When one person is in bondage none of us are free. Her job, as she saw it, was to break Jo’s chains, to return Jo to the freedom that she’d lost, to let Jo have the kind of life she wanted, which, clearly, could not be the life that she currently had.
The morning after the blizzard, Bethie awoke to a world all in white. In Judy Pressman’s harvest-gold kitchen, she made herself a cup of tea and watched out the window, sitting in the stillness, until the plows came to clear the roads and Dave made it back over the mountain, coming through the door like he was Alexander who’d made it across the Alps. Jo and Bethie and Dave and the girls spent the day shoveling out the driveway and digging a path from the driveway to the front door. Kim and Missy worked alongside their mother and father with kid-sized shovels, and Bethie enjoyed the cold, the wind’s bite on her cheeks, the snowflakes sparkling in the sunshine. In the backyard, she and the girls built an igloo, tall enough for Kim to stand up in. Jo had helped for a while, before drifting back into the house to start dinner. The girls had set the table, Kim folding each napkin precisely, Missy flinging silverware in the general direction of the plates. Dave sat at the head of the table and made a production of tucking his napkin under his chin to protect his shirt. His nails were buffed, maybe even polished, Bethie saw, and his hair was suspiciously poufy, like he’d sprayed it with something before coming to the table.
“For what we are about to eat, may the Lord make us thankful,” the girls warbled. When Bethie caught her sister’s eye, Jo shrugged. “We do the blessings over the candles on Friday nights, and they’re learning the prayer for after meals in Hebrew school, but they’re not there yet.”
“Godless heathens,” Dave said, scooping a dollop of steaming noodles onto his plate, then serving the girls smaller portions before finally serving Jo. “I’m raising a pack of godless heathens.”
“Daddy!” Kim giggled, as Melissa surreptitiously used her fingers to maneuver food onto her fork.
“What are we enjoying?” Bethie asked, helping herself.
“Turkey tetrazzini,” Jo said.
“Ah. So Mom’s noodle surprise is traveling under an alias.”
“It isn’t noodle surprise!” Jo said, affronted, as Kim giggled, and Missy asked, “What’s an alias?”
“This has fresh basil.”
“That’s the green stuff,” Missy muttered darkly. “It’s yuck.”
“Vegetables are good for you,” said Kim, as she primly smoothed her own napkin on her lap. The dynamic between the sisters was the opposite of what it had been for her and Jo growing up. Kim was mature, a little mother, a perfectionist. Melissa was the troublemaker. Not that she went out of her way to cause trouble, she just went barreling through life, noisy and exuberant and full speed ahead. Just like her mother. Or, at least, just like her mother used to be.
Bethie watched as Melissa tweezed a bit of basil between her fingers and then, after making sure her parents weren’t watching, rolled it into a ball and flicked it onto the floor. She saw the way the girls took their cues from Jo, the way Jo kept them quiet while Dave described his night in the back room of RePlay Sports and his perilous journey back home over Avon Mountain. She wondered if Jo had any idea about how much more relaxed, how much more herself she seemed when her husband wasn’t around. Alone with her girls, Jo was cheerful and easygoing, always up for an adventure, whether that was a bike ride, or a picnic, or letting the girls sleep in the pillow fort they’d built. When Dave was home, Jo got quiet, and instead of asking the girls what they wanted, it was Whatever Daddy says. Bethie felt like the only time she really saw her sister, the Jo she’d grown up with, was when Jo and the girls visited her in Georgia in the summer. They’d pick raspberries and blueberries and help make jam in the steamy, sugary-smelling kitchen, and sit around the firepit out back at night, roasting hot dogs (or tofu pups, in the case of some of Bethie’s compatriots) and making s’mores. At the end of every visit, they’d go tubing on the Chattahoochee. Jo would wear a faded black one-piece bathing suit that she’d had since college. She’d hold one daughter on her lap, and Bethie would take the