The Oleander Sisters
She glanced around at the pictures on the wall. They told their own story—the history of a bakery that became a café and a woman too fierce to give up, the friendship against all odds with Beulah, who had been with her every step of the way, the ever-increasing number of patrons who carried on meandering conversations spun out like a roll of silk ribbon, linking the past to the present and binding people together as surely as tree-ripened peaches blended with fresh cherries in Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.
“Amen cobbler, Jim,” Emily was saying. “I made it.”
Fear stung Sweet Mama as unexpectedly as a red wasp. Lord, she could have sworn she made that cobbler. Hadn’t she stood in the kitchen not more than two hours ago adding peaches to the batter? Or had that been last week?
“I’m not hungry, Em,” Jim said.
“Take a little bite, anyway. It’s your party,” Emily said. “Tell me if it’s as good as Sweet Mama’s.”
The way Jim was looking at his plate, you’d think it was filled with mud pies. What do you say to a grandson who’s standing close enough to touch but is so far away he’s no more substantial than the moonlight laying a path over the water?
Beulah’s shadow fell over Sweet Mama, a huge umbrella to shield her from a downpour of sudden sorrow.
“Honey, if you don’t eat that cobbler, old Beulah’s gonna think you don’t appreciate none of this cooking we nearly killed ourselfs over.”
“You’re still a con artist, Beulah,” Jim said. “And you don’t look a day older than when I left.”
“If you keep up that sweet talk, you’re gonna have a girl before we know it.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“I ain’t holding my breath. I’m gonna put out the word to the reg’lars to be looking. Now, eat that cobbler pie.”
Sweet Mama puffed up with pride as she watched Jim pick up his fork and dig in. The war might have taken his leg, but it hadn’t stolen one iota of the Blake honor. She glanced at her granddaughter’s fiancé over there with all his body parts intact, sleek as a tomcat.
“Emily, did What’s His Name serve his country?”
“Please, Sweet Mama. This is a party. Let’s not talk about that now.”
“It’s a legitimate question, Em,” Jim said. “Did he?”
Suddenly, Andy shouted, “Com’ere, quick! That’s him. There’s a man on the moon!”
Emily raced off like somebody saved from the guillotine.
“Oh, it is, sweetheart!” She sat on the bar stool beside her son, her color suddenly so high she looked as if she might be the one standing on the moon.
Even Jim moved toward the RCA TV, and suddenly the whole family was riveted by the pictures being beamed back to them all the way from the moon. Relieved that she was no longer under scrutiny, Sweet Mama poured herself a glass of sweet tea and sat at a table close enough so she could see what was going on. It didn’t look like much to her, just a bunch of blurry black-and-white images. For all she knew, this man on the moon stuff could be a big hoax.
“He looks like a monster, Mommy.”
“That’s the astronaut Neil Armstrong in his space suit,” Emily said. “Listen, Andy. You’re watching history.”
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Neil Armstrong said.
An impossibly huge moon shone through the plate-glass windows. That a mere mortal—somebody not so different from her, except younger—was up there this very minute walking around in the moondust filled Sweet Mama with such hope the café could hardly contain it. Her grandson was home safe, one granddaughter was at the beginning of a new life and the other granddaughter had the grit and the brains to turn this café into the finest restaurant in the Deep South.
Sweet Mama looked around the room till she found the picture she sought, hanging on the wall beside the clock and dated April 1, 1921. There she was, posing behind the cash register in the bakery she’d opened herself, with Beulah as her only help.
If anybody happened to ask Sweet Mama what she thought about the lunar landing, she’d say she’d already been to the moon and was planning to go again.
Two
EMILY DIDN’T NEED AN alarm clock to wake up. She loved sunrises and rituals and the small, everyday miracles of family. When dawn pinked her lace curtains she hurried to the window to admire the sky, and then she raced back to the bedside phone to call Sis.
“Sis, are you awake?”
“I am now, Em.”
Emily grinned. Sis might try to act like an old grump, but she counted on their early morning phone calls as much as Emily did. When you love a sister, you know her songs as well as her secrets. You know what makes her shatter and what it takes to put the pieces back together. You understand her as if you were standing inside her skin, counting the beats of her heart.
“I’ve decided to have a summer garden wedding,” Emily told her sister. “In Sweet Mama’s backyard.”
“It’s a disaster area.”
“It’s beautiful. All we need are a few chairs and some white satin bows, and it will be gorgeous.”
“Good Lord, Emily. Are we talking about the same backyard? It’ll take a ton of fertilizer, six weeks of rain and a flat-out miracle to get Sweet Mama’s backyard even halfway decent.”
“It might take all that if I didn’t have you, Sis.”
“Are you trying to flatter me?”
“Is it working?”
“A little bit.”
Sis’s sigh was audible, and Emily felt a prick of guilt.
“Listen, Sis, I don’t want to cause too much trouble. You need to spend time with Jim instead of fretting over a garden wedding.”
“If you want a garden wedding, that’s what we’ll have. Jim’s going to be fine. I won’t have it any other way.”
“He didn’t seem so fine to me, Sis. Bring him to the café today so we can feed him and fawn over him.”
“I don’t think he’ll come.”
“Why wouldn’t he want to come down to the café so he can be with all of us?”
“Because...” Sis hesitated. “Because he’s as stubborn as I am.”
What had she been going to say? Emily was certain it was something frightening Sis had edited out in order to protect her.
“You’re not stubborn, Sis, just certain. I wish I had more certainty.”
“If you’re not certain about Larry Chastain, don’t marry him.”
“I’m not talking about Larry.” Or was she? Emily felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction, as if she’d gone to the store for a carton of ice cream only to get home and discover the container was empty. “Let’s not be serious today, Sis. We have so much to celebrate!”
“That we do, Em. See you at the café.”
Emily dressed quickly, then went down the hall to check on her son. He was out of bed, wearing his Superman suit. It was from last Halloween and too short, but he didn’t care. A little boy planning big adventures with his favorite teddy bear, Henry, didn’t worry about things like dressing to the nines and combing his hair.
Andy hadn’t seen her yet, and Emily stood in the doorway, watching as he picked up the picture from his bedside table, Captain Mark Jones, smiling at his son from a silver frame.
“I love you right back, Daddy,” Andy said, then planted a big kiss on the picture.
That was her fault. She’d told Andy that Mark Jones loved him best. Was it wrong of her to tell such a lie? Wrong to let her son believe his natural father had wanted him, had loved him more than anything in the world?
She hoped that having a real daddy in the house would cause Andy to let go of the phantom father.
Andy spotted her and raced to hug her around the legs. When she knelt to fold him close, she put her face in his hair and inhaled the scent of shampoo and summer and little boy dreams.
“You think my daddy heard me?” Andy wiggled out of her grasp.
“I don’t know, Andy.”
“Maybe Heaven’s got big speakers like the ice cream truck.”
“Maybe so.” Emily picked up the pajamas Andy had dropped on the floor. “Did you comb your hair?”
“I forgot.” Andy raced off to the bathroom and turned on the faucet, making so much racket he sounded like a Little League baseball team. “I got important things to do, Mommy,” he called.
“Like what?” Emily shook out his sheets and tucked the corners into his bed.
“Build a rocket ship.” He poked his head around the door frame, his freshly wet hair sticking out at such odd angles he looked as if he’d had a big surprise. “If Nell Arms Strong can go to the moon, I can, too.”
“Why, yes, you can. You can do anything you set your mind to, Andy.”
“I might see my daddy up there.”
The weight of being a single mother descended so quickly Emily had to struggle against defeat. Where was that line between making sure your son felt loved by his natural father and letting him live in a fantasy world?
“Let’s not talk about that right now, Andy.” She caught her son’s hand, and he grabbed his old teddy bear. “Pretty soon you’ll have a real daddy in the house.”
Andy balked in the doorway, digging his heels into the shag carpet and sticking his head around the door frame with the anxious posture of a child searching for monsters.
“Andy, what are you doing? We don’t have time to lollygag.”
“Looking for a Larry Alert.”
Emily sighed. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Andy to warm up to Larry. Heaven knows, Larry had tried, too. He’d promised to take Andy fishing and to get him a new baseball mitt. He’d even said they could build a fort together in the backyard.
“We’ve talked about this, Andy. Until the wedding Larry will always sleep at his house, and then after, he’ll sleep here and we’ll be a family.”
Andy crossed his eyes, his way of saying I don’t want to listen to this. Maybe she’d been wrong to let him spend so much time at the café. Sis and Sweet Mama and Beulah encouraged every little thing he did. But still, what was she to do? Day care cost too much, and in her opinion, if you didn’t have family, you didn’t have anything worth talking about.
She went downstairs to her kitchen, which was her favorite room in the house, and began to fix breakfast while Andy raced around with his arms spread and his red cape flying out behind him. In a minute she heard him digging around in the pantry.
“What are you doing, Andy?”
“There’s a ginormous box in here. Big enough for me and you and Henry to go the moon.”
He dragged out the box their new television set had come in. A gift from Larry. Just one more piece of evidence that Emily knew what she was doing by marrying a man who could not only provide for her family, but was generous besides.
Andy raced back into the pantry and came out with an empty Tide box.
“I’m gonna take Aunt Sis, too. She knows ’bout boats and baseball and putting worms on hooks.” Andy heaved the Tide box into the TV box. “You got any more boxes? It’s gonna take lots for a rocket ship.”
“I’m sure there are some at the café. We can bring them home this evening.”
“I’m gonna build my rocket ship at the café. Aunt Sis can help. She knows lots of stuff.”
“Yes, she does. Andy, you need to eat your breakfast so we can leave for the café. I don’t know how the biscuits will turn out if I’m not there to make them.”
“You reckon Aunt Sis and me and Henry can finish the rocket ship today?”
“Good heavens, Andy. Why don’t you let it be a summer project?”
“’Cause I might need to make a quick getaway.”
The words settled into Emily’s heart like stones. What if the innocent recognized truths hidden from grown-ups?
* * *
Morning came softly to the Gulf Coast, tipping the waves with gold, rousing the terns from their nests along the beach and sending seagulls soaring across the water, looking for unsuspecting fish. After she’d hung up from talking to Emily, Sis threw back her sheet, slipped into sweat shorts, black T-shirt and gardening gloves, then tiptoed down the stairs.
Her sister had been wrong about Jim. He just wasn’t ready for public appearances, especially at the café where everybody knew him and would expect to hear a blow-by-blow account of his experiences in Vietnam. Sis decided to stick to the one thing she could control, fixing up the garden, bedraggled from a brutal summer of heat and bugs. The wedding was only weeks away.
Still, Sis didn’t mind the extra work. This was the part of the day she loved best, early morning when the dew was still on and she had the gardens to herself. Nature expected nothing of her. If she showed up to pull a few weeds and drench the beds with the water during dry spells, she was rewarded with prize-winning blossoms and tomatoes so big you could slice one and have plenty for five bacon and tomatoes sandwiches. If she didn’t show up, the resulting weeds became homes for the geckos and frogs Andy liked to catch and carry to the little frog houses he built all over the backyard with sticks and dirt.
It always amazed Sis that he expected the frog to be grateful, to set up housekeeping and be waiting when Andy stopped by later to ask how to catch flies with your tongue. Failing to get advice from a frog, he always turned to Sis.
Even if she didn’t have children of her own, Andy was the next best thing.
She eased the back door shut. Sweet Mama and Beulah were still asleep on the first floor, Sweet Mama in a big bedroom filled with mahogany furniture hauled from New Orleans in a wagon, and Beulah in a sunny room that had once belonged to Sis’s mother and daddy.
There had been no sounds coming from Jim’s room, either. Whether he was sleeping or lying on top of his covers with his eyes wide-open, Sis couldn’t say. All she could do was remember how he’d taken his duffel bag straight to his old room on the second floor last night, then shut the door.
Carrying the prosthetic leg he’d left in the umbrella stand downstairs, Sis had gone right in behind him.
“Don’t you ever knock?”
“You might as well not try your stinger on me, Jim Blake. I can still whip your butt.” She laid the prosthetic leg on the end of his bed. “I’m not going to let you shut yourself up here and have a pity party.”
“This is not pity, it’s a fact. If you want somebody to wear that leg, wear it yourself.”
“All right. Forget the leg for now. But don’t think I’m done. We lost Daddy and Mark to war, and I’m not going to lose you, too.”
“We lost Daddy in a car wreck.”
As if she didn’t know. Sis had turned and walked out of the room, the sound of crunching metal and the screams of her parents echoing through her mind. She’d been in that car, a teenager happy she didn’t have to stay home with the twins and Sweet Mama while her mother picked up Major Bill Blake at the bus station and brought him home for the holidays.
The driver who hit them was so drunk he didn’t see the red light, didn’t notice the car or the three people inside who were singing “White Christmas.” He never knew the look of surprise on Bill Blake’s face or the way Margaret Blake reached for her husband’s hand or the thoughts that tumbled through the head of a teenage girl flung clear of the wreckage. Sitting on the side of Highway 90 with her head hurting, Sis had checked her new red sweater set for damage.
What she should have been doing was checking her parents for a pulse, checking her future to see how she’d ever live with the guilt that she’d survived and they hadn’t.
Remembering, Sis jerked weeds out of the flower beds so hard she rocked back on her heels. She was not going to get mired down in the past and she most certainly wasn’t going to let her brother be one of those vets who returned from war but never really came home. The military had taken too much from her, and she was determined it would not take another single thing.
The back screen door popped, and Sweet Mama called, “Sis, can you help me with this?”
Her gardening gloves were on, her bonnet was askew and she was wrestling with a huge basket full of flowers. Plastic, for God’s sake. Sweet Mama wouldn’t be caught dead with a plastic flower in her house.
If Sis were Emily, she’d send up a petition to God, but she’d discovered if you wanted something, you’d best do it yourself.
“What in the world are you doing with plastic roses?”
“Shh, not so loud, Sis. I don’t want to wake that heifer.”
That heifer was Stella Mae Clifford. Sweet Mama marched to the edge of the yard and peered through the rose hedge toward the two-story Victorian house next door, a twin of theirs except it was painted yellow instead of pink.
Satisfied that her archenemy wasn’t about, she came back across the yard, chuckling, then plucked a pink plastic rose from the basket and secured it to the hedge with green gardening tape.
“Imagine that silly cow’s surprise when she wakes up and sees these on my rosebushes.”
Emily would die when she saw them. Still, Sis started taping plastic roses onto the nearly naked bushes.
“She’ll never believe you still have roses, Sweet Mama.”
“Yes, she will. She can’t half see.”
Black spot blight and aphids, enjoying the long stretch of intense heat and dry weather, had stripped every rosebush in Biloxi, including the hedge Sweet Mama was now decorating with plastic blossoms.
“Hurry up, Sis, before it gets daylight. We’ve got to get down to the café so I can put the coffee on for the regulars.”
“Emily can do that. Why don’t you and Beulah stay here and enjoy Jim’s first morning home? I think he could use the company.”
“Beulah’s in there now petting him like he’s three years old. Jim’s going to be all right. He’s like me. Made of strong stuff.” Sweet Mama plucked the last rose out of the basket and taped it to the disease-ravaged hedge. “Thank God he didn’t take after that jackass I married.”
There was a picture of their granddaddy on the walls at Sweet Mama’s, captioned simply The Jackass. Everybody knew it was Peter Blake, and everybody knew the story.
Sweet Mama had the misfortune to marry a man who was already married—to the bottle. Hardly an evening passed that he didn’t come home full of alcohol and bad attitude and smelling of another woman’s perfume.
After she had two boys, she made up her mind they’d not have Peter Blake as an example. One full moon when he came home sloshed and fell dead asleep into his bed, Sweet Mama went into the garden and pulled up two stout, dry cornstalks. Then she proceeded to tie her husband to the bed with the sheets and beat the devil out of him. When she’d whipped him sober, she packed his bags, threw them out the door and told him she didn’t want to ever see his sorry skinny self again.
Through the years he’d been spotted everywhere from Maine to California. The last they heard, he was up in Anchorage, Alaska. Wherever he was, that day he hightailed it was the last of Peter Blake in Biloxi and the beginning of Sweet Mama’s transformation from wife and mother to independent businesswoman, an unusual thing for a woman in 1921.
Some said Stella Mae Clifford was Peter Blake’s mistress, that he was the one who’d built her house next door. Once, Sis had asked Sweet Mama if the rumor was true.
“I like to keep people guessing, Sis. A juicy rumor is good for business. Better than a full-page ad in the newspaper.”
With the last plastic rose in place, Sweet Mama settled her bonnet on her head and shot a bird to the house next door.
“Take that, you silly old cow.”
What if Sweet Mama’s escapade with the plastic roses was not a sign of senility but a sign that the sassy, unsinkable Lucy Long Blake of years gone by was still shining through? What if she were made of such strong stuff she could defeat all the alarming signs of a mind and a body roaring toward old age?
“Let’s go inside so you can eat, Sweet Mama. Then I’ll drive you to the café. We’ve got a wedding to plan.”
“I don’t want to ride with you.”
“Why not?”
“You drive like a bat out of hell.”
It was true. Was it because Sis was in love with speed or was she thumbing her nose at fate, saying I cheated you once, see if you can catch me now?
“All right. We’ll go in separate cars. But you be careful, you hear?”
“Pshaw” was all Sweet Mama said.
Sis took her arm and led her up the back steps that might be a grandmother trap. Beulah was in the kitchen waiting for them.
“It’s about time ya’ll come in from the garden,” she said. “Breakfast is getting cold.”
“You and Sweet Mama go ahead and eat. I’ve got a few more things to do in the garden.”
“Not without something in your stomach, you don’t.” Beulah slapped two pieces of bacon between a biscuit and handed them to Sis as she headed back to the garden.
Sis decided to leave the plastic roses for a while. By tomorrow, Sweet Mama would have forgotten all about them, and Sis could remove them without causing a fuss. The rose hedge itself was another matter. She could fertilize and water a few of the bushes and hope for a little bit of greenery in time for the wedding, but most of them had to be dug up. She’d plant new ones tomorrow.
She went into the double garage where Jim’s baby-blue Thunderbird was parked, and the fishing boat Sis hadn’t used all summer. Thinking that fishing might be just the thing for her brother, she found her spade, then went back to the rose hedge and started to dig.
In spite of spindly growth with only a few blighted leaves, the rosebush had roots that seemed to go all the way to China. Sweat darkened her shirt and poured down her face as the mound of earth piled up.
Suddenly, her spade struck something hard. It was probably part of a brick or an old Mason jar. These old houses had yards full of junk tossed out and buried under years of accumulated dirt. Dropping to her knees, Sis leaned close to investigate, using her hands to carefully rake away the earth.
The bleached bones came suddenly into view, and Sis felt her breath leave her body. She bent closer to inspect her find. The bones didn’t look like much at first, maybe the carcass of a dead squirrel. Or something larger. A dog, perhaps. A family pet.
That was the answer, of course. On a day when the sky looked as if angels had polished it with lemon wax, what could possibly be awry in Sweet Mama’s garden?
Sis continued to dig, but as the mound of dirt collected at her feet and her discovery under the rosebushes revealed its true nature, she sank back on her heels, her heart hammering so loud it was a wonder they didn’t hear it clear in the kitchen. That was no family pet under the roses. It was a skeletal foot, pointing straight toward disaster. She felt as if everything tethering her to earth had been cut away and she was tumbling headlong into that dark hole with the bleached bones. Questions spun through her mind with the dizzying speed of a comet. Who? Why? And how?
But the one that burned a hole through her was What do these bones have to do with my family?
The sun had already climbed into a hot blue sky and beat unmercifully on her and her eerie find, the toe bones attached to the foot, the foot attached to the ankle. And what else? If she kept digging would she find the entire body?
She poked gingerly with her spade, each thrust meeting a sickening resistance that told its own story. The weight of sudden fear dropped her to her knees, but no matter how hard she stared at the awful thing in the hole, no matter how hard she wished she’d never taken her shovel to the roses, the bones wouldn’t go away. Bleached whiter than the wings of angels, they grew so big in Sis’s mind they took up all her oxygen, deprived her of breath and speech and hope. They grew so big she felt as if they were splitting the earth beneath her feet. Any minute now it would open up and swallow her whole, and along with her, everything she loved.
Slowly, Sis pushed herself upright. The woman who had come blithely into the garden expecting to tidy up for her sister’s wedding had suddenly become a woman whose awful discovery could destroy her family. Nothing would ever be the same. From this day on she would divide her life into two parts: before she found the bones and after.