The Oleander Sisters

Three

WHEN SIS LEFT THE KITCHEN she could hear Sweet Mama down the hall, singing some rollicking old song from the Jazz Age. Did she know about the bones in the garden? The last thing Sis wanted to do was ask her and completely undo a mind already coming unraveled. Instead, she hurried up the stairs and tapped on Jim’s door.

“Come in.” He was standing on his crutch at the window with his back to the door, his shoulders hunched in a too-big pajama top and his sleep-ruffled hair sticking up like Andy’s.

The brother she’d sent to Vietnam was one she’d have confided in about the skeleton in the garden. This brother she wanted to fold into her arms and croon to the way she had when he was a child crying over a skinned knee.

“Jim, I’ll be heading to the café soon. Would you like to come with me?”

“Not today, Sis.”

He didn’t even turn around, just kept staring out the window as if he couldn’t believe the blue Gulf spread out before him, the white sand dotted with umbrellas and tourists, the seagulls wheeling through a sky the color of a robin’s egg. Sis didn’t even want to think what hell he’d seen over there, a vague euphemism she’d hated until she discovered there’s only so much horror a person can stand in one day.

“That’s okay, Jim. Take your time. Beulah’s going to be here today, cooking up all your favorites.” That turned her brother from the window, brought the ghost of a smile. “And I imagine Em’s make you something special at the café.”

“Tell Em not to worry about me.”

“I will.” Not that it would change a thing. Emily had always shared everything with Jim, the heartache, the joy, even the measles. Sis watched her brother standing there, sagging, a posture so foreign to him she wanted to cry. “It’s a beautiful day, Jim. Why don’t you get out your convertible and take Beulah for a spin?”

“Some other time, maybe.”

What would he do all day? Hole up in the room staring out the window? Sis stood in the doorway torn between the urge to stay and take care of her brother and the need to go to the café to help Emily and Sweet Mama take care of business. In the end, her practical side won. If the café failed, they’d all go under.

She hurried to her room to dress, and then got into her Valiant and followed along behind Sweet Mama in her ancient, oversize Buick. Thank God her grandmother wrecked nothing but a hydrangea bush backing out of the driveway. And miracle of miracles, she stayed on her side of the road all the way to the café.

Still, by the time Sis got there, she was a nervous wreck. She made herself stand still in the center of the room, just breathing, grounding herself in the familiar smells of bacon and coffee and sugar and sweet, ripe peaches. Emily had already baked six Amen cobblers that were cooling on the countertop, and Sweet Mama was standing safe and sound at the coffee urns making a special pot for her customers who always asked for chicory—Burt Larson, the mailman, Tom and James Wilson, the brothers who had a barbershop next door and Miss Opal Clemson, the music teacher who claimed she’d once played the piano for a concert by Leontyne Price, Mississippi’s famed opera singer.

It seemed so much like an ordinary day that Sis could almost forget her grisly find in the garden. But the Amen cobblers were sending up thick steam you could get lost in and never find your way out of, a sure sign of a disaster so huge even Sis wouldn’t be able to contain it. The bones in the garden were just the beginning.

She pulled herself together and found her sister in the kitchen wearing a pink shirt with long sleeves, for Pete’s sake, and it was already hot enough to fry an egg in the parking lot. Still, the sight of Emily covered with a dusting of flour and elbow deep in German chocolate cakes gave Sis a momentary respite from thinking about portentous cobblers and backyard bones.

“Hey, Sis!” Emily said, smiling as she poured batter into cake pans. “Where’s Jim?”

“He’s not up to socializing yet, Em.”

“I should have known that.” Emily scraped batter off the bottom of the bowl and held out a wooden stirring spoon. “Do you want to lick the spoon?”

She took up a spot by her sister and opened her mouth for the taste of raw batter, rich with sugar and butter. It brought back memories of childhood, with Jim and Emily perched on stools at Sweet Mama’s side and Sis standing at her elbow, listening to stories of the café in its infancy, waiting their turns to lick the batter from the latest confection in progress—a German chocolate cake, a lemon icebox pie, a Coca-Cola cake or Emily’s favorite, Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.

“Beulah said for you to wait on these cakes,” Sis said.

“If I had waited, there wouldn’t be any spoons to lick.” Emily bumped Sis’s hip, teasing her, and then crammed the huge stirring spoon into her mouth. It left a smear of cake batter on her cheek that made her look like a little girl.

“How do you know, Em? Someday I might make a cake.”

Emily whooped. “I want a picture of that. It would be one for the walls.”

Sis stuck her finger in the bowl and dabbed batter on her sister’s nose. Emily paid her back with a smear on the chin, and soon they were doubled over with laughter.

“Oh, my goodness.” Emily put the bowl and spoons into the sink. “If I don’t get this mess cleaned up, I’ll never be ready to open.”

“I’ll rinse.” Sis wiped cake batter off her face and moved to the sink. “You load the dishwasher.”

“Good,” Emily said. “That gives us time to talk about the wedding. I was thinking of putting flower baskets in the garden instead of depending on the roses.”

Pricked with sudden alarm, Sis just stood there with the water running unheeded over the dishes.

“I don’t think you ought to have it in the garden.”

“Since when? Just this morning you said it would be fine.”

“I checked it after we talked. It looks awful out there.”

“I know it’s not at its best this time of year, Sis, but I’ve always wanted a garden wedding.”

Sis had an awful vision of Emily standing atop the bones saying I do.

“It’s too hot, Em. Everybody will parch.”

“We can put the chairs under the shade.”

“I have a better idea. Wait till November when things have cooled off.”

Could she report the bones and get the mess cleared out of her garden by November?

“I will not have Andy start school without two parents. Okay?”

Was Emily remembering walking the halls of Biloxi High to whispers of easy and slut, her baby bump showing and Mark Jones already enlisted and gone? Was she thinking about how she’d had to sit on the sidelines while the rest of her classmates walked onstage to get their diplomas?

“Nobody’s going to call him names, Em. Not while I draw breath.”

“What are you going to do, Sis? Go to school with him every day?”

“I’m not above it.”

“You’re not going to get me to change my mind, and you might as well quit trying. I will not have my son called bastard.”

“All right. I understand. But at least think about getting married in Sweet Mama’s living room. We could buy some of those pink roses you love so much and put them in wicker baskets on either side of the mantel.”

“Forget it, Sis.”

“You could walk down the staircase and not have to trail your wedding dress in the dirt.”

“Good grief! Just let it alone. It’s my wedding and I’m getting married in the garden.”

Sis imagined Uncle Steve’s nosy wife, Ethel, poking around the pitiful rosebushes and finding the bony foot sticking out of the ground, imagined cops and pandemonium and scandal.

“But, Em, think what a hissy fit Aunt Ethel will pitch if she gets too hot out there. Or what if it starts to rain?”

“I’ve had my say, Sis, and that’s my final word.”

Emily huffed over to the stove and turned her back.

Sis wished she could start the day over. She’d sleep late and never see Sweet Mama tying plastic roses on the bush, never drive along behind her at twenty miles an hour in case she ran over another hydrangea bush. But most of all, she’d never dig up a rosebush and find bones.

Sis turned to the window and saw her nephew in the backyard, surrounded by boxes.

“Is Andy building a fort out there?”

“No. A rocket ship. He’s planning to fly me to the moon.”

“Maybe he’ll take me, too.” She looked back at her baby sister standing there oblivious in her long-sleeved shirt, expecting every downpour to yield a rainbow. “I’m sorry, Em. I’m such a grump.”

“You’re not totally grumpy. Just a little.”

“I’m going outside to cool off and visit with Andy, and when I come back inside, we’ll plan a wedding that will turn your enemies green with envy.”

“I don’t have enemies,” Emily said without a single hint of irony.

Lord, Sis hoped that was true. She raced through the door, the scent of Amen cobbler following her all the way, so strong it felt like somebody squeezing her heart. Outside, she leaned against the wall, trying to catch a deep breath. What would become of her family if she worried herself into a heart attack? It could happen. Last year a woman not three years older than Sis had keeled over on the front pew of the Biloxi Baptist Church, and her with three children to look after and a husband, besides.

“Hey, Aunt Sis,” Andy called. “How many batteries you got?”

He was standing on top of a TV box in his Superman suit, his blond cowlick sticking up in front like the crest of a baby bird, his sturdy legs beneath the too-short pants turned dark gold from a summer in the sun, the big red S on his shirt faded from too many washings. His feet were bare and his face was filled with excitement.

“I don’t have any batteries in my pockets, but I’ll bet I can find some. What are they for?”

“My rocket ship. It’s gonna take lots to get to the moon.”

Hope is such a fragile thing, a butterfly wing you could crush with one finger. Walking a thin line, terrified of leaning too far to the left or the right, Sis squatted beside her nephew at the pile of boxes.

“Let me help you with that rocket ship.”

“Me and you’s gonna build the bestest one!” Andy scrambled among the pile and came up with a box still smelling of laundry detergent. “Mommy won’t let me use a knife. Can you cut the window, Aunt Sis?”

“I can.”

As she pulled out a pocketknife and cut a window right over the T on the Tide box, Sis missed the family she might have had as if they were real, as if she had a husband who kept her picture on his desk, a daughter named Susan who had inherited her aunt Emily’s beautiful blond hair and a sturdy son named Bill after her own father, a son who loved baseball and digging for worms and sitting on the banks of the Tchoutacabouffa River with a fishing pole.

When Andy raced inside to peer out through the hole, her phantom family vanished, leaving her in the backyard of the café with a nephew whose grin lit a candle in her heart.

“Oh, boy. When I fly to the moon, I can see my daddy up there in the stars.”

If Sis were in her sister’s shoes, she’d never have painted Mark Jones as a hero. In her book, there was nothing heroic about leaving a pregnant girlfriend to face the fallout in a Bible Belt society. But what did she know about love and children? She’d never had either.

“Do you think I’ll see my daddy, Aunt Sis?”

“Maybe.”

Andy got that little boy skeptical look that said I know you’re going to break my heart with the truth but I love you enough to stand here and smile while you do it.

“If you look with your heart, and maybe wear a special pair of glasses.”

“What kinda glasses?”

“The kind I’ve got back home in my dresser drawer.” It was an old pair of sunglasses, red with white polka dots and cat-eye frames. “Every astronaut ought to have a pair. I’ll give them to you.”

Andy clambered out of the box, then raced to the base of a live oak and dug a while in the dirt. When he came back, he handed Sis a white rock the size of a hen egg, along with a good-size chunk of soil.

“You the bestest, Aunt Sis. This is for you.”

“Thank you, Andy.”

“It’s a magic rock.”

“What does it do?”

“Wish real hard and rub it. See? Like this.” He put his grubby little hand on the rock and rubbed with all his might. “Then your wish’ll come true.”

Sis kissed the top of his head, which smelled like sunshine and salty sea air and optimism.

“I’ve got to get back inside, but you keep up the good work, Andy.”

Grinning, he made a fist and bumped it against hers.

“Later, ’gator,” he said.

“After a while, crocodile.”

Before she got to the back door, she rubbed the rock in her pocket. Just in case it might still contain a little boy’s belief in magic.

* * *

That afternoon Sis left the café early, and if you looked close enough you’d see a cloud of anxiety over her head as dark as a flock of blackbirds. You’d see a woman who has lost her moral compass, one who stopped seeing in black-and-white the minute she dug under the rosebushes.

Driving by the seawall as familiar as the peaches in Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler, Sis glanced at the beach, hoping for distraction, longing to see a little boy in a baseball cap hitting a fly ball into a blue surf pounding the white sand. But all she saw were shades of gray. No color. No right. No wrong. Just a vast shadowy land where the truth was hidden under a rosebush and anything at all was possible.

Finally, the Victorian house came into view, but it no longer put Sis in mind of a tall glass of sweet tea on the front porch swing. She parked and hurried straight to the kitchen, but there was no sign of Beulah or Jim.

Perhaps it was movement in the backyard that caught her eye, or it could have been instinct, sharpened by years of trouble and perfected to art by constant vigilance.

Beulah wore a red hat with a brim wide enough to shade two people, and in her hand was a shovel.

Sis barreled through the back door and took the steps two at a time.

“Beulah! What on earth are you doing?”

“What does it look like, Sis? I’m planting roses.”

There they were, new rosebushes all in a row, standing like sentinels over the bones. Even the bush that had sheltered the foot had vanished, and in its place was a Don Juan climber, its petals dripping to the ground red as blood. Closer inspection revealed that these end-of-summer bushes were hardly better than the disease-ravaged ones they’d replaced. Instead of rich, green branches full of life, the new bushes were mere skeletons, their limbs holding a puny offering of sparse leaves and small blossoms.

“Good Lord. Where did you find these?”

“Closeout sale at the corner market.”

“They won’t live in this heat.”

“Yes, they will. I aim to water ’em every day.” Beulah stripped off her gloves and handed Sis the shovel, as matter-of-factly as if she’d just planted prizewinning roses in a spring garden. “Stow this, will you, Sis? I’m gonna get some sweet tea before I melt.”

Sis held on to the shovel and stared at the Don Juan, paralyzed. Were the bones still under there? Or had Beulah moved them?

Sis had an insane urge to ram the sharp edge of the shovel under the bush and see for herself, but it was broad daylight and there was no telling who might be looking out a window or passing along the street. What would they see? Would they see a decisive woman who never even blinked when she chose family over college, who ate the same thing every morning without once wondering if corn flakes would be better for her than biscuits and bacon, who got out of bed every day at the same time and did her job in precisely the same way without ever stopping to cry over what she might be missing? Or would they see a divided woman split by the need to protect her family at all costs and the urge to discover the truth behind the awful secret in her garden?

It seemed to Sis that the bones under her feet were calling out to her, trying to tell her of something she’d missed, some little clue from her past that might reveal why they were there.

She thought back over the years. Once there had been a mimosa tree where the rose hedge stood. Its twin was still on the other side of the yard, its branches sturdy enough to hold a tree swing for Andy. She tried to remember when the first mimosa tree had come down, but the red petals drifting over her shoes from the newly planted Don Juan brought her mind back from the past and into the awful present.

The back door popped open and Beulah called, “Everything all right out here, Sis?”

“Everything’s fine.”

As she hurried off to the garage to stow the shovel, she tasted the bitterness of her lie. Everything she’d held true about herself and her history was suddenly in question.

She heard the sound of Sweet Mama’s powerful old Buick engine, followed by the slamming of a car door and Emily’s voice. “Andy, be careful and don’t drop the pie.”

She’d followed Sweet Mama to make sure she got home all right, just as she’d promised Sis she would. The pie would be the coconut cream she’d made at the café especially for Jim. Soon Emily would be driving to her own house where she would stand in her little blue-and-white kitchen making cookies for Andy and dreaming of having a family complete with a husband.

Sis tried not to even think about that, about dreams that turned out wrong and dreams that got left in the dust.

“Watch your step, Sweet Mama!” Emily’s voice echoed through the stillness of a clear afternoon. She’d be taking Sweet Mama’s elbow now as they climbed the front porch steps, something neither sister would have imagined the need for five years earlier.

The front screen door popped, and Beulah called out, “Ya’ll set that pie in the kitchen, then come back here on the porch under the ceiling fan. I got sweet tea made.”

Their voices receded and Sis stood in the doorway of the garage, half in shadow, half in sun, which seemed to her a metaphor for her life. Soon she would join her family, smiling while she sipped iced tea and discussed her sister’s wedding. Looking at her, nobody would know she was the keeper of a nightmare, one so dark that if she made a false move her world would crumble. And with it the family she loved.

Four

SWEET MAMA’S KITCHEN SMELLED of fried chicken and field peas cooked with fatback, sweet corn seasoned with butter and sweet potato casserole cooked with chunks of pineapple, each scent as distinctive to Emily as if she’d personally stood at Beulah’s elbow watching her cook for Jim. While Andy began a reconnaissance of the area that included looking in every cabinet and peering out the window, Emily set the coconut cream pie on the table beside a platter piled high with Beulah’s biscuits.

The kitchen was Emily’s favorite room in Sweet Mama’s house, or any house, for that matter. Her best memories were here. She ran her hands over the scarred surface of the table. She’d sat at that same table while Sis struggled to explain the mystery of numbers and her twin brother breezed through the multiplication table as if he’d been born knowing it. She pictured her own little maple table and how Larry would soon bend patiently over Andy, helping him add and subtract and listening to him as he read about Dick and Jane from the first grade reader. Did they still teach Dick and Jane? She could hardly wait to find out.

“Mommy!” Andy tugged at her skirt. “Sis is out in the backyard! Can I go out and make frog houses with her?”

“That’s a wonderful idea. But first go out to the front porch and tell Beulah and Sweet Mama I’m going upstairs to see Uncle Jim.”

“’K!” He raced off, his sneakers skidding in the polished hallway.

“Andy,” she called. “Don’t run in the house.”

“I won’t.”

Emily grinned. Of course he would. What little boy ever walked when it was so much more fun to run?

She got a dessert plate from the cabinet and cut a generous slice of pie, then headed upstairs to find her brother. Beulah said he hadn’t come out of his room all day. When Emily got upstairs and pushed open his door, she saw evidence of his hermitlike day—his bed still unmade, the plate of half-eaten chicken and the glass with ice melting in leftover tea. Jim was sitting in a straight chair at his desk, an open book in front of him, his beard stubble so blond it was barely visible.

“Em!” His smile reminded her of Andy’s, except for the vacant eyes.

“What are you reading?”

She walked over and put her arm around his shoulder, and he gestured toward the page, Constellations and Constitution in Volume C of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He could have been reading about either one with equal curiosity.

“I hope Andy inherited your brain,” she said.

“I hope he’s nothing like me.” The force of his passion catapulted him from his chair, while Emily stood by, helpless. “Look at me, Em! I can’t even stand the sight of my own face.”

“It’s a dear face. I love your face.” She cupped her brother’s cheeks. “Look at me, Jim.”

“Don’t, Em.” He jerked away. “Everywhere I turn I see the eyes of the dead staring back at me. Even when I look at my own sisters.”