Henry's Sisters. Cathy Lamb

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      “Uh…yeah…you know my mom?” Now the waitress was nervous.

      “Yes, I know your mother. Tell her I said you need better manners around fat people.”

      “I didn’t say you were fat.” She cracked her gum twice.

      “You didn’t have to. Now bring me my double order of bacon and eggs without the attitude. Perhaps sometime today you could decide in that pointy, black head of yours not to judge people’s worth solely on the size of their gut. Think you could do that? Too much for you?”

      “No.” She scribbled on her pad. “Shit,” she said quietly.

      “Shit yourself. Hey, Beck’s daughter, I’ll make you a deal. I won’t tell you that at first I thought your nose piercing was a black bugger if you lay off with your weird sneers.”

      “Uh. Whatever.” The waitress scampered away. “Yeah.”

      “I hired a private investigator,” Cecilia said.

      “You what?” Janie asked, her head tilting up. “What for?”

      “Because I want to get laid, Janie, that’s why. He’s going to find me a man who wants to have sex with a female King Kong.”

      I laughed. “Excellent. You can make monkey noises together.”

      “I feel so nervous when I’m with both of you,” Janie complained, fingering the sugar packets.

      “We feel nervous with you, too, shrink tank,” Cecilia said.

      “Don’t ever say I’m a shrink tank,” Janie huffed. “You mean sister.”

      This was going to get warlike. Here came the peacemaker. “Why did you hire a private investigator?”

      “Because I need her investigated.”

      “Who?” Janie asked.

      I didn’t need to ask.

      “ Her . The husband-stealing witch.” Cecilia slammed her coffee cup down. “The loose slut. The whorey home wrecker. The woman who met Parker on the Married But Unhappy Web site.”

      “A Married But Unhappy Web site? I didn’t even know that Web sites like that existed,” Janie said. “It would make a great beginning for a murder. Maybe a woman murderer—she went after cheating husbands and sliced off a ball.”

      “Please. I’m going to eat.” I sat back in my chair. “So you’re going to find out who she is, what she is, her past, her secrets…”

      “Yep. I know she’s twenty-six. Parker’s forty-two. She’s thin, blond hair, boobs the size of Kentucky. She knew she was cheating with a married father. He’s rich. He’s successful. He’s a fuck face. I hate her, I already know that.”

      “I hate her, too,” Janie said.

      “Me, too,” I added. Everyone had to hate the woman who took away your sister’s husband. It was an unbreakable rule. “I would like to smoke her body over a fire and feed her to a cannibal. I never liked Parker.”

      “Me, either,” Janie said, shuddering. “Scumfuzz.”

      “Gee! What a surprise!” Cecilia put a hand over her mouth, eyes open wide. “I’m simply shocked! Floored!” She waved both hands. “When you both staged an ‘intervention’ two months after we met and again two weeks before my wedding to—how did you say it?—knock some sense into my stupidity? That was a small clue. And, let’s see, Isabelle, for years you came to visit me at my house only when Parker wasn’t there.”

      “That’s because Parker’s insufferable.”

      Plus he’d made a pass at me. He was a little drunk about a year after the wedding, but drunks do what they want to do while drunk and use the drinking as an excuse.

      We were out on the deck and Cecilia went inside to bake him his favorite cookie, snickernoodle, because he’d told her to. Parker took a lurch toward me, a hand brushing my boob. Instead of apologizing, he left his hand hanging in the air above my breast as if he was massaging it. “You’re beautiful, Isabelle. God almighty, you’re beautiful. I didn’t marry the beautiful sister, though. I married Cecilia. We lost out, big-time. Big-time. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. We can change this.”

      He moved forward to kiss me, his lips puckered, his tongue darting out an instant before his lips landed on mine.

      He slung an arm around my waist and hauled me in. I do not shock for long, but for a millisecond I did. When that millisecond was over, I shoved Parker, karate-kicked him in the chest, and flipped his legs, and he went right over the railing and landed on his head after torpedoing a rosebush.

      He passed out as soon as his head hit the ground and did not appear for an hour. He had scratches all over his face and a massive bump on his head.

      He caught me by my Porsche before I left. (That was my first Porsche. It was red. Fast. Slick.)

      “You bitch.”

      I laughed. “You make a pass at your wife’s sister, and yet I’m the bitch. Now this is what a bitch would do, so we’re clear what a bitch is.” I slung my fist at his face so hard I cracked a bone in my hand, then got in my car and aimed it right at him. I swerved twice, trying to hit him (not really) and he had to scurry away, like a python with two legs.

      I drove to the hospital. Sent him the bill. I was never rebilled, so I think that was Parker’s way of keeping me quiet. I should have told Cecilia, but that is the problem with sisters and your relationship with them.

      You know them. You know how they’ll react.

      And I knew that Cecilia, at that point in her marriage, would have blamed me. As twins we have a lot of history. I was the pretty-slutty-valedictorian. She was the fat–athletic one. I had been accused by her on several occasions growing up of boyfriend stealing (never, never true), so I couldn’t risk it.

      And Parker the Penis would have denied what happened. Cecilia would have believed me, in her gut, but she would have had to have believed Parker’s version because she loved him. She would have hated me for it. I couldn’t have her hating me, because I knew she needed me so she wouldn’t drown.

      Later I found out that Parker told her he tripped in their shed and landed on a propane tank to explain his injuries.

      “And you, Janie,” Cecilia spat out, still angry, always angry, “you visited—infrequently—when you knew Parker wasn’t going to be there.”

      “I couldn’t be around Parker,” Janie said, “because he made my skin feel like maggots were eating it. One time he shook my hand and I couldn’t use that hand for days. It felt unclean.”

      Parker had made a pass at Janie, too. It was about two years after the wedding. He came by her houseboat, shoved his body up against hers. She had responded by leading him out to her deck, smiling. He advanced. She shoved him into the river and stomped on his fingers when he tried to get back up on her deck.

      He СКАЧАТЬ