Sisters. Nancy Thompson Robards

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      “Who is calling, please?”

      “Skye, it is Raul Martinez.”

      My breath catches. Raul is Mama’s personal assistant. He’s a jack-of-all-trades, keeping her appointments for the foundation she’s set up to help the needy and making sure her life runs in order.

      His voice is tight and low, and it raises gooseflesh on my arms. The spaces between his words hint at something ominous, like the angry clouds rolling in across the flat afternoon sky. I walk over to the sink and stare out the window.

      It’s getting darker outside. The interior light of my vehicle glows like a beacon reminding me I left the lift gate open.

      “There was an accident. Your mama, she is not doing so well.”

      My hand flutters to my cheek and a strange tingling erupts inside me as if his words cut the vein of decades of bad blood built up between Mama and me. In an instant the poison rushes out of me like watershed, and I hear myself stammering. “Oh my—is she okay? Raul, is she alive?”

      As I grip the edge of the sink, beads of rain on the window come into sharp focus. It makes patterns that shape-shift each time a drop breaks free. I get the strangest sensation that each time it changes, another minute of Mama’s life has slipped away…if she’s not already dead.

      “It’s too early to tell,” Raul says. “She is in a coma. So you should get here pretty fast.”

      I can’t believe this. Mama. In a coma? Ginny, hippie mother earth—the eternal free spirit who collected love children like genetic souvenirs. But in all fairness, Summer and I are twins. So technically, Mama only got pregnant twice. Still, no matter how you slice it, there’s nothing normal about having two different men father your children when you have no idea of one man’s identity. Last time I asked, she had it narrowed down to a list of about ten or fifteen candidates.

      “After all, the sixties was the era of free love,” she always said. “At least I gave you life.”

      But that’s not the issue right now. All of that and the upheaval it’s caused seem so insignificant in the face of…this.

      I realize Raul just said something and is waiting for me to answer.

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “Can you telephone your sisters? I cannot find their numbers. The doctor said the next twenty-four hours are critical. So if you are coming, you should get here as fast as possible.”

      Summer

      I haven’t been back to Dahlia Springs in twenty-two years. Frankly, I haven’t had the time, money or the inclination. But when my sister, Skye, calls to inform me that our mother’s in a coma… Oh God.

      What choice do I have? And it couldn’t come at a worse time.

      I suppose if I were completely honest, I’d admit I don’t want to go home. Because Dahlia Springs isn’t home. Never was.

      My home is here in New York. My job is here, my friends are here.

      Who was it that said friends are the family you choose?

      Whoever it was hit it dead on. I wouldn’t choose my family if I had the choice. But for some masochistic reason, I can’t cast them off, either. Despite the fact that my sister and I don’t see eye-to-eye on most issues. And our mother, Ginny, has had long-standing differences with Skye and me over the years.

      Still, she’s my mother. That’s why I decide to purchase a plane ticket I can’t afford and travel to a place I don’t care to visit. Because the woman with whom relations have been strained at the best times and worse on other occasions is lying in a hospital bed in a coma.

      “It might be a couple of days before I can get there. I may have to work a couple of days to give Gerard time to make arrangements. He’s behind schedule with the spring collection and—”

      “Summer, I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation.” Skye’s pitch veers into a sharp upper register and she’s slipped into that drawl she uses when she’s irritated, which is more often than not when we talk. “Mama may not last a couple of days.”

      My stomach clenches, and I take a deep breath.

      “Look, I’ll get there as fast as I can. I’d be there now if I could. But I can’t just drop everything. I have a job. I need to make arrangements for Gerard to get someone in here to fill in for me.”

      I don’t have a husband to support me.

      “What about Jane?” Skye asks. “Don’t you think we owe it to her to tell her about Mama?”

      The irony of Skye’s words makes me laugh, but it sounds brittle. Even to my own ears. “Isn’t that the story of her life? The whole damn world owes Jane, the one who’s had everything.”

      Jane is our younger sister. Half sister, to be exact. We share the same mother. Ginny married Chester Hamby, Jane’s father, after she got pregnant. Skye and I were nineteen and out of the house. So really it was a different chapter in Ginny’s life. A chapter from which we were largely absent.

      Our little sister’s had all the advantages we didn’t have growing up—a father for one. And a wealthy father to boot.

      Before Chester met Ginny, he made millions off an invention—something to do with farming. I was never clear on what the gadget was, but it brought in a boatload of money.

      Jane’s twenty-one and to say she’s a handful is an understatement. She ran away from home the first time when she was fourteen, about six months after her father died. She stayed away about a month. Of course, Ginny welcomed her home like the prodigal daughter. I can understand that. Jane was upset over losing her dad. Ginny was glad to have one of her daughters back.

      But then Jane did it again when she was sixteen. Said she was going downtown. Three days later she called Ginny from New Orleans to tell her she’d gone on the road with her boyfriend, Rad Farley, and his band, Flaming Skeleton, to be the “wardrobe mistress.”

      Ha. It didn’t take a genius to conclude that “wardrobe mistress” was really just code for glorified rock-and-roll groupie.

      Ginny was beside herself and called begging me to do something. When I wouldn’t go rushing down to New Orleans to whisk Jane back to Florida, my mother took all her anger out on me. I was in New York, for God’s sake. And to be honest, if Ginny was even half the mother to Jane that she was to Skye and me, I didn’t blame Jane for wanting to get the hell away from her.

      Even though I want to be irritated with Skye for pressuring me to drop everything and come, a pang of guilt needles me. The truth is, it won’t be that difficult for my boss to replace me while I’m away.

      For the past seventeen years, I’ve been a house model for the designer Gerard Geandeau. The oh-so-glamorous job boils down to serving as a human mannequin on whom he fits his samples. It requires spending hours a day, nearly naked on my aching feet. Not a plum modeling job by any standard. Still, there’s plenty of fresh meat clamoring for my position.

      Gerard was not very compassionate about my asking for time off. He had no time to listen to my reasons.

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