sedan at the airport. “There’s tea and cookies.”
“Who is she?” Bethie whispered to Jo. “And what has she done with our mother?”
Jo smiled back, but it was a brief smile. Things were still tense between her and her sister, and had been for years. The blowout at Blue Hill Farm had been part of it. The card Bethie had sent after Lila’s birth, fulsomely congratulating Jo on her commitment to her family, had felt like another slap. In the years since her post-blizzard trip to Atlanta, she’d spent time with Bethie at Thanksgivings and Passover Seders, in Connecticut or in Michigan, or over the last few years, at the beautiful home that Bethie and Harold had purchased in a neighborhood called Buckhead, where, Jo suspected, there weren’t many Jews, even fewer blacks, and maybe no interracial couples at all. The summer visits to Georgia continued, with the rafting trips and the campfires behind Blue Hill Farm, where Bethie would take them to pick raspberries and spend the day. Jo had overheard the two older girls reminiscing, telling Lila how it had been when Bethie had lived on the farm. “It was like a great big slumber party that never ended,” Kim had said. “All the kids slept in the attic, and you could stay up and talk all night.”
“But the hamburgers weren’t real hamburgers,” Missy had added with a frown. “They were made of black bean mush.”
As soon as Lila began nursery school, Jo started dropping the girls off with Aunt Bethie. She’d kiss them goodbye, give Bethie a list of what foods Lila was currently eating (it was easier to list those than to list the foods Lila wouldn’t eat), turn the car around, and drive back home. She would tell herself that a child-free house was as good as a vacation, but all it did was emphasize how little she and Dave had to say to each other. The girls were what bound them and what gave them fodder for conversation. Had they saved enough for Missy’s braces? Did Kim really need to buy a new dress to attend the prom at a different school, or could she just wear the dress she’d worn to her own school dance? Was it worth making an appointment with a psychologist, or would Lila figure out how to control her temper on her own?
Jo would always plan on using the free time to write, to finally begin the novel she’d always imagined writing, or even just a short story, or a poem, but it seemed she had no stories left, other than the ones about local residents that she wrote for the Avondale Almanac (her most recent opus had featured an area man who’d amassed the largest collection of He-Man action figures in all of New England). She’d sit in front of the Olivetti that Shelley had given her all those years ago. Once upon a time, she would type . . . and then her fingers would stop, and she’d sit, staring at that line, unable to think of what came next. “Write the stories you told us when we were little,” Kim would say. “Those were great!”
But Jo knew her stories weren’t special, or what anyone wanted. Parents were the ones who bought children’s books, and parents wanted sweet stories with beautiful princesses, brave princes, and happy endings, or trees that gave and gave until they were just stumps. They did not want stories like the ones Jo had told Kim and Missy, where the prince was a lazy bungler who kept falling off his horse, and the princess ended up saving both of them, then riding off into the sky for parts unknown with the dragon whose company she preferred to the prince’s. And Lila had hated stories, and bedtime in general. She’d kick and scream at naptime and at night, wailing, “Not tired. NOT TIRED!” until she’d finally collapse, facedown in her crib, and when Jo had tried to pull Lila into her lap for a story during the daytime, Lila would indulge her mother for a page or two, then squirm away, looking for something to break. Jo was in her forties, officially middle-aged, and it was time to accept the truth. She was a reasonably good substitute teacher, and her stories for the Almanac were acceptable, but she would never be a writer. In fact, the only thing she felt like writing were the bits of doggerel that popped into her head and hung around