Elaine Hussey - The Oleander Sisters

It seemed so much like an ordinary day that Sis could almost forget her grisly find in the garden. But the Amen cobblers were sending up thick steam you could get lost in and never find your way out of, a sure sign of a disaster so huge even Sis wouldn’t be able to contain it. The bones in the garden were just the beginning.

She pulled herself together and found her sister in the kitchen wearing a pink shirt with long sleeves, for Pete’s sake, and it was already hot enough to fry an egg in the parking lot. Still, the sight of Emily covered with a dusting of flour and elbow deep in German chocolate cakes gave Sis a momentary respite from thinking about portentous cobblers and backyard bones.

“Hey, Sis!” Emily said, smiling as she poured batter into cake pans. “Where’s Jim?”

“He’s not up to socializing yet, Em.”

“I should have known that.” Emily scraped batter off the bottom of the bowl and held out a wooden stirring spoon. “Do you want to lick the spoon?”

She took up a spot by her sister and opened her mouth for the taste of raw batter, rich with sugar and butter. It brought back memories of childhood, with Jim and Emily perched on stools at Sweet Mama’s side and Sis standing at her elbow, listening to stories of the café in its infancy, waiting their turns to lick the batter from the latest confection in progress—a German chocolate cake, a lemon icebox pie, a Coca-Cola cake or Emily’s favorite, Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.

“Beulah said for you to wait on these cakes,” Sis said.

“If I had waited, there wouldn’t be any spoons to lick.” Emily bumped Sis’s hip, teasing her, and then crammed the huge stirring spoon into her mouth. It left a smear of cake batter on her cheek that made her look like a little girl.

“How do you know, Em? Someday I might make a cake.”

Emily whooped. “I want a picture of that. It would be one for the walls.”

Sis stuck her finger in the bowl and dabbed batter on her sister’s nose. Emily paid her back with a smear on the chin, and soon they were doubled over with laughter.

“Oh, my goodness.” Emily put the bowl and spoons into the sink. “If I don’t get this mess cleaned up, I’ll never be ready to open.”

“I’ll rinse.” Sis wiped cake batter off her face and moved to the sink. “You load the dishwasher.”

“Good,” Emily said. “That gives us time to talk about the wedding. I was thinking of putting flower baskets in the garden instead of depending on the roses.”

Pricked with sudden alarm, Sis just stood there with the water running unheeded over the dishes.

“I don’t think you ought to have it in the garden.”

“Since when? Just this morning you said it would be fine.”

“I checked it after we talked. It looks awful out there.”

“I know it’s not at its best this time of year, Sis, but I’ve always wanted a garden wedding.”

Sis had an awful vision of Emily standing atop the bones saying I do.

“It’s too hot, Em. Everybody will parch.”

“We can put the chairs under the shade.”

“I have a better idea. Wait till November when things have cooled off.”

Could she report the bones and get the mess cleared out of her garden by November?

“I will not have Andy start school without two parents. Okay?”

Was Emily remembering walking the halls of Biloxi High to whispers of easy and slut, her baby bump showing and Mark Jones already enlisted and gone? Was she thinking about how she’d had to sit on the sidelines while the rest of her classmates walked onstage to get their diplomas?

“Nobody’s going to call him names, Em. Not while I draw breath.”

“What are you going to do, Sis? Go to school with him every day?”

“I’m not above it.”

“You’re not going to get me to change my mind, and you might as well quit trying. I will not have my son called bastard.”

“All right. I understand. But at least think about getting married in Sweet Mama’s living room. We could buy some of those pink roses you love so much and put them in wicker baskets on either side of the mantel.”

“Forget it, Sis.”

“You could walk down the staircase and not have to trail your wedding dress in the dirt.”

“Good grief! Just let it alone. It’s my wedding and I’m getting married in the garden.”

Sis imagined Uncle Steve’s nosy wife, Ethel, poking around the pitiful rosebushes and finding the bony foot sticking out of the ground, imagined cops and pandemonium and scandal.

“But, Em, think what a hissy fit Aunt Ethel will pitch if she gets too hot out there. Or what if it starts to rain?”

“I’ve had my say, Sis, and that’s my final word.”

Emily huffed over to the stove and turned her back.

Sis wished she could start the day over. She’d sleep late and never see Sweet Mama tying plastic roses on the bush, never drive along behind her at twenty miles an hour in case she ran over another hydrangea bush. But most of all, she’d never dig up a rosebush and find bones.

Sis turned to the window and saw her nephew in the backyard, surrounded by boxes.

“Is Andy building a fort out there?”

“No. A rocket ship. He’s planning to fly me to the moon.”

“Maybe he’ll take me, too.” She looked back at her baby sister standing there oblivious in her long-sleeved shirt, expecting every downpour to yield a rainbow. “I’m sorry, Em. I’m such a grump.”

“You’re not totally grumpy. Just a little.”

“I’m going outside to cool off and visit with Andy, and when I come back inside, we’ll plan a wedding that will turn your enemies green with envy.”

“I don’t have enemies,” Emily said without a single hint of irony.

Lord, Sis hoped that was true. She raced through the door, the scent of Amen cobbler following her all the way, so strong it felt like somebody squeezing her heart. Outside, she leaned against the wall, trying to catch a deep breath. What would become of her family if she worried herself into a heart attack? It could happen. Last year a woman not three years older than Sis had keeled over on the front pew of the Biloxi Baptist Church, and her with three children to look after and a husband, besides.

“Hey, Aunt Sis,” Andy called. “How many batteries you got?”

He was standing on top of a TV box in his Superman suit, his blond cowlick sticking up in front like the crest of a baby bird, his sturdy legs beneath the too-short pants turned dark gold from a summer in the sun, the big red S on his shirt faded from too many washings. His feet were bare and his face was filled with excitement.

“I don’t have any batteries in my pockets, but I’ll bet I can find some. What are they for?”

“My rocket ship. It’s gonna take lots to get to the moon.”

Hope is such a fragile thing, a butterfly wing you could crush with one finger. Walking a thin line, terrified of leaning too far to the left or the right, Sis squatted beside her nephew at the pile of boxes.

“Let me help you with that rocket ship.”

“Me and you’s gonna build the bestest one!” Andy scrambled among the pile and came up with a box still smelling of laundry detergent. “Mommy won’t let me use a knife. Can you cut the window, Aunt Sis?”

“I can.”

As she pulled out a pocketknife and cut a window right over the T on the Tide box, Sis missed the family she might have had as if they were real, as if she had a husband who kept her picture on his desk, a daughter named Susan who had inherited her aunt Emily’s beautiful blond hair and a sturdy son named Bill after her own father, a son who loved baseball and digging for worms and sitting on the banks of the Tchoutacabouffa River with a fishing pole.

When Andy raced inside to peer out through the hole, her phantom family vanished, leaving her in the backyard of the café with a nephew whose grin lit a candle in her heart.