The Sister Who Drove Me to Bangor

How two people stay angry

It is not difficult. That is the shameful part. It takes no effort at all.

Colette was born in July. I mailed Ginette a birth announcement. She sent back a card with a ten dollar bill in it and no note, only her small square signature.

I took that to mean she was paying a debt. I never thought of it as a hand held out.

We lived twenty-five miles from Ginette for twenty-seven years, and we saw each other only by accident. At the Shop ‘n Save. At the Walmart in Presque Isle. I turned my cart around in the cereal aisle more times than I could count. Once I held a can of tomatoes in front of my face until she had gone by.

People have asked me since why neither of us ever picked up a telephone.

I was waiting for her to call, because she was the one who had said not to come back. She was waiting for me, because I was the one who had said what I said.

That is the thing nobody tells you about pride. It does not need help. It can stand on its own legs for thirty-two years.

When Raymond died of a heart attack, six years ago last March, she did not come to the funeral. No card, no flowers, no call.

I told myself that said everything about the kind of woman she was. I did not think about the fact that I had not gone to Armand’s funeral two years later, either.

The doctor and the porch

I am sixty-one, and I had put off my colonoscopy for nine years. I was busy. I was embarrassed. When I finally went, because my back ached and I was tired in a way sleep did not fix, they found a mass. A week later, with the biopsy back, Dr. Bhatt, a kind young man with very tired eyes, sat me down at the hospital in Caribou and said the word.

I called Colette from the truck, because she had already lost her father and had a right to hear it from me. Then I drove home ten under the limit, thinking I would tell no one else for a week.

I found my sister on my porch.

I did not learn how she knew until the morning of my surgery. I will get to that.

The first drive

Thursday I was up at four.

I stood on my porch in the dark with my purse and my insurance card, and at one minute before five the Buick came around the corner and stopped in front of the house.

I got in and buckled my belt. Neither of us said good morning.

The heater was set to seventy. In the back seat sat the red cooler and a brown paper grocery bag, folded over at the top. She set it on the seat, thought it over, and moved it into her own lap. She held it there the whole way to Bangor.

I did not ask what was in it. I did not ask anything.

It is a hundred and sixty miles, from Caribou down through Presque Isle and Houlton and onto the interstate, and nearly three hours to do it. We said maybe twenty words. I counted afterward, to see how bad it was. Nine of the twenty were about a moose.

It was still dark near Oakfield when she eased off the gas without warning, and I said, “What?”

“Moose,” said Ginette.

I saw nothing. Then, forty yards ahead in the ditch, a long gray shape taller than the car, standing still as a post, its head turned toward our lights.

“I did not see him,” I said.

“You never did,” said my sister. “You’d have hit him.”

Somewhere past Houlton, with the sun not yet up, her right hand came across the console and held out a little bundle of wax paper.

A ploye. A buckwheat pancake rolled up with butter and brown sugar, the way Mama made them on school mornings, twisted at the ends like a candy.

I did not say thank you.

I ate every bite, all the way to Sherman, looking straight out my own window with my eyes burning, and she never once looked over.

In Bangor, the surgeon, a brisk, kind man named Dr. Haldane, drew me a picture on the back of a form. Stage three, he said, in the colon. He thought it had reached a few lymph nodes and no further.

“We take the tumor out,” he said. “Then six months of chemotherapy to get anything that’s left. It is serious. It is also something we treat, and treat well.”

“Who will be helping you at home?”

“Nobody,” I said. “I’m a widow. I’ll manage.”

“Me,” said Ginette.

She did not raise her voice. She had a church bulletin open on her knee and a stub of pencil from her purse, and she was writing down every word he said, small and square and without a mistake, the way Mama kept the egg money.

Armand had died four years before, of a stroke, in his chair after supper. Her boys were grown and gone. There was nobody at home to tell her she could not.