My Sister, Myself

One more blow landed on her bottom when she wasn’t looking.

And Alex started to cry.

TORY WAS IN Christine’s office after her last class on Friday, double-checking to make sure she’d done everything she’d needed to. And feeling relieved that she’d made it through her second week as a teacher. There’d been no uprisings in any of her classes.

She had a few telephone calls to return—one about an assessment committee Christine had been chosen to sit in on, a student who’d missed class, and Phyllis. She also had a roster to update.

And she had a permanent knot in her stomach.

Yet, as she looked back over the past two weeks, she had to smile. She hadn’t been half-bad. What was more, during those moments when she’d forgotten who she really was, she’d actually enjoyed herself. She’d always known she loved literature. Reading it. Studying it. Discussing it. She’d just never known how much she liked teaching, too.

“Come in,” she called when a knock sounded at the door.

Her stomach flip-flopped when Ben Sanders entered. The man was definitely something to look at. Six feet tall, with his curly dark hair and big brown eyes, he’d probably led more than one woman astray.

But not this woman.

Dropping his backpack on the floor, he sank into the chair across from her desk. Tory stiffened.

“I just stopped by to let you know I sent off the paper this morning.”

“Oh!” She smiled. “Good.” Though she tried to keep it in place, she could feel her smile fading. He could just as easily have given her the news in class that morning. Why was he here? What did he want? What did he know?

“Thanks for the suggestion.”

“There’s no guarantee anything will come of it,” she felt compelled to warn him.

“Don’t worry, Teach.” He grinned. “I gave up on guarantees a long time ago.”

“I’m impressed, you know,” she said, thinking like a teacher—and suddenly horrified when she heard how the words sounded. She wasn’t a teacher; she was Tory Evans, failure and fraud.

“Oh?” He gazed over her shoulder at the window behind her desk.

“You not only read the assignments, you think about them.”

“I’m here to learn.”

“I can’t imagine how much time you must spend on homework if you do for all your classes what you do for mine.”

Ben leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I have the time.” He was looking at her again, and the genuine niceness in his eyes, the ease, relaxed her a tiny bit.

“You’re not working?”

Shaking his head, he smiled, almost apologetically. “I got a loan, at least for this first semester, so I could concentrate fully on my studies.”

“You’re older than most of the students in the freshman class,” Tory said, though she knew she shouldn’t have.

This conversation was traveling places it mustn’t go. There was no place in her life for personal conversation between her and a man. Whoever he was.

But for some reason, he was on her mind often….

And there was a big solid desk between them.

“I worked for a number of years after high school,” he said.

“Doing what?” It shouldn’t have mattered. Shouldn’t have interested her.

He shrugged and Tory noticed the breadth of his shoulders. In her fantasy world, they would have been shoulders to cry on, to offer protection. To make her feel safe. In the here and now, the real world, his strength and maleness made her uncomfortable.

“Whatever would pay the rent,” he said. “I worked for a moving company in Flagstaff during the day for most of those years, and usually had another job at night. Working on cars, on loading docks, in a grocery store. Even did some construction work on weekends.”

The heroes in her mind were always hard workers. Not always rich, but hard workers. Money didn’t impress Tory. It couldn’t buy anything that mattered.

“I’m surprised, then, that you didn’t have enough money saved to pay for college.”

She had no idea where her impertinence was coming from. Or her nosiness, but as he sat there looking at her, he seemed to invite the questions.

“I had a wife who liked to spend the money before I managed to earn it.”

Her breath caught as she glanced at his left hand. “You’re married?”

He shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“Oh.”

Sitting up, he frowned. “Before you go getting any ideas, she left me, not the other way around.”

“I wasn’t getting ideas.” Okay, maybe she had been. Men deserted women all the time. Why should he be any different?

“Guess I’d better go and let you get back to whatever you were doing,” he said, standing. He slid his backpack onto one shoulder.

Tory stood, too, feeling at too much of a disadvantage remaining seated. “Thanks for coming by,” she said. When she realized how much she meant the simple words, she added, “To let me know about the submission. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”

“Thanks.”

He turned and left, but not before he’d sent her another of those odd smiles that confused her. Scared her.

He’d smiled the same way that first day of class. Almost as though he was reassuring her, offering her a kindness she hardly dared to recognize.

It had to stop.

“I’M SURE DR. PARSONS and his wife don’t want to be bothered with me,” Tory said later that evening as Phyllis drove them up the mountain toward the president’s beautiful home. “The invitation to dinner was for you.”

Phyllis, already sweating in her sleeveless yellow cotton shirt, threw her a sideways glance. “It was for both of us.”

“Why would they want to spend one of their few free evenings with me?”

“Why wouldn’t they, Tory?” Phyllis asked, her voice serious. “You’re a delightful woman with compassion and insight. You have a sense of humor—when you let yourself relax—and intelligent things to say.”

Tory smiled, in spite of herself. “You’ve sure managed to project a lot of things onto me that were never there before.” Fantasies were nice, but in the long run they hurt.

“I don’t think so,” Phyllis said. She slowed as she rounded a curb. Tory studied the saguaro cacti standing erect and proud just a few feet from the drive. “The old man of the desert,” Phyllis had told her that type of cactus was called. Tory preferred to think of it as an old woman. A grandmother, stalwart and stoic, who’d survive until the end.

“Okay, for expediency’s sake, we’ll pretend that the way you describe me has some truth in it. But Dr. Parsons and his wife are expecting someone else—Christine. A confident, accomplished woman. Not me.” she shuddered. “It makes me nervous that they’d want me here.” She watched as the house grew closer and closer. It was beautiful with its mostly glass walls, reminding Tory of a place Bruce owned in the Poconos.

She’d almost killed herself there once. Or at least planned to do it. Until she’d thought of Christine. Then, as always, she’d found the strength to endure.

“You don’t think they suspect anything, do you?” she finally asked, heart pounding.

“No!” Phyllis said, taking her hand off the wheel long enough to squeeze Tory’s.

Tory wasn’t used to the contact. Christine had never been much of a toucher.

“Will was really taken with Christine,” Phyllis told her. “Though he only met her once, spoke with her maybe a handful of times, something about her seemed to reach him. I’m sure he just has an interest in getting to know her—you—better.”

“Thank you,” Tory said, swallowing with difficulty.

“For what?”

“I don’t know,” Tory answered honestly. “Keeping Christine alive, I guess.”

“You do that all by yourself, honey,” Phyllis said. “She’s so much a part of you, so much inside you, that just having you around is a comfort to me.”

They were approaching the house, and Tory wondered if she’d underdressed in spite of Phyllis’s assurances to the contrary. Had she been with Bruce, the simple twill shorts and cotton blouse would have been an embarrassment. How would Will and Becca Parsons react to her appearance? She shook her head. She had to think about something besides the intimidating people she was about to see.

“I’ve been thinking about looking for an apartment,” she admitted suddenly. She’d been meaning to broach the subject all week, but until now, the time had never been right.

“Why?”

The genuine distress in Phyllis’s voice brought warm tears to Tory’s eyes.

“Because it’s your home and I’m afraid I’m out-staying my welcome.”

Parking the car in front of the Parsons home, Phyllis turned off the ignition but left the keys hanging there as she faced Tory. “Listen, I know that someday you’re going to be ready to move out, to have your own place, your own life, and when that time comes, I’ll help you find just what you want. Until then, please don’t even think about going. I love having you there, Tory. After Boston, this town is so quiet I need the company.”

Tory swallowed again, her lips cracking into a smile. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Knowing she was exceedingly lucky, Tory followed Phyllis to the door, armed with a little more strength.

She was fully aware of why Phyllis had opened her home to her. And even that made her feel a little better.

Once again, Christine had come through for her.

“YOU WANT TO HOLD her?”

Tory sat back on the couch in the comfortably elegant, glass-walled family room of the Parsons home and shook her head as Becca offered her month-old daughter.

“I’ve never…I wouldn’t know…”

The child terrified her. Babies were far too fragile to be part of Tory’s life.

“Come on,” Phyllis coaxed, taking little Bethany from Becca’s arms. “She’s an absolute charmer, and I ought to know. I spent every single day with her until you got here.”

“I’m sorry,” Tory said, stricken, as she looked from Becca to Phyllis. It had grown increasingly obvious during the course of the evening that the two women had become close friends over the past two months. “I didn’t mean to take you away from what you’d normally be doing.”

“It’s okay,” Becca was the one to answer, smiling at Tory. “August was kind of a rough month around here.” She stopped, sharing a secret though somewhat sad smile with her husband. He’d just entered the room with a tray of drinks, his protective glance shooting toward his daughter, then to his wife. Tory had been a whole lot more comfortable when it was just the four females in the room. Even with one of them being only a month old.

“I needed a keeper,” Becca continued, “and Phyllis was kind enough to volunteer. Nowadays, I have more people around than I know what to do with.”

“You reap what you sow, my love,” Will said, setting glasses of iced tea down on the coffee table. He’d exchanged the suit he’d worn to work for a pair of denim shorts and a polo shirt. It felt odd to Tory, seeing her boss so casually dressed. Odder still for him and his wife to insist she call them Becca and Will.

Leaving her daughter with Phyllis on the couch, Becca moved to stand beside her husband. They were a striking couple. Wearing a pair of pleated off-white shorts with a tucked-in emerald silk blouse, Becca wasn’t as casually dressed as her husband, but she complemented him perfectly.

Tory wondered if the love they exuded was real.

“Becca’s the town’s go-to person,” Phyllis explained. “She runs the town council, every committee that’s worthwhile in town, and has time left over to take care of the rest of us.”

“I’m not that bad,” Becca told Tory wryly.

“Yes, she is,” Will inserted, giving his wife a sideways glance that was clearly a special communication between the two of them. “And now that she’s a mom, she’s thinking about organizing an afternoon social time for mothers with new babies, too, so they can exchange dirty-diaper stories.”

“I am not!” Becca said. “I merely said I can’t wait until Sari has her baby so I’ll have someone to share colic stories with.”

“Sari’s Becca’s younger sister,” Phyllis informed Tory. “And really, if you ever do need to get something done in this town, Becca’s the one to go to. Doesn’t matter that she’s home with Bethany now. She still manages to make things happen. Still makes it to her council meetings, too. She had that statue of Samuel Montford erected downtown this summer. And after organizing the Save the Youth program for the city’s teens, she and her sisters did a load of research and a friend wrote a play for the kids to do depicting the life of the town’s founder.”

“Wow.”

“It was so good I stayed awake through the whole thing,” Will teased.

Despite her general discomfort with men, Tory had liked Will when she’d met him briefly that first day of class. She liked him even more now.

Which made her eager to leave.

“Stop it, you two,” Becca said, watching Bethany sleep snugly in Phyllis’s arms. “You’re going to have Christine thinking I’m an old fusspot.”

Christine.

For a moment there, Tory had forgotten who she was.

“SHE’S NICE,” Becca said later that evening as she lay beside Will in their bed, nursing Bethany.

“I told you she is.”

“I know.” But that was last spring when she and Will had hardly been speaking, when her marriage had been on the brink of collapse and Becca was half out of her mind with fear. And worry. And so in love, in spite of the odd midlife crisis that had caught her and Will unawares.

Will was gazing at Bethany, his eyelids drooping, almost as though he was falling asleep. But Becca knew he wasn’t. Not until Bethany was finished and he’d had his chance to burp her and put her back in the cradle at the end of their bed.

“You were right about Christine. Her eyes hold a lot of secrets.”

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