out seconds in simple, sluggish lunges forward. Jill remembered the last time she’d taken it in for cleaning. The loop-eyed jeweler, new to the shop, had marveled at the antique piece, claiming, “A 1930s Gruen Curvex. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.” Jill had bent over the counter to take a peek. She’d never, in all the years it had guided her through the minutiae of her day-to-day, seen its intricate machinery. “Wow,” she’d said. “It’s so complicated. You’d never know by looking at it.”
Jill took a deep breath and called Jocelyn at home. She wasn’t surprised to catch her at home on a weekday. Jocelyn, a former hairstylist, was now a highly regarded, and well-paid, massage therapist and color therapist—whatever that was—for the swish crowd of L.A., but work was as fickle as a Hollywood husband.
“Hello.”
“Jocelyn, it’s me.” Never one to waste time, Jill pinched the phone between her shoulder and chin as she carried perishables to the fridge.
“Hey, stranger. How’s the wayward gang?”
Jill had always bristled at the term wayward, a descriptive that had been deemed pejorative and dropped from the home’s name in the late seventies. Even with the more open-minded McCloud Home for Girls title, theirs had been an unusual family life and living arrangement, to say the least. Jill and Jocelyn had grown up surrounded by young women “in trouble.” People, the elderly in particular, seemed to step backward in their footprints at the mere mention of teenage mothers. For her part, Jocelyn had always been cavalier about the whole thing. She used to joke that they ran a home for “little mothers who got goosed.” She had never dared say that in front of their father, though. Even she, the family rebel, had respected his dedication to the home.
Though the religious zeal of his father had soured Daniel, Jill’s father, to organized religion, it had instilled in him a great respect for life. He had always grieved the nephew he lost to the back-alley clinic, as well as his beloved sister. With the more relaxed morals of the eighties, Jill had witnessed her father’s great joy in aiding the willing and able among the girls to keep their babies. Over the years, a few had returned with fat-cheeked bundles or into-everything toddlers. In those moments, seeing proud, unwiped tears roll down her father’s cheeks, she understood his passion.
Their mother had always dramatized, and even glamorized, the situation. She had an uncanny knack of remembering every girl’s name as well as the individual story that landed her on their threshold. From time to time, Ruby would talk about her own path to the home: the football-player sweetheart named Josh, his tragic demise in an automobile accident, and the stillborn baby Janine.
“I have news,” Jill said. “Hester Fraser is dead.”
“No shit.”
“Yep.” Jill filled her arms with pantry items.
“I guess her pact with the devil ran out,” Jocelyn said.
“Had to sometime.”
“So is he?” Jocelyn asked.
“Is who?” Jill shelved a bag of raisins with the other dried fruits.
“Keith.”
“Is he what?” Jill said, knowing exactly what Jocelyn was after.
“Is he coming for the funeral?”
“Already here.” Jill stacked a plastic container of clover honey under another.
“Holy shit. I’m booking a flight.”
The last thing Jill wanted was Jocelyn underfoot. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because it will be awkward enough without you.”
“I was thinking of coming for a visit anyway.”
“Yeah, right,” Jill said.
“I was. I’m not working right now. Plus, it’ll be nice to see Fee while she’s on summer break.”
“Come in July or August.”
“We both know it would take a restraining order to keep me away.”
“If it comes to that.”
“So have you seen him?”
“Yes. Briefly.”
“What were you wearing?”
Jill looked down. “Jeans, blue top.” She swapped cardamom and cayenne on the alphabetized spice rack.
“Blue?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, blue. You never listen to me, do you?”
Jill exhaled loud enough for it to transmit over the phone. “I happen to like blue.”
“It’s all wrong for you. Blue is the throat chakra. It controls our ability to communicate. For whatever reason, you don’t process blue well.” Jill heard Jocelyn stifle a laugh. “You clammed up, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“Not really.”
“I’ve told you this before: green is the heart chakra; green is your color.”
“I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“It’s light refracted at different wavelengths and vibrations. Hard—cold—science. What’s not to believe?”
Jill huffed at Jocelyn’s definition of science, one that had about as much in common with true branches of knowledge—like physics, chemistry, or biology—as did the Church of Scientology. Besides being a “color therapist,” Jocelyn fancied herself some kind of relationship savant. She liked to call it her “sexth sense,” an ability to detect pheromones between two people, to know when they belong together, and how to charge or manipulate the atmosphere if and when they’re too clueless or stubborn to do so themselves. Jill and Keith had always been Jocelyn’s biggest “stumper,” on par with other scientific anomalies like spontaneous combustion or ball lightning.
“Seriously, I don’t think you should come. I haven’t even told Mom yet and you’ll just make things worse.”
“You haven’t told Mom?”
“No.”
“Jesus, Jill. Take the friggin’ blue off and vent a little.”
“Go to hell.”
“Shouldn’t that be ‘come to hell’?”
“Don’t,” Jill said.
“Come on. It’ll make my year.”
And ruin mine. Jill could already picture the uncomfortable reunion between herself, Keith, and Jocelyn. Just perfect. One could always count on Jocelyn to add cayenne to an already five-alarm chili. Jill hung up, fearing yet another storm front on its way.