SHE’S OLDER. THAT’S THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about her.
I’m pregnant. That’s the first thing you need to know about me.
Our favorite colors are one color, blue. Even two sisters who are very different can be similar. You should know that, too, because it may explain the way things went.
I MARRIED A FARMER. I didn’t plan to do it. It just happened. To be fair, I didn’t know he was a farmer. He was just a guy I met at a dance, and then later he came into the hardware store where I was working and pretended to be surprised to see me. We went out on two dates before I even got his name right—I thought it was Bert and it turned out to be Berne, which is such a strange first name that I don’t think I can be blamed for my mistake. My sister’s husband, Ed, who owned the hardware store, said that when he first saw the name on a personal check he thought it was Verne, and he blinked twice to get the B to turn. But it didn’t. It was Berne. Berne never had trouble with my name. Who has trouble with Susan?
Berne and I dated for eleven months. He bought me presents all the time: a necklace with a heart-shaped charm, a red scarf, a hat. Then we broke it off when I went to McCook Community College to learn to be a medical secretary. My parents wanted me to go. My mother, in particular, was sold on the idea. She told me that a marriage was one thing, but you always needed a career.
We wrote to each other. He wrote more often, and though he was unpracticed at it—he spelled about every third word wrong, and his punctuation was a form of improvisation—it made me love him more, because I saw how I could improve matters. I used to tell friends at McCook that I had a boy waiting for me at home. They would nod or smile and I’d complete the thought; “He’s waiting to become a man,” I’d say.
Then we broke it off. That’s what I like to say, but really he broke up with me because he thought I was dating my teacher, Mr. Carr. This wasn’t true at all, of course. Once Mr. Carr and I went out to coffee because he said he needed to talk to me about my exam, but after about fifteen minutes it became painfully clear that he had nothing at all to say about the exam, and that he just wanted to tell me all about his divorce, and how his wife couldn’t give him any kids. I guess I felt sorry for him, because I went back to his house after that, but we didn’t do anything except sit around on the couch with the outsides of our legs touching each other. Then he leaned over and kissed my shoulder. His lips were cool on my skin. I didn’t tell him to stop, but I didn’t encourage him and I left a few minutes later.
I don’t even know how Berne found out. Maybe I mentioned it because it seemed like such a nothing. But it wasn’t nothing to Berne—he lowered his voice almost to a whisper, which was far worse than yelling. I went out with Mr. Carr only once after that, and then just to tell him that even though I respected him as a teacher (which wasn’t really true) and liked him as a person (which wasn’t really true either) I couldn’t see him anymore because I had a guy back home who wanted to get more serious. This time I didn’t say a boy, and that was true, and before I knew it, I was Mrs. Berne Moser, and I was throwing the bouquet over my shoulder. It stayed in the air for a while, and then Sarah caught it.
HOW CAN IT BE that my sister was in line to catch the bouquet when she had a husband who owned the local hardware store? Easy. He died. ED MCCAFFREY, 58, OWNED MCCAFFREY’S HARDWARE. That was the headline in the paper. Ed was a rough-and-tumble guy, always getting into a scrap over the silliest thing. Once he threw another guy through a window because the guy didn’t like Some Came Running, which was Ed’s favorite movie of all time. Sarah was always worried that Ed would die in a bar fight or in a motorcycle wreck. But neither of those things happened. He died of a sudden heart attack, behind the counter at the hardware store. It was the counter where I worked for hundreds of days, but when I went back there after Ed’s funeral, it didn’t seem like the same counter at all. It was still and quiet, with none of the glorious mess. The register drawer was open, which it never was, and it was empty, which it never was. One of the other clerks said that they buried Ed with his money, but I wasn’t sure whether that was a kind of knock on Ed for being a notorious cheapskate or a kind of joke about how much he loved his business, so I didn’t say anything.
ED HAD A SON from his first marriage, Dave. Ed always said that it was in honor of his uncle Dave, and not Frank Sinatra’s character in Some Came Running. Sarah always said that she never met Uncle Dave and didn’t think he existed. Dave worked in the hardware store with me when I first started there. I was nineteen and he was seventeen. Ed wasn’t my brother-in-law yet, just my boss. So Dave was nothing to me, until he was something. We locked up late sometimes, and one time he told me that I was looking pretty, and the next thing you know we were crouching down under the key counter, kissing. Every time he moved or I moved the whole thing jingled like Christmas, so he tried to stay still and so did I. We saw each other a few times after that, and then I started going with this older guy and Dave kind of got his feelings hurt. The older guy wasn’t Berne, not yet. Berne was two guys later, and by then Dave had quit the hardware store and gone to Lincoln to try to be a painter. Not a house painter or a sign painter, either. A real painter. Ed always joked about how any man who painted was a fruit, but I know that he was proud of Dave because he hung his paintings in the back office of the hardware store. One of them was of a woman standing by a window, looking out. She was real pretty and had a faraway look in her eyes, but faraway like she was thinking about something in her past rather than in her future. Dave told me that it was a girl who posed for him in Lincoln. He also told me that she was the second girl that he ever kissed, and that she wasn’t as good as the first. Go on, I said. Flattery will get you nowhere. I didn’t tell Sarah about the woman in the painting, but we both agreed it was a nice painting because it was mostly blue.
DAVE WAS ALWAYS REAL CLOSE to his dad. They drank together almost every day, from when Dave was just a boy until Dave left town. Ed wasn’t one to keep a boy from drinking. “Thirteen,” he said, like that was an explanation. When Sarah married Ed, she told me that she and Dave didn’t get along, not because Dave couldn’t accept her as his stepmother but because he couldn’t accept having less of his father’s attention. Sarah liked talking that way; when she was at McCook, she took one psychology class, and she wore it proudly whenever she could. I told her that it would get better, that Dave was a nice guy who didn’t usually hold a grudge over stupid things.
I was wrong. Dave didn’t like her to start with, and after about six months the two of them hated each other. He called me once when he was back in town and said he didn’t understand how I could be sisters with such a stuck-up, dull, foolish kind of person. I told him that Sarah and I were different, but not so different. He told me that I needed to think more highly of myself. Then he started telling me that I was still on his mind. While he was talking, Berne walked in the room, and I had to pretend it was the grocer on the phone so that Berne wouldn’t get suspicious.
BERNE’S DAD WAS A FARMER, but he was also a banker. He gave loans to other farmers. Berne has shown me pictures of his father when he first came to town in the thirties. He was a nicely dressed man, as handsome as his son, and he was always smiling. In the pictures, at least. To hear Berne tell it, he took a turn for the worse after he married Berne’s mother, who was the kind of woman who liked to tell her husband one thing and do another thing. That other thing, mostly, was running around with other men. Berne said that was the main reason he was so jealous, because his mama made a fool of his daddy. The men in town who were friends of Berne’s daddy used to tell him to leave. Ed wasn’t one of those men—he was a roughneck, and Berne’s daddy was a gentle soul—but he was a man people listened to. You know, he liked to say, if I had a woman like that, it would put crazy thoughts in my head.
Berne’s daddy had a saying in return: when a man has crazy thoughts in his head, he should count to ten and pray that those thoughts go away. Ed and Berne’s daddy must have been talking about two different kinds of crazy thoughts, because at some point Berne’s daddy couldn’t count to ten anymore. Instead, he went out to the barn, looped a rope over the main beam, and hanged himself until he was dead.
WHEN BERNE’S DADDY DIED out in the barn, Berne buckled down. He became more himself, more careful, more quiet. When Ed died of his heart attack, Dave went to seed. He wasn’t even going to come back for the funeral, he told me on the telephone, because coming back was proof that his dad was dead. I told him that he needed to pay his respects, and that he needed to think about Sarah for a minute, also, because she loved Ed as much as Dave did, and this was a time when they needed to set aside their differences. He didn’t say anything on the telephone, but he must have liked my advice because the morning of the funeral he showed up at the church, clean-shaven, eyes bright, mouth set in a serious line. I’m just going to stay for the day, he told me, but he was in town the next day, and the day after that, and after a month it became obvious that he wasn’t going to make it out of town any time soon, and that the line of his mouth wasn’t going to stay so straight. Mainly it was the drink, although the women didn’t help either. He set up a studio over the hardware store and started painting all the girls in town. Some of the fathers of the girls weren’t too thrilled about having a young painter like that set up shop in their midst. It was probably one of those fathers who went by Dave’s studio one night and beat him up. He was in pretty bad shape afterward, not because the beating was so severe but because he slipped down the stairs while he was leaving his studio and ended up smacking his hipbone on the banister-post.
I let him come live in the barn of Berne’s farm. Berne wasn’t too pleased about the arrangement, but not because he suspected anything about me and Dave. He wasn’t too pleased because it was so soon after the wedding, and he wanted to have some time for the two of us, and also because he’s just that type of guy: not too pleased. I told him that I felt responsible for Dave because he was kind of my nephew, being my sister’s husband’s son. “We’re all knots on the same rope,” I told him, and I don’t know if he liked the sound of it or not, but he nodded. I also reminded him how hard it was for him to lose his own father, and that Dave wasn’t as strong a person inside. And then I told him that if he let Dave come to stay with us, I would be a very good wife, if he knew what I meant, and he did, and he rolled his eyes and laughed. “If you’re not trying to make babies, Susan, it’s a sin,” he said.
IT WAS BECAUSE OF BERNE’S FATHER THAT, when we were dating, half the time he said he didn’t want any children. Children just keep people together who shouldn’t be together, he said. The other half of the time he said he wanted children because children are the best part of love. “Not sex?” I said. I was just joking, of course, but he got all serious. “I have two rules,” he said. “One is to honor and love, and the other is to keep procreation sacred.”
I have only one rule, and that’s that I refuse to have only one child. Only children like Berne and Dave end up with this idea that everything their parents do is because of them. Children with brothers and sisters, like me and Sarah, have it better. We learn to talk, to joke, to watch as power shifts, to spare the feelings of others, to wait and see.
There are many examples, but I can only think of one now. When I was about eight, and Sarah was about ten, our daddy lost his job in the post office. For about six weeks, he was at home, and he was driving everybody crazy, rearranging the items in the kitchen, polishing things he’d never looked at before, let alone polished. The main thing he did was ask us to play catch in the yard. Every hour of every day it seemed like he wanted to play catch: to go outside and toss a tennis ball back and forth. He said it soothed him. For some funny reason, he wanted only one of us out there at a time. Probably because it doubled the amount of time he could spend playing catch. One day, Sarah was out there for about an hour, and then she ran in and took a popsicle out of the freezer. “I’m not going back out,” she said. “You go.” She sat there sucking on the popsicle, and when I asked her if that was more important than our daddy’s feelings, she shrugged. “It’s hot out there,” she said. “And I can’t make him feel better. He thinks I can, but I can’t.”
I didn’t want to go outside either, so I didn’t. After about twenty minutes, our daddy still hadn’t come inside, and my mom told me I had better go out and see what was keeping Frank. She always called him Frank, even to me. I went to the yard and found him sitting on the back stairs, bouncing the tennis ball between his knees. “You ready?” he said.
I shook my head. “Just coming to see what’s keeping you.”
“God damn,” he said, and threw the ball over the back fence, as far as it could go.
SARAH AND I WERE CLOSE. She was only two years older, which meant that all the things that happened to me were fresh in her memory. Getting your period, kissing, going to second base, but also other stuff, like how to dress on your first day in school, and how to hold a cigarette so that you didn’t look like you were imitating someone from the movies. She was always a little louder than me and a little wilder. When she was sixteen, she was going with this boy and she got pregnant, and she had one of her friends drive her down south of Lincoln for an abortion. She made me promise not to tell our mom or dad, and I didn’t. After that she was afraid that she couldn’t get pregnant again, and maybe she was right, because she didn’t from the next guy, whom she went with for two years, and she didn’t with the guy after that, whom she lived with for a year, and she didn’t with Ed. Right at the beginning of her time with Ed, our dad died when he had a stroke while driving, and for a few weeks we talked every day on the telephone. Our mother was sick by then, too, with lung cancer, and she was in and out of the hospital. I hope she goes soon, Sarah said. She needs to be with Frank. That was the other thing about only children: when parents passed, there was no one who felt the same exact things you were feeling.
WHEN DAVE CAME TO LIVE in the barn, he told me he was going to start a new life. “No more drinking,” he said, “and no more girls.”
“Good,” I said. “We can begin our new lives together.” He broke both rules the first week—I saw a small box of empty bottles stacked against the wall, and once I knocked on the barn door and heard noise inside, but no one answered.
When I asked him about it, he denied that there were any girls. “I told you,” he said. “I have a new life now.” He was propped up on pillows on a narrow board he used as his bed, sketching with a piece of charcoal.
“What are you drawing?” I said.
“Pictures of the things I can’t do anymore,” he said.
I didn’t care what kind of rules he broke. What did I care? Berne was less generous. He grumbled about Dave: Why would we let a man like that into our home, especially when we were trying to begin our own life together? I could see him getting angrier and angrier, but it wasn’t like Berne to do anything other than grumble. Finally, he asked me flat-out if there had ever been anything between me and Dave, and I said absolutely not, and he asked me if I was telling him the truth, and I just stared at him like he was crazy.
Sarah asked me why I didn’t tell Berne the truth. “Because he wouldn’t understand,” I said.
“I guess not,” she said. “Who would understand that a nice girl like you ever had a thing for that dirty little drunk?”
“Are you still thinking of moving?” I asked Sarah. Ever since she caught the bouquet she’d been telling me she needed to get out of town. On weekends she went to Lincoln; she was seeing a guy there sometimes.
“I don’t know,” she said. “This town isn’t doing much for me. I have a little money from selling the hardware store. I am seriously thinking about getting out of here.”
“Would you go to Lincoln?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said again. “The problem with this guy is that he wants a family.”
“Don’t you want kids?”
“If I can have them.”
“You can.”
“Are you a doctor?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
FOR A LONG TIME, Berne and I weren’t getting pregnant either. He thought it made me sad, and he bought me lots of presents: another necklace (this one had a cross), another scarf (this one was blue), another hat (it looked just like the first). I didn’t like the necklace or the hat, but I loved the scarf. I wore it all the time, and even Sarah agreed that it looked like a dream on me. But then I lost it. Berne never seemed to notice, and I certainly didn’t mention it. Then I got pregnant, and it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Berne told me that the baby was a girl, that he was sure of it.
“I want to name her Laurel,” he said, “after my father’s mother. If it’s a boy, I don’t have any ideas.”
ONE DAY IN WINTER, I was out in town, getting some things for the house, and I came home to find a note from Dave on the counter: it was folded up and tucked inside an envelope, though the envelope wasn’t sealed. It said he couldn’t stay anymore. It thanked me for my generosity. It told me that we would always be special to each other, even without Ed, even without the hardware store. It said that there was a painting in the barn for me, the portrait of the woman that Sarah and I liked so much. It didn’t mention Berne.
I went out to the barn. Even before I got there, I knew that there was someone inside. “Dave,” I said. “What’s with this note?”
But it wasn’t Dave. It was Berne. He was standing over Dave’s bed, looking down on what was left there, the twisted bedsheets and the portrait of the woman Dave had known in Lincoln. As I came through the door, Berne turned and made a blue fist at me. I say a blue fist because that’s what it looked like. It was actually his normal-colored fist, but it was wrapped inside a blue scarf. “What is this?” he said.
“It looks like my scarf,” I said.
“I thought you lost that scarf,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I thought so, too. Where did you find it?”
The fist tightened and took some of the creases out of the scarf. “I found it,” he said, “in here. With Dave’s things.”
“Why would he have my scarf?”
“That’s what I’m asking myself, Susan. Why would he have your scarf? And why would it be in the space between his bed and the wall?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know,” he said. “Do you know why he would write you a note saying that you would always be special to each other?”
“No,” I said.
“And do you know why some of the guys downtown made jokes when he moved in here?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, then you certainly don’t know why those guys would say that once upon a time Dave and you were sneaking around?”
“No,” I said. “What guys?”
“Ed,” he said.
“Ed?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “He used to talk about you and Dave to anyone who would listen. He sounded proud. I think he imagined that you and Dave might end up together.”
“When we were kids, maybe he liked me. Maybe he made up a story and told his father. But there’s never been anything between me and Dave,” I said.
“Am I a fool?” he said.
“No,” I said.
It must have been the wrong thing to say because he stepped forward and hit me. Berne had never hit me before, so I didn’t really understand what was happening. When I figured it out, I also thought that the scarf would cushion the blow. But his knuckle was poking out through a wrap, and it caught me right on the cheekbone, and I fell backward.
Berne stood over me. He was trembling. Then he unwrapped the scarf and threw it into the air. It opened up and came down slowly, like a parachute, and before it hit the ground he was gone from the barn.
I STAYED IN THE BARN for hours, sleeping on Dave’s board bed until Sarah came over. I was crying, surprised that I was crying, but I stopped when she showed up. She took one look at my black eye and walked right out. I started crying again. “Stop that,” she said, ducking her head back inside. “I’m just going to get something.”
She came back with a makeup case and started putting foundation on my eye. “What a bastard,” she said. “What a fool.”
“He’s not a fool,” I said.
“If you don’t think so, maybe you’re one, too,” she said.
The makeup was cool on my skin.
“Why do they call it black and blue?” I asked.
“Is this a riddle?” she said.
“No. I just want to know. It has red in there and brown, and when it heals, it will go to green and yellow.”
“Tell me again what happened?” she said.
I told her. When I got to the part about the note from Dave, she asked me what it said. I said I didn’t remember exactly. “I mean, did it say where he was going?” she said. I shook my head no. She kept on with the makeup.
When I got to the part about the scarf, she stopped and closed up the makeup case.
“What?” I said. “Do I look okay now? Because I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of going back in there looking like I got hit.”
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“I have to tell Berne something, too,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“It was my scarf,” she said.
“What was your scarf?”
“The scarf he found was mine.”
“It was mine,” I said. “I lost it. Did you take it from me?”
“No, Susan. You showed yours to me, and I liked it so much that I went and got the same one.”
“So how did it end up in here?” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I was here,” she said.
“When? Since when are you and Dave speaking?”
“We’re not just speaking,” she said.
“I see,” I said.
She could tell from my tone that I didn’t believe her. “What?” she said. “You think I’m trying to cover up for you? I’m telling you. Dave and I are having a little thing.”
“A little thing?” I said. “Isn’t he your son?”
She must have heard something funny in my voice because she took me by the chin and looked me straight in the eye.
“My god,” she said. “You’re jealous.”
Then she marched on up to the house to set the record straight.
WHEN I CAME IN, Berne was standing by the kitchen table. Sarah was standing by the door. Both of them had crazy looks in their eyes. I didn’t know who had said what or who had done what, but I did know that there was a kitchen knife out on the counter about midway between them. The air was tight, like any moment one of them might go for the knife. I didn’t think they would. But you never know when family is involved. They stood facing each other like that for a long time. “So,” Berne said finally. “You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to believe what’s true,” said my sister.
“I believe what I know,” Berne said. “And I have had enough of hearing what’s true and what’s not true from this family, from you and from your sister and from your husband.”
I didn’t dare say anything. I just kept edging toward the knife until I was the closest of the three of us. If there was sudden movement, I could lunge for it and throw it into the trash can, or run away with it, or threaten to do myself in unless they stopped fighting. I was concentrating so hard on the knife that I didn’t see Berne take a step toward me. I flinched, expecting another blow. Instead, he let out a soft cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If you tell me to believe you, I should believe you. That’s where my father went wrong.”
“Your mother was lying, Berne.”
“That was only half of the problem,” he said. “The other half was that he didn’t believe her. There are two sides to every story, and you always have to listen to the other one.”
I took a deep breath against his chest and held him tight. He felt like a good man to me, a man who had acted in error and was trying to set things right.
“Laurel?” I said.
“Laurel,” he said, and squeezed me close to him.
MY SISTER LEFT TOWN. She called me and told me she was leaving, and I knew from her tone that it wasn’t just melodrama. “I’m going to Lincoln,” she said.
“Are you looking for Dave?” I said.
“No,” she said. “At least I don’t think so. I just need to go somewhere for a while that isn’t here.”
Laurel was born six months later. Right up until the end, I thought she would be a boy. Berne never wavered on his prediction of a girl. When Laurel was only four months old, I got pregnant again. Now, I told Berne, I’ll be able to use the boy’s name.
“How do you know it’s not another girl?” he said.
“You think it’s another girl?” I said.
“No,” he said. “I think you’re right. I think it’s a boy.”
I dreamed about the boy who would be Laurel’s little brother. I even had a name picked out. But then I got a card in the mail from my sister. I hadn’t talked to her in months. The card had a photo that slipped out when I opened it; in the picture, she was standing by a window, holding a little baby that looked just about the same age as Laurel. She and the baby were as beautiful as a painting. Can you imagine? Sarah wrote. Ed would be so proud. Not that he’ll ever know. Or Dave, for that matter. I haven’t seen him since I got to Lincoln. I heard he went to Boston or Philadelphia. So it’s just me and my family.
You know what’s funny? she wrote. I’m the mother and the grandmother. How many women can say that?
I miss you, she wrote, and I love you.
I called the phone number on the card.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” Sarah said.
“What’s his name?” I said. I already knew the answer.
“Ed,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I figured. That was the name I wanted.”
“You wanted for what?”
“For my baby,” I said.
“For Laurel?” she said. “What kind of sense does that make?”
“No, the second baby,” I said.
“You’re pregnant again?” she said. “Congratulations.”
“But I wanted the name Ed,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “Maybe this one will be a girl also.”
“Berne thinks it’s a boy,” I said.
“How are things?” she said.
“With Berne?” I said. “Oh, you know.”
“That bad?” she said.
“No, no,” I said. “They’re good. He is who he is. He works so hard to get things right. Do you know that he hung the painting?”
“What painting?” she said.
“That portrait Dave left for me,” I said. “One day I came home, and it was hanging in the kitchen. Berne went and got it framed and everything. I didn’t say a word about it, and then a few days later we were eating dinner, and he looked up at it and said that he liked it. ‘There’s something about it,’ he said.”
“There is something about it,” Sarah said. “Listen, I should go. I’m glad you called. And I’m sorry I took the name you wanted.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “James isn’t such a bad name for a little boy.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not at all.”
After I hung up, I went outside. It was cold, so I bundled up, and it wasn’t until I got out there that I realized that I was wearing the blue scarf Berne had found in the barn. I hadn’t been in the barn much since Dave left. Laurel was scared of it; I was, too, a little bit. But the cold stung, and suddenly the barn didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I went in through the main door, brushing a web out of my face.
Dave’s bed had been in the back of the barn. I stood where his bed had been and fingered the scarf. Then I thought about taking it off, throwing it high in the air, and counting until it came down. I wondered how high I could count before it reached the ground. But I didn’t throw it. Instead, I imagined throwing it into the air, and counted in my head. I got to eight, then imagined throwing the scarf again. The second time I got to ten.