The Sister Who Drove Me to Bangor

The recliner

The surgery went well. Dr. Haldane took out the tumor and a section of colon and eleven lymph nodes. Two of the nodes had cancer in them.

I woke with a drain in my side and my daughter holding my hand. By night Colette had gone to find a motel, and I was alone with the dark and the beeping.

I woke again around three in the morning with my mouth like cotton.

My sister was asleep in the vinyl recliner by the window, in the barn coat, with her shoes on and her glasses pushed up into her hair. She had been in that chair eleven hours without asking a nurse for a blanket.

On the floor by her feet was the brown paper grocery bag, folded over at the top.

She sleeps with her mouth a little open, exactly as Mama did. I had not known that. It made my chest hurt.

“You need water,” she said.

“I’m all right.”

“You are not. You’re in Bangor with a hole in you.”

I took her wrist, just for a moment, and I said, “Gin.”

It was the first time I had said her name in thirty-two years. It came out as a croak.

Her face did something I cannot describe. It folded, and then it smoothed.

“I know,” she said.

I looked at the bag on the floor, and I managed to ask what was in it.

She picked it up and held it against her chest.

“I should have handed you this thirty-two years ago,” she said. “I was too proud.”

I should have said, give it to me. I should have said, whatever it is, I can stand it.

But I was cut open, and weak, and frightened, and a part of me, God forgive me, was still the woman in that kitchen with her hands full of casserole dishes. I was afraid of what was in the bag.

I said nothing more.

“Go back to sleep,” said Ginette, after a long minute. “It will keep.”

She sat down in the chair with the bag in her lap.

The winter I could not stand to be cold

I came home from the hospital with a sore belly and a list of instructions. Ginette did not go home.

She had packed a bag. “I’m here for the weekend,” she said, and put it in my spare room. She stayed three weeks.

Stories about sisters make it sound as though a wall comes down and everything is sweet. We were terrible to each other. She moved my dish towels. She threw out a shelf of my pantry because the cans were past their dates. She turned my heat down.

On the ninth day I found her scrubbing my stove with a wire brush, sleeves pushed up, and I said what had been boiling in me.

“This is my house, Ginette. I didn’t ask you to come. You walk in here like you own the place, like you did with Mama, deciding everything for everybody, and nobody ever got to say a word.”

I heard it come out of my own mouth. It was the same thing, almost word for word, that I had said in 1993.

My sister put down the brush, wiped her hands, and folded the towel in thirds.

“No,” she said quietly. “You didn’t ask. You never would.”

She walked out of my kitchen, got her coat, and went and sat in her Buick in my driveway with the engine running.

I watched her through the front window. She sat with both hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead, for forty minutes, the exhaust rising in the cold air. I could not make myself go out. I had a sore stitch and a bad temper and the habit of thirty-two years.

At the end of forty minutes the engine went off, and she came back in and hung up her coat. She did not say a word. She went to the stove and began, very quietly, to make supper. Pea soup, with the ham bone. We ate it across the kitchen table with the radio on.