Who Needs Her?

The thing was, she already had a perfectly good sister, had had her for most of her life, so what in heaven’s name did she need another one for? A brother: now that was something different. She didn’t have a brother, never had had one, and if there was one thing it would have been nice to have, it would have been a brother. To do things. You know, like the car things, the yard things, the basement things, all the things that she had been responsible for all along.

But no, there was God up there, snickering as He always seemed to do whenever He took notice of her, and then reaching into her life to “fix” something—which usually meant messing things up. Long ago, He’d removed her father from the midst of her small family, smote the poor man dead of a coronary occlusion (or so the doctor had said) in the middle of shoveling the front walk. Coming home from work, she had found him half-buried in the snowbank he’d been forming from the heavy shovels full of sticky wet snow he’d wrestled off the sidewalk. She had dragged him up the three steps to the small porch and then, out of breath and unable to move him farther (they were both big people, but he was by far the bigger), she had given up and phoned the ambulance.

Later that day, she had finished shoveling the sidewalk, but by then it had grown colder, and the water-filled snow had become icy and much harder to manage. At first, with every difficult shovel-full, the mantra of the Little Engine That Could chugged dully through her mind: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” But by the time she had finished, it was truly dark and numbingly cold, and the mantra had become a ponderous “It’s my job now, it’s my job now, it’s my job now.”

Not her mother’s job. That poor woman, who suffered from some form of hysteria (wasn’t that a malady for the 1880s, rather than the 1980s?), had absented herself from the family two years ago and had only just returned several weeks ago, wheelchair-bound and requiring the daily attention of a succession of nurses. Nor was it her sister’s job, three years younger and not in the least concerned about the hardships of others. Besides which, she had taken herself off to college in Albany.

No, there was only Maddie to step into her father’s shambling shoes and take on all of the household maintenance—and continue to manage the plumbing supply office for seven hours a day, five and a half days a week (Wednesdays were her half days, though not for the business, and she dreaded Thursday mornings). But she had done it, for almost thirty years now, with no help from Him, that so-called Father in Heaven. In the post office yesterday, where she’d gone to get the mail (including the strange purple envelope enclosing the even-stranger letter from that unexpected and unnecessary “sister”), she’d heard Joan say to a patron, from behind the bars of her little office window, “Well, you know, I always say God helps those who help themselves.” Maddie had snorted as she closed her box up. Believe what you will, silly fool.

Though she’d had no help from her Maker, she could not discount the help she’d received from Steve, her boss at Puffer’s Plumbing Supplies. The first thing he’d done, pulling her aside at her father’s wake, was to tell her he was giving her a two-dollar-an-hour raise. She was struck dumb, and by the time she’d recovered enough to indignantly refuse such charity, he’d left. Propriety said she did not call him at home, so it was Monday before she could protest—vigorously—that she did not need handouts from him or anyone else.

“Not intended as a handout,” was his unruffled reply.

When she protested again, he turned away and, heading into his office, threw over his shoulder, “All right, earn it then. You can cook dinner for me on Friday night.” That stopped her cold.

It took her all week to decide to do as he bid, an uncomfortable week in which he said even less to her than usual, and she brought him none of the problems, overdue bills, late suppliers, missing petty cash, that constituted their usual interactions.

Ultimately, she climbed off the fence on the side of culinary repayment of the welcome increase in her salary. The first two dinners, she cooked at his house, but the lack of neatness and basic equipment there (he’d been a bachelor all his life and still lived in the house he grew up in. As did she, come to that) impelled her to invite him to take the Friday meal at her house. Mrs. Stillman, Maddie’s mother, had been laid even lower by her husband’s untimely death and spent her days in her darkened bedroom. However, once she divined that there was a third person—a man, to boot—in her house every Friday, she soon became well enough to join them.

Mrs. Stillman was a born flirt, one of the qualities that had made life with her stolid and unimaginative husband so difficult and had prompted that two-year sabbatical from her marriage. One interpretation of the atmosphere at those threesome dinners would be that her interactions with the normally dour Steve pulled her out of her slough of despond. Maddie did not begrudge her mother the healing nature of those evenings, but at first it disturbed her to feel more of an onlooker than a participant. By the third year of the dinners, however, Maddie found she had settled into the role of, well, a kind of chaperone. Not that there was any hanky-panky going on, just that she wasn’t as quick with repartee as were the other two. It was truly easier to prepare the meal, serve it, and clean up afterwards, smiling as required at the witticisms, responding when something was directed at her, but otherwise to treat things rather like a show that she watched on TV while she worked.

Then two things happened, within months of each other, the kinds of things she sensed God was instigating up there in his Office in the Sky. First, her mother’s health, which had evidently been frailer than even Maddie suspected, began to deteriorate, and the poor woman took again to her bed. Doctors and visiting nurses agreed she should be moved to a nursing home. One was found not too far away, and dinner was once again à deux.

And once again quiet. Though she recognized that Steve was making an effort—even more of one than she herself felt compelled to offer—nothing seemed able to bring back the liveliness of the meals à trois. Things became almost uncomfortable.

Until the second event unfolded. One Friday night, when Steve, who usually arrived with a box of Entenmann’s cookies or some cider or even a pie he’d picked up at the market on his way to the Stillman house, came with a bottle of a red wine (a Merlot—mer-lott? she pronounced the word uncertainly and only in her head), a magnificent bunch of gladiolas, and a small blue-velvet box.

Dumb-struck once again—the third time since her father’s death, and always at the hands of this lumbering bear of a man—she could make no answer when he asked the inevitable question. The silence would have defeated a less benign and patient suitor. But Steve, who had made his proposal from his usual seat at her table, merely said placidly, “Well, whenever you’re ready, then. No hurry,” and turned to the beef stroganoff that had appeared in front of him. If he couldn’t have her answer, it seemed he’d settle for the meal.

Maddie suffered low-grade anxiety through the weekend and dreaded coming into the office that next Monday, even more than she did on the Thursdays after her half-day. When she arrived to find the blue-velvet box now sitting on her desk blotter, next to a heart-shaped container of Brach’s chocolate-covered cherry cordials, her dread took a more specific shape, sword-like, sharply pointed, and aimed directly at Him. Is this what He thought she needed in her life? This kindly but unimaginative man who came awake to trade corny jibes with her mother but could think of nothing to say to her? And why had He backed her into such a corner that there was only disaster, no matter how she answered? Either she submitted to Steve and the life he offered—or she’d be out of a job. Did God, in His infinite wisdom, have another one lined up for her? Pretty darned unlikely, if she knew God. And by now, she did!

But it seemed God didn’t want her completely beaten down. After staring at the box for almost an hour, she took it into Steve’s office, laid it on his desk blotter, and said, “Thanks, but I don’t think so.”

He looked up from the pile of invoices he was examining, his expression, at least to her, unreadable. After a good half-minute, in which they both simply stood there, he said, “All right. But keep the candy. If you’d like, of course.”

Thursday morning, as she was getting ready to tackle the paperwork from her half-day, Pete, the Parts Manager, came in from the back to say that Steve had wanted him to tell Maddie that he was going to be gone for the weekend, back on Monday, and that she could leave any problems on his desk for his return. Thus, her job continued (her paycheck remaining at the generous pre-proposal level), while the quiet Friday night dinners ended as though they had never occurred.

Steve, who made several of those weekend trips to wherever, came back from one of them with a plump woman, her blonde hair braided into a crown, her smile twinkling, and her happiness irrepressible. This was Johanna, he said, Johanna Puffer: they’d been married that weekend. Maddie found that she was delighted at the news, which made her realize, at the same time, that she had been almost holding her breath until something happened, the other shoe dropped, some event put an end to that whole business.

Which meant that God was free to devise some other plan to “fix” whatever He thought was wrong with her life. She expected there might be one or two more Steve-type situations, no more than that, since the town was small and she was not much to write home about, as the saying went. But evidently some things were beyond God’s all-powerful nature, because two more decades crept by, and there never were any other blue-velvet boxes—nor any cherry cordials, either.

But other things happened. Her sister graduated, married her college chemistry teacher, put her sheepskin away, and began to produce children. They remained happily in Albany, so Maddie was only occasionally required to play the doting aunt. Then one day, her mother slipped peacefully off to wherever God took such as her. Maddie had visited her as often as required, spending some afternoons sitting by her bed while they both watched Monty Hall make deals with the outlandish members of his audience. Other days they would talk a bit, sometimes mentioning the years (few in number but nevertheless memorable) when Maddie’s mother entertained the boss at dinner. Sometimes her mother looked like there was something more she wanted to say, but nothing ever quite materialized.

And of course they never talked about that two-year hiatus when Maddie, in her mid-twenties, having given up college so her sister could attend and having taken the job at Puffer’s, awakened one morning to find her mother had left. That meant Maddie was responsible for trying to keep her father from going off the deep end and for maintaining the house, all eight rooms and two baths (plus attic and basement), with detached garage and 1-1/2-acre yard.

As even God would have to admit, if anyone cared to ask Him, she had done a passably fair job at both tasks, though maintaining a 70-year-old house that size was no piece of cake. After her father’s death in the snowbank, the house became hers in all but title. Once her mother died and her sister came to take what furniture she wanted back to Albany, even the title bore Maddie’s name.

So, when this strange purple envelope, with its unfamiliar Ohio return address, showed up along with two or three Christmas cards in today’s mail, she looked at it a bit quizzically but went on about her lunch business, which included a stop at Zayres to pick up the gifts Steve had asked her to get for Johanna. They were bulky—rather, the yardage of green velvet cloth was bulky; the diamond bracelet was not—so she left the former in her car for Steve to get later and brought the rest, including her mail, up to her desk.

After staring at the mysterious epistle for a while, she decided to open it, noting with a frown that purple (really, more like lavender) was not a very Christmas-y color for a card. She started to tackle the somewhat flowery penmanship but had read only a few words before all thoughts of Christmas, indeed, of ordinary life as she had known it for nearly sixty years, left her head.

Dear Madeleine,

I’m not sure how to begin, but I guess the best thing is to just say it: I’m your sister. My name is Ruth and I’m soon to be 46 years old. On Christmas day, actually, though that’s just a passing fact. I don’t know whether our mother ever mentioned me before she died, but I’m betting she didn’t. Her letters to me stopped coming when I was around 15. I’m not sure why, though one reason could be that I never wrote back to her. But I know she was in contact with my adopted mother, so she probably knew that I was both turned on and turned off by the fact that I had a “real” mother out there somewhere.

Once she stopped writing, I stopped even thinking about her. I was busy with my life (which I hope to have a chance to tell you about—but that’s going to be up to you), and I have a great set of parents all my own, so I guess you could say I didn’t need the mother we share.

My mother (the one who raised me, the real one in my book) let me know when my birth mother died, but even that didn’t make me want to seek out the rest of my family. I’m not sure why I’m doing that now. I don’t need anything from you or Caroline—I want to say that right up front, so you don’t think I’m after you for money or anything—except perhaps to be connected to family. I mean, to people who share my actual blood. Isn’t that funny? I know it shouldn’t matter. I mean, you can have strong bonds with people who share nothing, either genetically or hematologically (is that a word? If not, I just invented it!). But somehow, right now, I seem to need something a little more mine.

Oh, and by the way, one thing I do know is that you and I and Caroline share the same dad, too. Not sure what went on back then, but I think our mother was uncertain about having another child (me!) and so took a break from the marriage to figure things out. I’d love to know what you know about that time; maybe we can piece things together and both learn something about who we are!

So this is me, Sis, reaching out to you, and hoping you feel like reaching back. I’ve tried you first because you’re the “big sister.” Was that the right choice?

Hoping to meet soon,

Ruth

When she recovered her wits, Maddie’s first reaction was to simply toss the letter in the wastebasket. What kind of bizarre joke was He playing on her this time? If this was His idea of a Christmas present, He certainly hadn’t paid much attention over the last two thousand years. Christmas—His Son’s birth, after all—was supposed to save us from whatever we needed saving from. Hadn’t she shown Him over all this time that she did not need saving? From anything? She’d survived the death or departure of her family, she’d assessed the few men who’d come along and found they brought nothing into her life that she couldn’t get along without—had gotten along without, quite adequately, thank You very much, God.

And now she had her job for as long as she wanted it (Steve’s son Rob had assured her of that when Steve retired and took Johanna to Florida), she had a well-stocked library down the street, she had television (which she talked to almost the way she and her mother had done together years ago), she had the yard to mow and rake, the sidewalk to shovel. And when she did drop dead, whether at her desk or in the middle of shoveling the sidewalk, it would all be His problem. Then there’d be something for Him to “fix.”

No, she asserted firmly, she didn’t need the sister she already had, and she definitely did not need another one. She picked up the letter and began to tear it into shreds, letting them fall into the wastebasket. Drowning people needed saving; weak and helpless people needed saving. But she could take care of herself.

She straightened up, pulled the pile of invoices over, and, in the silence, began to log them into the account book.