The Christmas Sisters (2 page)

“The Duets!
Talk about a blast from the past.” Sam tried to picture the two sets of twins—women he had last seen in their forties who would now be past retirement age.

“What the Dorsey
sisters was
to your generation, The Duets was to mine and then some.” Big Hyde shook his head and let out a low whistle.

“So, the Dorsey girls ever come back to visit their aunts?
Their cousins?”

“Oh, sure.
Sure.”

“They do?”

“They're good girls.
Brought up right.
They didn't just take off and forget about everyone they left behind.” He rolled his hand over so that the tip of the knife pointed straight at Sam.

He sighed. Sam wondered if he'd ever do anything right in this town's eyes. If he were smart, he'd climb in that truck and hightail it back to Albuquerque.

“Yes,
them
girls come down here every year for a spell, without fail.”

“Can you tell me when?”

“Why you want to know?”

I just...a...

Freeman held up his hand to cut off the justification. Probably wouldn't have believed whatever excuse he gave anyway, Sam thought. “Can't say for certain when they'll show up.”

I see.

“Just know that sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas a
person'll
look up, and there they come, one, two,
three
.
Cars flying down the road.
They slide around that corner

just
like they did when they was teenagers.”

Sam could practically hear the
thumpa-whomp
of tires as they left the paved main road,
then
crunched across the rutted red dirt of Fifth.

“
Them
girls descend on that old place like a flock of snowbirds settling in for the winter.”

“Even Nic—uh—Nicolette?”

“Even her.
They all come, kids and husband in tow.”

“Kids and husbands.
Of course.”
Sam nodded and hunched his shoulders up.
“Of course.”

“Sure do liven up the place when they do, too. Just like the old days. This old town never did have too much to brag on, but one thing we did have, we had the Dorsey sisters.”

“For a fact,” Sam murmured.

The Dorsey sisters.
Just the name charged the air with anticipation. People sitting in a room with backs to the door would find themselves drawn away from conversations, compelled to turn and look when one of those dark-haired, brown-eyed beauties appeared.

“They were something,” Sam whispered.

“Were and still are.”

Sam nodded. “I can well imagine.”

“Don't have to imagine. You'll see for yourself. If you're still around when they show up.”

“Oh, I'll still be here, Big Hyde.” Sam folded his arms. The autumn wind stung his face, and a long forgotten emotion began to twist in his gut. He looked from the cottages to the church to the corner lot of the
Dorseys
' old house. “You can count on it. I’m the town’s new preacher.”

Two

“Nic, get your head out of that toilet this instant!
You  are
a guest in my home for Thanksgiving not on the job.”

“I do not scrub lavatories for a living. I own my own house- cleaning service, thank you very much.” Nic shook the can of powdered cleanser twice, hard. The fine cloud that rose from the bowl burned high up into her sinuses. “And if I did scrub them, I'd hardly do it with my head!”

Petie
rapped at the door with all the restraint of a woodpecker on a sugar high. “If you expect to hold any kind of conversation with me,
li'l
sister, you
gotta
get yourself out of that rest room and join the festivities.”

Hot water gushed into the basin. “I'll be out when I'm good and ready.”

“You're just doing this to hide out for a few extra minutes. Don't think I don't know it.”

A few extra minutes of peace before the chaos of a huge meal with her family, with her youngest sister in charge of the food, no less.
The notion did tempt Nic sorely.

She lathered up her hands.
“
Naw
.
Not me. I just love spending my day of thanks with Wally telling stupid Southerner jokes and asking us how long it takes to get used to wearing shoes again after we get back from Alabama.”

“Hey, don't begrudge the man. It's his day after all.”

“His day?”

“Turkey day.”

Turkey. Now there was an apt description of Wally
Weggler
. What Mama saw in that ruddy-faced clown after a life with Daddy, she'd never know. But then, Nic was hardly the expert on men and what made a good one. Her track record made
ol
' Wally boy look like the catch of the century.

“I'm serious, sugar. If you're not coming out, at least let me come in and hide with you.”

“After that crack about my work, I don't want you in my hideout, big sister.”

“I didn't mean anything by it. I know you run a very successful cleaning service. How you've worked your way up from two houses to a list as long as your arm. And how now you even have more than one person interested in buying your business lock, stock, and ammonia barrel.”
Petie
trilled out the facts like an overly enthusiastic announcer at a testimonial dinner. Then her voice went soft, “And you know I'm proud of you for it, too.”

Nic didn't know that. In fact, she doubted very much that anyone in her family had used the term
proud
in the same sentence as her name in years. Still, she and
Petie
had been thick as thieves since either of them could remember. Though years apart in age, the way they favored one another and spoke about each other, people often confused them for twins, like their notorious aunts, The Duets—Lula and Bert, though, the fraternal twins, not Nan and Fran the identical ones.

“Nic?
Honey?
Do you forgive me? I was just trying to get you to come out of there.”

“I'll be out in a minute. I have to dry off my hands.” From the corner of her eye, Nic caught the gleam of the brass doorknob. Her stomach fluttered. All she had to do was press in the button at the center of that knob and...

And spend the next forty-odd years hearing about the Thanksgiving Nicolette locked
herself
in the bathroom? No, thank you. She'd only just now begun to live down the awful story about how she almost ran off with Sam Moss on New Year's Eve nine years ago and the trouble it put
her family through. Why hand her family yet another reason to give her grief over some impetuous act or lapse in judgment? She yanked the door open.

“Collier banished me from the kitchen.”
Petie
put her hands on her hips. Her ruby-toned nails thrummed over the pressed cotton of her full-length apron with the horn of plenty and Indian corn motif.

“Ah, so now I understand why the high anxiety to get me out of here. You want an ally.”

“I just wanted someone on my side; is that so wrong?”

“Suck in the lower lip, sister. The pouting Southern belle
thang
does not work on me.”

Nic gathered up the tissue paper mum her daughter had made for her from beside the marble sink. She fished in her jeans pocket for a safety pin to stick the big orange corsage back on. Nic struggled with the bulky paper corsage and pin.

“Actually I came here because “Willa told me there'd been a little accident and that you were scouring the commode.”

Petie
slipped through the door and made a quick sweep of the room. “Why didn't you just come get me? Or Park?”

“Park?
Are you sure he's still breathing? I haven't seen him
so
much as blink since we got here this morning.”

“Football fever.
You know how he is.”
Petie
stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth and let her eyes glaze over.

Nic laughed.

“But you still should have gotten one of my
family
to do this.” She tucked the bowl brush back in its peach porcelain kitty cat container. “Jessica or Scott would have been happy to have helped out. We ought to get some use out of them while they're home from college for the long weekend.”

“I know Scott and Jessica would have helped.” Her niece and nephew—two finer, smarter, more easygoing young adults you couldn't hope to find. They couldn't help it that they looked like they'd been ordered straight out of a J. Crew catalog.

“That goes for Parker, too.”
Petie
patted her hair down. It sprang back to the natural carefree wave she invested so much time and money to maintain. “Rolling out of the recliner for dinner is the only exercise he'll get today if I don't come up with something to tear him away from the games.”

“I wouldn't do that. I know what football means to him.”

Parker, like any Alabama Adonis worth his salt, had moved effortlessly through all the expected stages of a well-born but not well-to-do Southern man's life. High school letterman and president of his college fraternity, he'd then bounded his way up the ladder to a comfy rung in higher middle management. But the dreams of his day in the limelight of the Bode County Pirates never completely faded from his mind.

“Well, he was the star quarterback the year they almost took state.”
Petie
beamed. “And I was captain of the cheerleading squad, and you were second in line.”

“Why do I have the sneaking suspicion, big
sister, that
somewhere in a pile in the back of your closet there's a skirt with box pleats?” Nic laughed.
“And a sweater bearing the face of Pirate Pete?
And a couple of shaken-till-they-shriveled maroon and gold pom-poms?”

“Don't be silly.”

Nic raised an eyebrow.

“The skirt and sweater are hanging in a garment bag, and I keep the pom-poms in a hatbox at our old house in Alabama. It's only fitting they stay in Persuasion, you know.”

They met gazes in the mirror,
then
shared a laugh.

“I'm serious as a heart attack, though.”
Petie
nudged Nic. “You should have gotten one of us to do whatever it is you did in here. You're a guest in our house. You should not be tending to our plumbing mishaps.”

A person couldn't ask for kinder, gentler, more generous souls than Park and
Petie
and their two children. How was Nic going to survive another holiday around them without grabbing Mama's best turkey carving knife and slicing every last toggle button off their matching navy blue cardigan sweaters?

Nic closed the safety pin and the heavy corsage slouched forward, pulling her sweater collar out of shape. Not that it had much of a shape to begin with. “I didn't call you because it was
my
child that decided to flush down the leftover gobs of tissue from her flowers. That made taking care of things my responsibility.”

“Well, you can see Willa's reasoning in that. We called the craft paper “tissue” paper the whole time we taught her how to make the mums.”

“The pipes stopped up and orange dye went everywhere.”

“Now I wish you had called me in here. I've seen blue toilet water, even green, but never orange.”

“Stop it,
Petie
, would you just stop it?”

“Stop what?”

“Stop trying to make everything all right. To make it seem like it was a perfectly logical thing for an eight-year-old girl to do.”

“I just...”

“You just wanted to smooth things over, I know. But we can't forever go through life smoothing things out for her and covering up for her when she pulls something like this—or worse.”

Petie
folded her arms and tipped her chin down. With the play of light and shadow on her face and the no-nonsense tilt of her head, she looked just like their own mother half a lifetime ago. “Sometimes I think you are too hard on that child.”

Anger, pain and fear locked in a grip on her heart and choked her words as Nic managed to ask her sister in a harsh whisper, “Do you think the world is going to be any easier on her?”

Petie
said nothing.

What could she say, really? She was, after all, talking directly to the queen of how tough the world can be on people who make a mess of their lives.

“Don't you think I wish I could bundle her up in cotton and keep all the bad stuff at bay for the rest of her life?”

“Maybe as her family we
should
be her refuge from the harshness of the world.”