Elaine Hussey - The Oleander Sisters

She’d given up everything for her family, even her name. Beth. Nobody called her that anymore. Everybody just called her Sis, as if she were nothing more than the role she played.

The sign on the door of Sweet Mama’s read Closed for a Private Party. There was nothing private about it, of course. Tomorrow, word would be all over town. Sweet Mama would tell the breakfast regulars, and Emily was too gentle to refuse details to anybody who asked. By ten o’clock, everybody in Biloxi would know that Sweet Mama had made Jim’s favorite red velvet cake, and Emily had forgotten to take off her apron and Jim had refused to wear his leg.

There it lay on the backseat of Sis’s Valiant, another piece of sand in her craw. What do you say to a brother just returning from the hell of Vietnam? Why don’t you let me strap on your prosthetic leg so you’ll look normal and Emily won’t cry? Or do you just stand there with sand drifting into your sandals while Emily races out the front door, already crying before she gets close enough to hug her twin, the Gulf breeze blowing both of them sideways?

Maybe the Gulf was blowing all of them sideways, and had been for so long Sis didn’t know what normal was anymore. She thought about a brother coming home broken and a sister smiling as she raced toward disaster. She thought about a life gone so far off track she didn’t even remember the direction she’d been going.

Best not to think too far into the future, to simply put one sandy sandal in front of the other until she was standing in Sweet Mama’s, surrounded by the smells of cake and pie and fried chicken and freshly cut tomatoes from Sweet Mama’s prize crop, just standing there silent, gnawing on a chicken leg and watching over her brother and sister as she always had; watching as Emily laughed through her tears and Jim was engulfed by the ones who loved him best and would love him always, even if he never got his mind back from Vietnam and his leg out of Sis’s car.

“Aunt Sis! Aunt Sis!”

The TV perched on the edge of the serving bar was blaring wide-open. Andy sat so close he was crossing his eyes to see.

“C’mon over! They gonna land on the moon!”

For two cents Sis would get on that rocket ship with the astronauts. And she wouldn’t care whether she found the moon or not. All she wanted was to be as far away from her current life as she could get.

* * *

Sweet Mama was relieved when Sis quit glaring over her fried chicken leg at What’s His Name and walked over to join Andy at the TV. Why, from the look on her face you’d think What’s His Name was a fly set to land on Jim’s celebration cake and Sis was a flyswatter.

Larry Chastain. That was the name of Emily’s new fiancé. Sweet Mama would write it down this very minute if she thought she could do it without getting caught. But Emily might see her and start worrying all over again about her forgetfulness. And Sis was bound to notice. That girl didn’t miss a thing. And she wouldn’t stop at calling Sweet Mama forgetful, either. She’d use the scary words senile and hardening of the arteries and dementia.

“Larry Chastain.” Sweet Mama mumbled his name, hoping it would make a lasting impression. If she forgot and called him Gary, everybody would look at her funny. And her older son Steve, the one who wasn’t dead and wasn’t Emily and Sis and Jim’s father, would start that silly talk again about signing over power of attorney.

Sweet Mama would rather be six feet under than sign over any damned thing. She’d built this place from scratch and had run it for nearly fifty years and she wasn’t about to let somebody else take over now, especially her son Steve, who only came to the café when his bossy wife allowed. Besides that, he hated pie. What God-respecting man hated pie? No sirree, Bob. If anybody took over Sweet Mama’s Café, it would be the Blake girls. Emily could make an Amen cobbler the customers couldn’t tell from Sweet Mama’s, and Sis knew more about running a business than any man Sweet Mama ever saw.

If her mind ever did go, God forbid, she’d have her granddaughters running the show and not somebody with a power of attorney, thank you very much.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sweet Mama saw Emily motioning to her fiancé to go on over and join Sis and Andy at the TV, trying to communicate with gesture and smile, as she always had, that everything was all right.

Lord God, Sweet Mama hoped so. The scent of sun-ripened peaches coming from the Amen cobbler was so sweet, if you squinted you could see bees buzzing around the crust. Sweet Mama couldn’t recall what that was a sign of, but she knew it was a harbinger of something that made her bones feel heavy. She closed her eyes, just for a minute, and as clear as a summer day she saw a swarm of bees streaking down from the mimosa tree in the backyard, aiming straight for her head. She lifted her shovel to fight them back.

“Sweet Mama.” Her granddaughter’s voice drifted through the fog. “Sweet Mama. Wake up.”

Emily was shaking her shoulder, and when she looked up at her granddaughter, it came as a great surprise that she was all grown-up instead of four years old. Momentarily panicked, Sweet Mama looked around for Sis, who was no longer fourteen, but a rather unstylish and pensive-looking woman past thirty.

“Are you all right, Sweet Mama?”

“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I thought you’d fallen asleep.”

“In the middle of my own grandson’s homecoming party?” Sweet Mama checked for the cake to be sure she was right. “I should say not!”

Emily sat down beside her and started patting her hand. Sweet Mama was torn between snatching it away, acting all huffy that her youngest granddaughter was treating her like an old woman and leaning into her to enjoy the petting. If you’d told her ten years ago she’d ever get to the age that she needed somebody treating her like a child, she’d have slapped you silly.

Before she could make up her mind which way to act, Gary came over and interrupted the whole thing.

“Larry, darling,” Emily said, and Sweet Mama thought about her narrow escape. She’d come within a gnat’s hair of calling him the wrong name. “I thought you were going to join Andy and Sis.”

“Your sister doesn’t seem to like me.”

“Nonsense, darling. You have to know Sis. She’s just protective, that’s all.” Emily patted him on the arm. “Go on over there now, and don’t spare your charm.”

He trotted off and Sweet Mama said, “Charm, my ass.”

“Sweet Mama! What a thing to say!”

She knew it was a terrible thing to say, but she wasn’t about to admit that it had just slipped out. To make up for the many ways she was now failing Emily, she was going to give her granddaughter the best wedding the Mississippi Gulf Coast had ever seen.

Sis was another thing—as tough and unbending as the live oaks that dripped with Spanish moss in front of the café. Sometimes Sweet Mama wished her oldest granddaughter would bend a little. She wished she wouldn’t be so hard on people. And the way she dressed...Lord God, the more Sweet Mama tried to talk her out of wearing khaki slacks and black blouses all the time, short sleeves in the summer, long in the winter, the more Sis resisted.

Still, Sweet Mama knew Sis would make sure her sister got a wedding grand enough to make up for all those years wondering if Mark Jones would have changed his mind and married her if he’d made it back from Vietnam.

More and more, Sweet Mama depended on Sis to take care of the family. Any day now, she might retire and travel to some of the places she’d read about in National Geographic. She’d always wanted to, and now could be her big chance.

“I think I’ll head to Pikes Peak first,” she said.