they want. No one enjoys watching an old woman sing. And so, you see. . . .” She trailed off, shading her eyes to look at the house. “Shall we look inside? You must have the key.”
“We really don’t have time before your flight.” If she saw the house again, Shirley thought, Miriam might find some way to possess it.
Miriam seemed to understand. She turned toward the car. “If there’d been any way. . . .”
“You could leave New York. That would cut your expenses.”
Miriam stopped. “I will never leave New York. My whole life is in New York. Friends, professional contacts, music—everything.” Her voice had sharpened.
“Well, I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve looked at this land since I first opened my eyes.”
“I looked at it, too, until I decided to leave, but it never meant to me what it meant to you.” Miriam broke a milkweed pod off its stalk and began to pry it open.
“Of course not. How could it? You were almost never here.”
“We both made our decisions a long time ago,” Miriam said, slitting the pod with her fingernail.
“And now we have the consequences. Don’t scatter those,” she added. Miriam was throwing a handful of white parachutes into the air. “Those seeds will spring up all over.” Shirley knew her reprimand was ridiculous; the bulldozers would make short work of a field full of milkweed.
Miriam smiled. “I used to love letting them go.” The parachutes floated down around their feet.
For the first time, something usable stretched between them.
“So you do remember,” Shirley murmured.
“Every bit of it.” Miriam folded herself down on the ground, risking the ruin of her good slacks. She patted the dirt beside her. “Sit down, Shirley. Lets’ talk.”
Shirley lowered herself as best she could, wondering how she would get up and what damage she was inflicting on the gray skirt she’d chosen with such care. As she spread her hand on the dirt, supporting herself, she saw her sister’s, long-fingered, deeply mottled, so like her hand she could only tell them apart by her wedding ring.
“I want you to understand,” Miriam said, looking off toward the line of walnuts and the foundations beyond them.
“You’ve explained it before. I guess I understand it as well as I can. You need the money.”
“I tried to find an alternative but nothing makes sense, financially.”
“Did you really look into keeping it?” Shirley asked. How impulsive Miriam had always been, how quickly she had made the sale.
“Yes, indeed. I had quite a lot of correspondence with the state Ag department—”
“They don’t know anything about the new methods.”
“You’d be surprised. They were quite well informed about crop rotation, natural weed suppression, that kind of thing. And of course I talked to other experts as well. I wanted to keep the farm.”
“I never heard you say that before.” Shirley smiled with relief. “But I still think you could have found a way.”
“Not to farm it and make even a tenth of the profit I made off selling it. This is prime real estate now, almost flat, half a mile from the interstate. Twenty minutes into town, even at rush hour. People kill for houses with that kind of commute.”
“Real estate—that’s what land becomes when it goes on the market. An estate, and a real one. Nothing else counts, not the birds, or the deer, or the wild turkeys.” When Miriam didn’t respond, Shirley asked, “What did you make off it.” She had wanted to ask ever since Miriam sold the land; now shame prevented her from turning it into a question.
“I hate to disappoint you,” Miriam said, “but not nearly as much as you imagine, after I paid off the back taxes.”
“Back taxes?”
“Five years, I guess ever since Daddy got sick. Mama never kept up with that kind of thing, she just let it all go. I found a whole drawer stuffed with overdue bills.”
“But we went over the house together.” Shirley remembered the chill of the house after the funeral, the thermostats turned down and the curtains drawn.
“After you left,” Miriam said with a gleam of foxy humor. “To go home to dear old Brian, waiting with dinner.”
Shirley might have told her that Brian had never learned to cook; they’d had takeout that night, after a nasty argument over which one of them was going to get it.
“So that’s when you did your snooping,” she said.
Miriam laughed. “Oh, I was shameless. I even went through Mama’s lingerie.”
“Underwear.”
“She used to rail against ‘panties’—said the word was obscene.”
“Panties—obscene!”
They leaned back, laughing.
“She was a stitch, a card!” Miriam said.
Shirley sat up. “She was a handful, these last years. Gave me a run for my money.”
Miriam sat up as well. “I envy you that.”
Shirley stared at her. “Three years of drudgery?”
“You got to spend time with her. I never spent more than an hour after I left home. She felt I’d defected.”
“She accepted daughters leaving to get married, but not for anything else.”
“Saw no reason why I couldn’t pursue my career with the local chamber music society. And Daddy just wouldn’t enter the conversation.”
“It was pretty loud, for a conversation.” Shirley, crouching on the stairs, had listened to the shouting.
“She never held it against you when you left,” Miriam said.
“We settled half a mile away, and she always thought there’d be babies.”
“But not.” Silence intervened. Miriam picked a dry stalk and broke it into small pieces. “Why was that?”
“You’re still snooping.”
“Is it snooping, after all these years?”
“I tell you what,” Shirley said, turning toward her sister. “I’ll tell you why if you’ll tell me how much you got for our land.”
“Our land! Do you still really think—”
“Not think. Feel. I’ve walked here every day for the past three years.”
“To get away from Mama?”
