7

“Good morning,” Katherine said.

“Morning,” Mary Alice said, trying to hide the mortification she felt over knowing someone else had spent the better part of the morning rummaging through her things. “I don’t normally sleep in this late, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t,” Katherine said, her gaze staying on the sizzling eggs.

“Where’d you get the eggs? I thought I finished off a carton yesterday.”

“Where do you think?” Enough scrambled eggs to feed a small army were cooking in the cast-iron pan. Katherine gently swirled them around, a low and slow method Mary Alice had never had the patience for. This was just like her, Mary Alice thought. Coming into her home and finding ways to flaunt the time and money and tricks she had. She wasn’t cooking breakfast, she was showcasing the leisurely pace of her life. And Mary Alice was so, so hungry.

“You went to Carlye’s?” Mary Alice leaned on the barstool but didn’t take a seat, making the difficult choice not to succumb to such an inviting scene. They were still fighting the same fight from last night. Hell, she thought, they were still fighting their fight from 1982.

Katherine grinned, her gaze still on the pan. “You want the truth? I mainly went because I wanted to be recognized.” Mary Alice raised her eyebrows to feign a bit of shock and drummed her fingers on the bar. “But the only people working were a young man at the butcher counter and a teenager up at the register. Had no clue who either of them were, not even who they could be the children of. So, no luck. Oh well.”

“C.J. and Emily. Good kids. Taught them both.” Mary Alice eyed the pan, watching the eggs solidify ever so slowly over the faint blue flame, and realized she was salivating. She swallowed as subtly as possible as Katherine continued her stirring.

“Is Carlye still alive?” she asked.

“Amos is long dead, but Eric’s alive as ever,” Mary Alice said. “His birthday’s this week actually. Seventy. Having a party at the center.”

“Seventy! How funny,” she said, closing the oven door and putting her hands on her hips. “I always thought of him as an old man, but I guess he was never more than a few years older than us.”

“That’s how it always goes when you’re a kid. I started teaching seventeen-year-olds when I was twenty-two. They thought I was ancient then, so I must’ve been practically dead by the end.” She lifted herself up with a grunt and took a mug from the cabinet.

“Forty years of teaching,” Katherine said with a sigh of either admiration or pity. “Now what?”

“Until last night, I would have said nothing.” She didn’t want to bring up the night before, but she didn’t want Katherine making a hotel out of her house, either. With nothing to do, she leaned into both aggravations.

“So do you want to tell me what happened?”

“There’s nothing to tell, Katherine. He left. And now he’s come back.”

“Twelve years after everyone thought he died,” Katherine said, pointing at her with the dirty spoon. “Don’t forget that part.” As if Mary Alice could possibly. “You know he was in New York City all this time?”

Mary Alice poured a cup of coffee, impressed that her sister was able to operate the machine without paid help. “I did. I knew more than you think.”

“Like about his friendship with Kenny?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mary Alice snapped.

“You’re the one with answers here, not me.”

“I can assure you that if something had happened to him, I would’ve been told.”

“Hell of a leap of faith for someone who only goes to church because she’s afraid of what people like her would say if she didn’t,” she said, twisting back around to the stove and turning off the burner. She dropped two pats of butter in the pan and gave the dish one final punctuation mark of a stir and began dividing the dish between two plates already on the counter.

“Oh, don’t get sanctimonious with me. What I believed about Michael had nothing to do with faith or church or God. And might I remind you he was an adult when he left. I couldn’t do anything to bring him back even if I tried.” Katherine knew that wasn’t true, and so did Mary Alice.

“He was your son. Didn’t you care?”

“Of course I cared. I think your bacon’s burning.” Bacon in the oven, too, Mary Alice thought. Yes, it was better that way, more evenly cooked and without the messy, snapping grease of pan-fried, but it took so much longer. Again, she was jealous of Katherine’s abundance of time. Sure, retirement had suddenly left her with plenty, but she lacked the experience one must have to use it properly. Idle time was new to her, daunting and unwieldy. There was so much of it, so suddenly, that she may as well have had none at all.

“Shit,” Katherine said, hopping around to pull the charred, smoky strips from the oven. “Well, damn. Ruined a whole damn package.”

“I’m sure they’re still edible. You like ’em crunchy anyway.”

“So do you,” Katherine said, a glimmer of relief in her eyes.

Katherine added a few strips of blackened bacon to each plate, cracked a heaping dusting of black pepper on both, and placed them on the bar, which Mary Alice only now noticed had been prepped with place mats, napkins, and silverware.

“Oh,” Mary Alice said, incapable of offering anything more.

“Take your coffee and sit. Time to eat.”

“And talk, I assume,” Mary Alice said, her defensiveness obviously wearing Katherine thin.

“You think I came here to talk? You think talking will make any of this better? I came here to take you back to Atlanta.” They were both seated, unfolding their napkins in a few gentle shakes and spreading them across their laps like mirror images. If you walked in and saw them just now, just like this, you would think they were not only sisters, but twins. You’d think they were each ten years younger. But the first thing you’d think is that they were friends. So familiar and comfortable in their actions—until they started talking and you’d realize you were wrong about everything you’d thought. And then you’d think something else: you’d think you should leave before someone got hurt.

“You want me to come back with you?”

Katherine threw her fork onto her plate with a sharp crash that caused Mary Alice to flinch and spill egg from her fork. “Why are you making this so goddamned hard? Do you know how difficult this is for me, coming home and trying to figure you out for the first time in our lives? Tiptoeing through this house and pretending I don’t see all the ghosts?” Mary Alice stared at her eggs. Her mouth was dry now, her appetite gone. “I didn’t want to come here, I came here because your son can’t get out of bed and you can’t be bothered to pick up your damn phone. Oh sure, I’d love to just talk. To find out why any of this happened in the first place. But I feel like I have a pretty good idea. What was it? He told you he was in love with that dead boy and you kicked him out of the house?”

Mary Alice scoffed. “You think everything must be so simple, because you’ve never lived a day in your life where that wasn’t the case.”

Katherine clenched her jaw and pushed her stool back, causing a rough squeak to echo through the house. “I knew you’d be difficult, but I didn’t expect you to act like such a child. I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell you I’m flying back tonight. And you’re coming with me. My treat, if you want to call it that.”

“I can’t,” Mary Alice said in a defiant tone that surprised even her.

“You can’t?”

“The picnic is on Saturday. If I leave now none of it will get done.”

“Oh, come on now, Mary Alice. The picnic will go on. It did before you and it will when you’re gone,” Katherine said, uncertain whether she meant dead or just away.

“If I leave now, everyone will ask questions. You know that.”

“There it is. You don’t want to be embarrassed. Well, I’m sorry, but it’s too late for that.”

“Give me this, Katherine,” Mary Alice said with a tremble in her voice that her sister didn’t recognize. “Give me this weekend. One last picnic. Then I will pack a bag and I will go with you for as long as it takes. Or for as long as I’m welcome.” Mary Alice’s eyes welled up but her tears remained steadfast, communicating everything they needed to without falling.

Katherine covered her face with her hands and inhaled like a machine, as if she wanted no air between them. In the course of her breath, time seemed to stop, and the two of them stood opposite one another, motionless in the harsh kitchen light. Only when she exhaled calmly did the room come back to life. “Fine. I’ll call John and tell him to expect us immediately after the picnic.”

“Do you think he’ll mind?”

“Do you care?”

Mary Alice’s nod looked more like a tremor. “Thank you,” she said in a near whisper. It was the quietest she’d spoken in years, and the timidness embarrassed her, even with an audience of one. She looked back up at her sister and cleared her throat. “Thank you,” she said once more. “I mean it.”

“I know.”

Mary Alice returned to the kitchen. Breakfast was a total loss, she thought while shoving the eggs and bacon into the garbage disposal with a wooden spoon. But at least this gave her something to do. In under twenty minutes the pans would be stripped of their grime and the counters would be spotless. The plates and forks and knives would be hidden in the dishwasher. Her home would be clean again, and she would have done it herself.