What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [79]
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“I didn’t think I was going to cry like that,” Sharla says. We are lying in the guest room, taking a break before dinner, which our mother has insisted on preparing alone. Probably she wants to give us all some time to recover. “Did you?”
“I thought I might,” I say. “I thought either that, or I’d start laughing.”
Sharla looks at me, puzzled.
“You know,” I say. “Like when you shouldn’t. Like at a funeral. So you do.”
Sharla lies down on the bed, pulls her sweater up to expose her belly, pats it. “I’m hungry, are you?”
“Yeah. It smells good, whatever it is.”
“Something Italian, I think, lots of garlic.”
“Let’s go taste,” I say.
“In a minute.”
“She’s still beautiful, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. I love her hair.”
It was completely gray now, but beautifully streaked. It was long; she wore it up in a bun. She was tan, a little too thin, perhaps. She wore dangling silver earrings with a green, arty T-shirt and loose, black tie pants. Her makeup was subtle: eyeliner, a bit of rust-colored lipstick.
“She still seems so familiar, even though she’s so different,” I say. “I shouldn’t be surprised. But I am anyway. I guess I just didn’t know what to expect.”
“If you’d just … met her,” Sharla says, “like at a party or something, wouldn’t you like her? I mean, doesn’t she seem like a pretty neat woman?”
“Yeah. She turned out just fine.”
Sharla laughs. “It feels like we’re talking about our children.”
“Well, there always was that, you know? I think we always felt like we kind of had to take care of her.”
“I guess,” Sharla says.
I get up, walk over to the window. “It’s so beautiful here. Look at the view she has every day. She’s really done well for herself.”
Sharla comes over to stand beside me, puts her arm around me. “Ginny.”
“What?” I put my arm around her. This is the part where she is going to tell me she already knows the outcome of the biopsy, and that it’s not good.
“I have to tell you something.”
Here it is. “Yes?”
“That cyst thing? It’s not what I told you.”
I’ll put her in my living room so she’ll be close to everything. I’ll get someone to stay with her whenever I have to leave.
Sharla sits on the wide windowsill, looks up at me. “It’s not me who’s sick. It’s her.”
It takes a moment for my thoughts to reshuffle. Then, “What?” I say.
“It’s her. It’s her who’s sick. Mom.”
“How do you know?”
“She called me.”
I start to laugh, stop. “So … why didn’t you tell me?”
She sighs. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
“Huh,” I say. It is the only word that can escape from the tangled goings-on in my mind.
“Would you have?”
I see the scene: the phone rings. I pick it up. Sharla says our mother is sick. Naturally I think she means Georgia. But then she says no, it’s our birth mother. You know, Mom. And if I am honest, I must admit that the first thought that would come to me would be, That’s her problem. Followed by, What am I supposed to do about it?
When our father died, where was my mother? Nowhere in sight, that’s where. We wrote her about it, and heard nothing back. Of course, we did request that she not come to the funeral. We felt it would be too upsetting, on top of everything else.
But if Sharla had told me about our mother, surely, after an initial reaction of numbness, I would have rallied to do the right thing. Which would be to come here.
I start for the door.
“Don’t,” Sharla says. “She wanted to make us dinner first. I wasn’t supposed to tell you until after. But I couldn’t wait anymore.”
“I’m going out there.”
“Don’t tell her I told you. Please.”
I look at her face: pleading, even a bit frightened.
“I won’t tell her,” I say. “I’ll just offer to help. I’ll say I was getting bored.”
“All right,” Sharla says. “I’m going to pee. I’ll be down in