he’d tossed into the car along with his duffel bag was a testament to the horrors he’d endured.
“If you want to talk about it, I’m a good listener.”
“Give it a rest, Sis. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s okay. Maybe some other time.”
That didn’t seem likely. As she turned her attention to the radio, Sis tried to keep her despair from showing. She found a station where Elvis Presley was crooning “If I Can Dream.”
Were there any dreams left in that car? Sis quickly switched to a station that wouldn’t remind both of them of all they’d lost.
“You won’t believe how Andy’s grown. And Sweet Mama’s still feisty as ever. She wanted to invite everybody in town to your homecoming, but I finally talked some sense into her. I thought it would be easier for you with just family.”
Jim turned her way with a shut-down face full of sharp angles and shadows, then swiveled toward the window to stare at the water. Was he watching the whitecaps? Remembering Vietnam? Wishing on the moon?
“Do you want to hear about Emily’s fiancé?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, you ought to. He’s a jackass.”
“They run the world.”
“Not my world, not while I have breath.”
Sis had been taking care of her family since she was fourteen and that awful accident took their parents. She didn’t plan on stopping just because Emily was trying to outrun her past by racing toward the altar. And maybe that was Sis’s fault. She’d always encouraged her baby sister to be the fairy princess in a fairy-tale world.
Sis took a sharp left in order to avoid Keesler Air Force Base. No sense giving Jim any reminders that the military had mowed the Blake family men down like ninepins, leaving only him behind to pick up the slack. Not that Sis held out any high hopes of that happening. A man who wouldn’t even carry on a conversation about his family was as likely to see after their welfare as Sis was to have somebody stop her in the street and tell her she was beautiful.
Just look at the pair of them. She was an old sourpuss and Jim was still in the killing jungles somewhere on the other side of the world.
It was a pure relief to see the café, a fine, old building of moss-covered brick, reflecting the style of the Gulf Coast’s Spanish history, shaded by a couple of hundred-year-old live oaks and lit up like a rocket ship on blast off. Christmas lights and silver tinsel circled the plate-glass windows where gold lettering proclaimed Sweet Mama’s Café, and underneath in red was etched Home of the Famous Amen Cobbler!
Beyond the front window was Sweet Mama with her coronet of silver braids and a pearl brooch on her green linen dress, laughing at something Emily had said. That was a talent Emily had—making her grandmother laugh, making everybody around her smile. Everybody except Sis, who hadn’t found much to smile about since she discovered she hated the idea of spending the rest of her life selling pies, Amen or otherwise.
The flush on Emily’s cheeks could have been excitement or summer heat. With blond curls escaping from her ponytail, she looked sixteen. A strap of her yellow sundress had slid off one shoulder, and the blue apron she still wore was dusted with flour. Even disheveled, Emily was beautiful.
Sis would never be beautiful, with or without a dusting of flour. She would never look sixteen, even if she could get her frizzy brown bob into a ponytail. She would never be the kind of woman men wanted to sweep off her feet.
Envy ambushed her, so unexpected she almost crashed her car into a live oak.
“Watch out!” Jim grabbed for the steering wheel, but Sis slapped his hands away.
“I’ve got it. I’m just excited, is all.”
How could you envy the sister you’d dressed and fed and soothed at night with silly, made-up stories so she’d sleep with the lights off?
Perhaps it wasn’t envy but longing fueled by the perspective of age. How could Sis have known at fourteen that once you set out on a path, it can take you so far from your dreams you’ll end up at the age of thirty-four not even remembering who you once wanted to be?
She’d given up everything for her family, even her name. Beth. Nobody called her that anymore. Everybody just called her Sis, as if she were nothing more than the role she played.
The sign on the door of Sweet Mama’s read Closed for a Private Party. There was nothing private about it, of course. Tomorrow, word would be all over town. Sweet Mama would tell the breakfast regulars, and Emily was too gentle to refuse details to anybody who asked. By ten o’clock, everybody in Biloxi would know that Sweet Mama had made Jim’s favorite red velvet cake, and Emily had forgotten to take off her apron and Jim had refused to wear his leg.
There it lay on the backseat of Sis’s Valiant, another piece of sand in her craw. What do you say to a brother just returning from the hell of Vietnam? Why don’t you let me strap on your prosthetic leg so you’ll look normal and Emily won’t cry? Or do you just stand there with sand drifting into your sandals while Emily races out the front door, already crying before she gets close enough to hug her twin, the Gulf breeze blowing both of them sideways?
Maybe the Gulf was blowing all of them sideways, and had been for so long Sis didn’t know what normal was anymore. She thought about a brother coming home broken and a sister smiling as she raced toward disaster. She thought about a life gone so far off track she didn’t even remember the direction she’d been going.
Best not to think too far into the future, to simply put one sandy sandal in front of the other until she was standing in Sweet Mama’s, surrounded by the smells of cake and pie and fried chicken and freshly cut tomatoes from Sweet Mama’s prize crop, just standing there silent, gnawing on a chicken leg and watching over her brother and sister as she always had; watching as Emily laughed through her tears and Jim was engulfed by the ones who loved him best and would love him always, even if he never got his mind back from Vietnam and his leg out of Sis’s car.
“Aunt Sis! Aunt Sis!”
The TV perched on the edge of the serving bar was blaring wide-open. Andy sat so close he was crossing his eyes to see.
“C’mon over! They gonna land on the moon!”
For two cents Sis would get on that rocket ship with the astronauts. And she wouldn’t care whether she found the moon or not. All she wanted was to be as far away from her current life as she could get.
* * *
Sweet Mama was relieved when Sis quit glaring over her fried chicken leg at What’s His Name and walked over to join Andy at the TV. Why, from the look on her face you’d think What’s His Name was a fly set to land on Jim’s celebration cake and Sis was a flyswatter.
Larry Chastain. That was the name of Emily’s new fiancé. Sweet Mama would write it down this very minute if she thought she could do it without getting caught. But Emily might see her and start worrying all over again about her forgetfulness. And Sis was bound to notice. That girl didn’t miss a thing. And she wouldn’t stop at calling Sweet Mama forgetful, either. She’d use the scary words senile and hardening of the arteries and dementia.
