“When you get home in August, we’ll have lunch and I’ll tell you all about my trip to Europe,” Skyler promised.
Jayden wrapped her arms around her petite sister and gave her another hug. There was something so hopeful about hugging Skyler—she knew they could build a relationship—that it almost brought tears to Jayden’s eyes. “We could text and send pictures back and forth.”
“Probably not.” Skyler picked up her purse. “Maybe if the reception is good in Europe, I’ll try to send a selfie when I can. Oh, and pack a pair of good walking shoes, but you won’t need a hat. They provide a cap for all the girls and the counselors.”
“Why would I need good walking shoes?” Jayden followed her sister outside. “Don’t the girls go to counseling sessions and have classes?”
“You’ll have group therapy scheduled, and they’ll do one-on-one therapy once a week with Karen . . .” She drew her brows down. “I can’t remember her last name, but she’s really good with the girls,” she said with her hand on the doorknob. “You’ll need the good boots or shoes because you’ll be doing some hiking. The cap they issue to you will keep you from getting sunburned and adding more freckles to your nose.” Skyler closed the door behind her.
Leave it to Skyler to ruin the moment by reminding Jayden that she wasn’t the pretty sister. Jayden stepped out on the landing and watched her sister drive away in a little low-slung sports car. She leaned against the railing and looked down at her green vintage 1958 GMC pickup truck, so very different from Skyler’s fancy little car. Jayden had inherited it from her grandfather when she turned sixteen and had driven it for the past fifteen years.
It seemed fitting that each sister was like the vehicle they drove. Skyler was cute and fancy. Jayden was like her truck—sturdy, dependable, and gullible enough to let her sister talk her into giving up her summer to counsel little rich girls whose folks could afford to send them to a fancy boot camp. But then, Jayden wondered, how would Skyler survive without that extra money? She couldn’t imagine her sister gearing down her lifestyle.
“We haven’t been all that close since Mama died,” Jayden whispered to herself as she went back into her apartment and picked up her purse. “But if there’s more going on, you could have been honest with me. But then, I wasn’t up-front with you, either.”
She locked the door behind her, crossed the lawn, and got into her truck. Before she left for the summer, she had to go visit her mother’s grave and talk to her.
She drove through Boyd, where she and Skyler had been raised. Her mother’s house had sold two months after she’d died, and Jayden noticed as she drove by that the yard needed mowing, the rosebushes hadn’t been trimmed, and one of the shutters was hanging askew. She and her mother, and then her grandfather when he moved in with them, had spent such wonderful hours together, taking care of the yard and flower beds.
“I’m glad y’all can’t see this, but why didn’t you leave the house to me instead of Skyler? I wouldn’t have sold it. I would have taken good care of it.” She wiped a tear from her cheek.
From there, she took a farm road back to Hog Branch Cemetery, where her mother had been buried five years before. She parked her truck under a big pecan tree and wandered back to the tombstone marked WANDA SKYLER BENNETT.
“We were so close, Mama.” She laid her hand on the top of the tombstone. “Why didn’t you give me power of attorney? I would have never pulled the plug and let you die. People have come out of a coma after years of being asleep.”
“Mama, Skyler is holding out on me,” she tattled as she dropped down on her knees and pulled a few dandelions from the front of the tombstone. “She’s talked me into going to some sort of roughin’-it camp and doing her job so she can traipse off to Europe. I know what you’re thinkin’. If we’d kill the elephant that’s been in the room since you left us, we could get along better. I’ll never understand why you put all the power in her hands, and you didn’t even tell me about it. We shared everything, and she just came and went sporadically. Since then she’s acted