Henry's Sisters Read online

  Parker used that b word again. Pluralised.

  We laughed, both of us. As if that word would throw us one whit.

  As soon as he was in the house I accidentally let the air out of a tyre.

  I was told later by Cecilia that Parker had got stuck on a back country road with Constance and they’d had to hike back. Five miles.

  ‘Parker said you have to pay Constance for her heels,’ Cecilia had said. ‘They’re designer. Six hundred dollars.’

  We had laughed so hard at the thought of me paying Constance back we had to cross our legs.

  ‘Isabelle, forgive me,’ Janie said, touching my arm. ‘But I think that Parker’s car is in need of literary help.’ She took out her black permanent marker and wrote, ‘Tengo un pequeño pene’ (I have a small penis).

  Four times.

  The trunk, side doors, and hood.

  There was that number four again!

  We Bommarito girls are masters at vengeance.

  ‘I’ll settle this divorce, Parker, but first I need you to drive up your attorneys’ fees higher,’ Cecilia said, smirking.

  Me and Janie sat on either side of Cecilia at the kitchen table. We sisters were all eating lemon cake and drinking tea.

  We had offered Parker nothing.

  Well, that wasn’t true.

  Janie had placed a dead piece of asparagus in front of him on a newspaper. ‘Bon appétit, perverted porn man.’

  ‘The three musketeers.’ Parker sneered. ‘The three sickos, more like it.’

  ‘I’m not sick,’ Janie said. ‘One. Two. Three. Four. You. Are. A. Dick. One. Two. Three. Four. You. Have. Walnuts. For. Balls.’

  ‘I’m not sick, either,’ I said, surprise in my voice at his misconception. ‘Healthy as a horse. How are you feeling, though, Parker? Any new website adventures for unhappy but married people? How’s the porn going? What, exactly, does a gigantic fake boob feel like anyhow? I’ve always wondered.’

  He got all red and flustered and angry and gross and pointed at Cecilia.

  ‘You tell your sister to settle this thing on the double. I am not – you hear this, Cecilia – I am not going to spend any more of my life battling this out. I am not giving you a cent. Just because no one’s ever gonna be dumb enough to marry this fat bitch again, I’m not takin’ the heat.’

  Dear us.

  Janie had a knife in her hand from her purse lickety-split, and I had both of my hands around Parker’s chicken neck and jammed him against the kitchen counters.

  We have to work so hard, we Bommarito sisters.

  Together we marched a struggling, swearing Parker to the porch and shoved him up against the rail and made him bend far, far, far back and Cecilia shoved his legs over. He’s a little guy, so it wasn’t hard.

  He took off, and we laughed when we heard his howl upon entering his midlife crisis car. He obviously could read a little Spanish.

  I glanced out the window of the bakery before I closed up around nine o’clock the next night and caught the eye of an older gentleman across the street under a street light. He was tall with white hair.

  Our eyes held for a second. I thought I saw him smile.

  The phone rang and I turned to grab it.

  When I turned back, he was gone.

  Amelia Earhart stood to attention on our front porch, her legs wide. ‘I am here to inform you that I have been named the Queen of the Air for my outstanding flying contributions to America!’

  Velvet swung on the porch swing, her hands busy crocheting. ‘She’s been a peach today! A southern Carolina peach!’

  ‘Hello, Amelia! Congratulations.’

  ‘I am flying to Honolulu shortly, and I can take you with me! You have to fill out this form first, though. It asks your name, address, hair colour, Yosemite, waffles, if you own flight goggles and diapers. Are there any flatulence problems? How is your bottom?’

  She handed me a piece of pink paper with a smiley face in the centre of it.

  ‘I’ll fill it out immediately, Mrs Earhart.’

  ‘You do that. I’ll have my assistant get back to you.’

  Henry came out, smiling at me. ‘Hi, Isabelle! You pretty!’ he shouted, waving his hand. He was in a flight outfit that Momma had bought for him so he could play aeroplane with Grandma.

  He snapped his goggles over his face. ‘Ready for takeoff!’ he shouted. He pulled a pink baseball hat over his brown curls.

  ‘Ready for takeoff!’ Grandma shouted. They both leapt off the front steps and onto the grass. Grandma crouched in front of Henry. They both bopped up and down while making engine noises, then Grandma started running and Henry followed. Both spread their arms way out like wings as they sped across the grass.

  It was likely, I thought, as I watched their flying manoeuvres, that I would get dementia. Momma, too.

  I laughed. Who knew. Maybe Momma would believe she was Mary Poppins and start carrying an umbrella.

  Nah. It was more likely Momma would morph into Attila the Hun. Or Dracula.

  Henry and Grandma skipped under the willow trees.

  Heck, if dementia transformed me into someone with purpose and happiness like Grandma, I wouldn’t complain.

  Not at all.

  But I would want a co-pilot exactly like Henry.

  ‘Cupcakes,’ I said.

  ‘Cupcakes?’ Janie and Cecilia said.

  ‘Yep. The cupcakes will be Bommarito’s Bakery’s signature treat,’ I told them.

  It was six o’clock in the morning on a Sunday and we were having a Bommarito Sisters Meeting.

  ‘We already make cupcakes,’ Cecilia said, taking another gulp of coffee and a doughnut hole.

  ‘I don’t mean your regular, run-of-the-mill cupcakes,’ I said. ‘They’ll be different. They’ll be huge. Like small cakes, only we’ll call them cupcakes.’

  Cecilia and Janie blinked at me.

  ‘We’ll decorate them so the tops will be 3-D-like. I’m thinking mermaids and monsters, lizards and spiders, ghosts and vampires. Creatively decorated, huge cupcakes. Special. Yummy. Bommarito’s Heavenly Cupcakes.’

  I waited. Cecilia and Janie stared at me.

  I opened my eyes up wide, spread my hands. ‘Hello? Are we still here together on planet Earth or has a dwarf alien slipped inside your mouths and tied your tongue to your teeth?’

  More silence.

  Finally, Janie said, ‘I’m thinking of all the ways I could ice big cupcakes. We could pile on chocolate shavings like a chocolate sculpture or alternate meringue and strawberry filling in a swirl.’

  Cecilia said, her voice misty, ‘We could do tiny scenes on the cupcakes. Like two girls in a garden. Or a forest scene with a raccoon staring at a fish in the pond.’

  We sat in our own cupcake heaven for a second.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said to my sisters.

  ‘Cheers! To Bommarito’s Heavenly Cupcakes!’ Cecilia said.

  ‘One, two, three, four,’ Janie said. ‘I’m not out the door.’

  I rolled my eyes.

  We all raised our coffee mugs and clinked them together. Cecilia’s broke, coffee spilling onto the table.

  So typical for the Bommarito girls.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  To launch our cupcakes, we bought an ad in the local paper with photos of five of our different types of decorated cupcakes.

  At three o’clock on Thursday, the time when we said we’d be selling those cupcakes, a line snaked out the door.

  We ran out in fifteen minutes.

  People were not happy.

  ‘I waited for an hour for the cupcake with the giant squirrel.’

  ‘I told my daughter I’d get her the cupcake with the octopus on it and the blue candy bubbles…’

  ‘It’s my parents’ anniversary, those cupcakes with motorcycles are perfect because they ride bikes…’

  ‘My garden club is meeting tonight and I need those cupcakes with the smiling flowers…’

  ‘Come on. Make some more. Please?’ />
  We shut the bakery at six o’clock. For the next week our working hours expanded once again. We were working sixteen-hour days and flopping into bed, exhausted.

  I knew we couldn’t go on like this for long, but I had goals. I had plans. We’d work to make Momma some money, hire people who knew how to bake and manage a bakery, and I would move back to Portland, and my life, but not my photography because I’d had to give that up, and I’d check out of this town and back into reality.

  That’s what I would do.

  And maybe, for once, Momma would appreciate what we’d done.

  I laughed.

  Nah. Ain’t happenin’.

  Bao continued to come in. Each day he smiled at me, shuffled over to the counter, and ordered. I think he was the most gentle man I’d ever encountered.

  On Friday I served him and he sat down and set up his chess set. I brought him a free cookie. He smiled. ‘Thank you, Isabelle. You kind woman.’

  Janie and I were baking and I was serving customers. The phone was ringing and we were trying to take orders. A shipment of pans had not been delivered, we were trying to unload food that had recently arrived, we had cakes and cupcakes on order that we had to bake, and we were wiped out.

  I watched Bao playing chess by himself for a second, pushing my braids out of my sweaty face. Now there would be nothing to indicate my next decision was going to be a good one. The man limped, moved slow, and only one hand worked well. I went by gut instinct, the same gut instinct I’d used when deciding not to stay at a certain hotel in Baghdad that was obliterated two nights later.

  ‘Bao,’ I said to him. ‘Think you’d be any good at icing cupcakes and cakes?’

  Bao was a gift.

  Janie had taken a few seconds to show him how to ice a couple of cakes and cupcakes, and he’d gone to work. First he was simply doing the background icing job. By the end of the second day he graduated to full cake decorating.

  He was brilliant. He wielded those icing tubes like a professional artist.

  A few days later I showed him how to make lemon and pumpkin breads and the recipe we followed for our cinnamon rolls and tiramisu. No problem.

  No problem with the tarts, either.

  He did all his bakery work perfectly, with such care.

  At the end of the first day, we’d hugged him. He hugged us back, his eyes teary.

  I handed him an employment application.

  He bowed.

  ‘No, I work here for you, when you need Bao. As favour. A gift.’

  ‘Thank you, Bao. I appreciate that, but no can do. Your first day was today and we’ll pay you for it. Fill out the forms. We’re all Americans. We like forms. You’ll come in tomorrow? And the next day? Forever and ever?’

  Bao smiled and it transformed his face.

  ‘Please, Bao,’ Janie begged. ‘We need help.’

  He raised his eyebrows and said quietly, almost to himself, ‘I have job. First time long time. I have job.’ He grinned again and his face lit up. ‘I have job. I be here tomorrow. Early.’

  In the midst of waiting for another batch of giant cupcakes to bake, I got a break. I decided I should take a lookie at the books. Get the numbers on how Momma was doing.

  It didn’t take long to read it. I sat down heavily.

  I tapped my fingers. Leant back in a chair. Steepled my hands. It was worse than I thought. Momma had undoubtedly used some of the money she received from the settlement to reopen the bakery. But she couldn’t bake. She was impatient and bored with the whole process. The bakery had worked because of us three, not her.

  Reopening the bakery was a nice pipe dream of hers. She said she’d done it because the people of Trillium River loved her baked goods and insisted on it. My guess was that she was worried she would need more money for Grandma down the road if she was unable to care for her – and possibly long-term care for herself if she inherited the same disease.

  Nice dream, nice thought, but here was the reality: the income from Momma’s bakery would not have supported a family of squirrels.

  In fact, it would not have supported even one squirrel on a lifetime fast.

  She was broke.

  I may have mentioned that we are no strangers, as a family, to being broke.

  It’s how we lived our whole life after our dad left.

  During one winter, when Momma was stripping, and she fell into yet another black, sticky morass of depression, we hit a new level of despair. Her depression lasted two months. She lost her job and would not get out of bed, her hair eventually sticking to her head like glue.

  We baked and baked, as we’d done for years by then, using our dad’s cookbooks, his recipe changes noted and followed in the margins.

  I could almost feel my dad as I sifted, chopped, melted, iced, and stirred, could hear him directing me, encouraging me to make it perfect. ‘Life isn’t perfect, girls, but everything you bake in a kitchen can be. It’s a moment of order and edible art in a life of disorder and chaos.’

  We made layered lemon cakes, peppermint bars, pumpkin cheesecakes, you name it, as our dad taught us, but it wasn’t enough to pay the bills.

  We were evicted for the fifth time on a rainy day. Our new home was our car. It was an old Ford, a long black-green car. All our belongings went in the trunk with room to spare.

  ‘We’re going to get a trailer,’ Momma told us one evening, her voice wobbling, as we ate popcorn for dinner in the backseat behind a hardware store.

  A trailer didn’t sound too bad. Maybe there would be a bathroom in it. We were cleaning up at gas stations in the morning before school, but it’s hard to wash your hair in a gas station sink. Our clothes were getting dirtier and we had no dimes for the Laundromat.

  Janie had lost a shoe so was wearing mismatched ones. Henry was fussing, throwing temper tantrums, and occasionally wetting his pants.

  Janie’s migraines kicked up, Cecilia’s rashes flared up, and Henry’s general health problems ballooned up.

  ‘We need a trailer for the winter,’ Momma told us. ‘It’s going to be cold. We’ll put it out in the woods and pretend we’re a pioneer family without the oxen. It’ll be fun.’

  ‘That not fun,’ Henry said. ‘Woods dark. Scary.’

  I held his hand.

  ‘Ghosts in wood. Scary ghosts,’ he said.

  We drove way out into the thickest of woods the night Momma went to get us our trailer. It grew darker and darker, as if we were spiralling into a melting black crayon, the trees a tangled, gnarly mass, the moon disappearing, too scared to stay with us. The road disintegrated into gravel, then dirt, becoming bumpier as we rode.

  Momma was scared down to her fingernails. I could tell by the way she gripped the steering wheel, her lips tight, but I could also feel her near-paralytic fear swirling around us.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, fear making my body tingle.

  ‘We’re going to the home of a man I know from work, now be quiet.’ She exhaled, inhaled, exhaled. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

  Henry whimpered, ‘What wrong Momma what wrong? I scared.’

  Janie started to count and Cecilia gurgled down a pop we’d stolen from the five-and-dime that night. We had been reduced to stealing food from the supermarkets. The stealing made Janie cry and hyperventilate, so Cecilia and I did it. We only cried and hyperventilated on the inside.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Henry,’ she snapped.

  ‘When are we going back to the hardware store to sleep?’ Janie whimpered.

  ‘Hush up, quit asking questions,’ Momma said, her fear slinking around that black car like oil, slick and greasy. She pulled around a corner, our tyres skidding, and stopped about twenty feet away from a run-down shack.

  A man immediately appeared on the porch. I could see him under the yellowy porch light. He was short and squat and had a few hairs pulled over a bald spot. His facial features seemed to be all mashed together. He was smiling a sick, manipulative smile and I felt, I felt, his depravity.
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br />   ‘You kids stay here. Do not come in that house, do you understand?’ Momma’s voice pitched up and down. ‘I’m going to talk to this man about his trailer. Do you understand? Do not move.’

  ‘Who that?’ Henry asked after Momma got out of the car, her walk unbalanced.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Janie whimpered, clicking her tongue.

  Henry pulled a blanket over his head and his stuffed dragon to his chest. He later vomited on them.

  The man slyly grinned at Momma as she tottered up on her heels. I saw him brush her arm with his hand. She pulled her arm away and glared. The door shut behind them.

  We waited and waited out in the wickedness of that inky, sinister night, the crickets making the only noise. To this day, I cannot bear to hear crickets.

  Finally, I got so scared for Momma I could hardly breathe and got out of the car. So did Cecilia. We both climbed the porch steps, trembling. I held Cecilia’s hand. I could feel her terror in my whole body, like she was in me. The second we got to that rickety porch and had our hands up to knock on the door, Momma darted out, straightening her dress.

  Her expression changed from sheer self-hating despair to boiling anger. ‘I told you two to stay in the car! Did you not hear your momma? Are you deaf? Get in the car this minute!’

  ‘Well now, hold on, River darlin’,’ the wrinkled man said from behind her. ‘I didn’t know you brought your girls, didn’t know you had your fillies with you.’

  He reached out and stroked my cheek. Momma moved so fast, I didn’t even see it coming. She whacked that man’s arm with both her fists so hard he said, ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Get your hands off my girls.’ She stood in front of us and pushed us towards the car. ‘Go girls, now. Run.’

  We wanted to run. I knew Cecilia wanted to run, because I could feel how she was having trouble breathing, but neither one of us moved. We were not going to leave Momma with this sweaty guy with a hard, bowling ball stomach and smashed-up face. No way.

  In the yellowy light I noticed a bruise across Momma’s cheek. She had high, swooping cheekbones and the bruise was red and purple, swollen. A little blood was caked in the corner of her mouth.