The Sisters Club Read online

  The Sisters Club

  Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition July 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-704-3

  Also by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Jane Taylor Novels

  The Thin Pink Line

  Crossing the Line

  Johnny Smith Novels

  The Bro-Magnet

  Isn’t It Bro-Mantic?

  NEW CLUB!

  Looking for like-minded women who love books to talk about same, and could use some feminine support in their lives to help each other become our best selves. Interested parties should contact Diana Taylor at…

  Sylvia

  I burned the inside of my arm taking the double chocolate-chip muffins out of the oven.

  Crap.

  Forty-six years I’ve been cooking, ever since Minnie and I were four and our aunt used to let us stand on one of the scarlet, vinyl-covered chairs in her kitchen to help roll the dough for the rugelach. You’d think I’d learn how to cook one single thing without burning myself.

  But there was no time for self-pity tears, no time to run for the first-aid kit in my small office, because the phone was ringing.

  “Sylvia’s Supper,” I answered.

  “I’m having a dinner for four tomorrow night,” an expensive woman’s voice said, breathlessly, “and the caterer I always use just called and canceled at the last minute. Said something ridiculous about a fire.”

  She definitely sounded like the kind of woman for whom someone else’s fire constituted “something ridiculous.”

  “That wouldn’t be Kate Bakes, by any chance, would it?” I’d seen the story on the midday news on the little TV I kept on all day in my back office to check on the news and my soap operas between customers and cooking. Kate was my biggest competitor, and while I’d always dreamed of besting her, arson had never been in my plans, nor was this the way I wanted to win.

  “Yes,” the woman said hurriedly, “but I have no time for that now. My husband will be arriving here tomorrow night with his boss and the boss’s wife. The holiday bonuses were delayed until January this year—right now! I’ve only got this one chance to make it a decent one. I need this dinner to be spectacular.”

  Far be it for me to say, Then why don’t you put on an apron and try cooking something yourself? So instead, I said, “What do you need?”

  “What have you got?” she countered.

  “Lady,” I said, having grown quickly tired of all of her breathlessness and angst, “I can make anything you want.”

  We reviewed menu options, finally settling on clams casino and a field greens salad for starters, homemade parmesan bread, side dishes of lemon-drizzled asparagus and rosemary roasted potatoes, a main course of a crown roast with the little white booties left on—booties being her word—and for dessert a frozen chocolate praline layer cake. None of it combined to make a menu I’d ever want to eat all at once, but it seemed to satisfy her. I could hear her anxiety level subsiding as we settled on each item, until…

  “And you’ll have it here by seven thirty,” she said, sounding as though her blood pressure was going through the roof again, “won’t you? And you’ll supply all the heating dishes and what have you—yes?”

  “You want this delivered?”

  “Don’t you do deliveries? You are a caterer.”

  Actually, I did do deliveries. But I usually tried to avoid them because for the past year it was just me there, alone, every day. Plus, I hated that she thought she could just call at the last minute and expect me to dance to her tune.

  “My delivery boy left five years ago,” I said, “and I don’t think he’s coming back.”

  “I can’t believe you wasted my time like this,” she said. “All this while I could have been calling other caterers. I won’t have time to come pick it up myself. I’ll be too busy getting dressed. Plus, what if grease dripped onto the seats of my car?”

  Well, that is a hazard.

  “I can’t be—”

  I cut her off. “I’ll deliver it personally,” I said. “Heating dishes, what have you, booties, and everything.” What the hell, I could use the money. Business had been slow, despite what the political analysts on the news programs kept saying about the economy recovering just fine. Probably just their own personal economies were fine. “Just give me the name and address,” I said, holding my lucky pen ready to write it at the top of the yellow order form.

  Once she gave me the necessary information, she surprised me by saying something nice.

  “You’ve really saved my life,” she said. Then she added, “Thank you, sir, thank you so much.”

  “Sir?” I snorted. “It’s not sir. It’s ma’am. You’ve been talking to Sylvia.”

  Click. I hung up.

  But I didn’t really hold it against her. I get that all the time. We may have been twins, but Minnie had inherited Mom’s speaking voice while I somehow wound up with Dad’s. If I had a nickel for every phone-in customer who mistook me for a man, I could have afforded a sex change operation.

  I placed the order to one side, figuring I’d start what prep work I could do for it that day: check what supplies I had on hand, what supplies I still had to pick up, set the sides and first layer of homemade chocolate ice cream in the springform pan, and toss the pralines with sugar and set the mixture out on sheets of wax paper. Then I went into the office and got out some aloe from the first-aid kit, put it on the burn stripe on my forearm, and then went back out front and took a cooled double chocolate-chip muffin from the tray. I leaned against the counter and surveyed the business my sister and I had built.

  Before opening Sylvia’s Supper, my sister and I were accountants. For twenty-five years we crunched numbers, trying not to scare shifty-eyed people into thinking we’d turn them over to the IRS. Yeah, our lives were exciting. I took a bite of the muffin.

  It was a good muffin. My sister would have loved that muffin.

  I miss my sister, dammit, I thought. I miss her every damned day.

  But how many times can you cry when there’s no one there to hear?

  I polished off the muffin and went back to business.

  On the way home from work, I decided I would stop off at the bookstore. No matter what goes wrong in life, I thought, the bookstore is always the best place to go.

  Cindy

  Climbing onto the bus, I slid on the steps, icy from the boot leavings of previous passengers. If Eddie were with me, he’d say it was my fault for wearing those boots: four-inch heels, narrow toes, black suede, coming to mid-calf with a couple of inches of soft black fur at the top. Of course Eddie would have been totally right to say that. But I loved those boots. They were one of the few things that made me feel like an individual. Besides, after telling me it was my fault that I slid for wearing the boots, Eddie would tell me they made me look hot.

  I teetered down the aisle, found a seat nearly at the back, sat down, and right away pulled out of my brown suede satchel a copy of Swept Away By Desire, the romance novel I’d been reading. When I b
ought it a few days ago, I’d stripped off the jacket like I always did with a new book, stripped away the picture of the hero and heroine rolling around half clothed in the surf, because I didn’t want to hear other people’s snotty comments about my reading habits. It’s been my experience that if you have a book in your hands, and you keep your nose in it the whole time, even the most die-hard talker that sits down next to you will eventually get the message and shut up. It’s not that I’m antisocial, as a rule, but there are times when you just do not want to talk endlessly to strangers about the weather.

  As the bus pulled away from the curb, I felt a strong chill. Even with the heat on, the cold windows always retained their own brand of weather. I pulled my patched, tan, suede full-length coat with the blond fur trim tighter around myself. If Eddie were with me, he’d say a lot of animals had died to keep me pretty. He’d say it even though he was the one who bought me the coat. Then he’d smile and tell me I did look pretty in it, that it was worth a hundred animals dying if necessary.

  But none of that mattered. The coat covered my hated uniform, the black polyester pantsuit I had to wear to work in the lingerie store. And I didn’t care about anything right then. I was just glad the bus was taking me away from the mall and all those obese ladies my manager was always pressuring me to get to buy thongs. Let me tell you, “one size fits all” is not truth in advertising.

  Still, within the rose-colored walls of Midnight Scandals, the lingerie store, I was the blithe spirit; the one my manager, Marlene, was convinced could sell G-strings to an Eskimo. And I smiled, always smiled, convincing myself at least half the time that I really was the blithe spirit everyone thought they saw.

  The bus chugged up the hill, depositing me at the stop outside the hospital. On the way down the stairs, book safely back in my satchel, I slipped again in my heels. Of all the things you can say about me—and Eddie always had plenty, good and bad—at least I was consistent.

  If Eddie were with me, he’d have said, “Why do you have to come here every day, Cin? Give it a rest.” I knew he just said those things because he worried about me. He worried that if I spent too much time at the hospital it would depress me. But Eddie wasn’t there and it was my time, the magic purple-blue time between afternoon and evening; and for one whole hour I could do what I liked.

  As big a place as the hospital was, it felt like everyone knew me. Not surprising, really. And when I got off the elevator, the nurse on Douglas buzzed me right through.

  In her room, my sister was where she always was when I came to visit, in a chair by the window, looking out.

  “Hey, Carly,” I said, putting my arms around her, embracing her in a hug she didn’t return. “How’s it going today?” As I settled down on the edge of the bed just a couple of feet from her, I tried to think of something perky to say. “Any new cars come and go in that lot out there?”

  No answer. Not that I expected any.

  I reached out slowly so my movement wouldn’t startle her, replacing a hair gone wild behind her ear. My mom always said that seeing us side by side was like looking at a carbon copy of the same person. But growing up, I could never see it. Carly was the super pretty one, while I was the paler version of her. Still, as I smoothed her hair with my hand, in profile I could see the basic resemblances: the same long and straight honey-blond hair, the same slightly darker sweep of brow over gray-blue eyes, and the same lips we used to joke were made for kissing. Of course there were obvious differences: I had my work makeup on while she was scrubbed beyond clean, as though someone would be wheeling her off to the lobotomy chamber any second. Plus, there was that lifelessness in her eyes, and the lack of conversation. Me, on the other hand, I was nothing but chatter.

  I told her about every blessed thing I’d done at work that day, about the 38D customers trying to cram their way into 34Bs, about the 32As stuffing their way into Cs, about all the damn endless thongs, and Marlene being such an eternal bitch.

  “I swear,” I said, forcing a laugh like she might actually for once laugh along with me, “if I could afford to quit, I’d start some kind of thong bonfire in the store. Or maybe just threaten to strangle Marlene with one.”

  No returning laugh. Not that I’d expected one.

  And then, all of a sudden, I was full stop out of happy chatter. The only other thing to talk about in my life was Eddie. And I’d made a pact with myself from the day Carly landed herself in there, never to talk to her about Eddie if I could avoid it. When Carly had still been full of life, she’d hated the topic of Eddie, which was a bit of a big problem, since I loved Eddie so much. I swear, I loved that man to death.

  With nothing left to say, but with time still remaining on the clock, I pulled Swept Away By Love out of my satchel.

  “Let me read you some of this,” I said, sounding falsely excited in my own ears. “I really think you’ll like it.” I found the page I’d turned over into a triangle to mark where I’d left off. Funny, I hadn’t noticed before, I only had one short chapter left. Holding the book open with one hand, I gently covered the clasped hands in Carly’s lap with my other. When her fingers didn’t resist, I increased the grip, holding on tight. I was never quite sure who I was holding on tight for: her or me.

  “Do you remember when we were small,” I said, really smiling now at the memory, picturing us as little towheads full of girlish hopes and dreams, “and we used to read comics to each other under the sheets with the flashlight?”

  • • •

  Outside, cold had turned to colder. And the true light was gone, leaving just the light from the city.

  I pulled the fur collar of my coat up around my neck and thought of the night ahead. If I went home right now, Eddie would be there, on the couch waiting. He’d want to know what I’d planned for dinner, which was absolutely nothing. He’d already know that, since there was nothing really in the house to eat, nor would there be any grocery bags in my hands if I walked through the door now. Then Eddie’d say, even if he laughed when he said it, “How do you expect me to watch Idol with an empty stomach?”

  And Eddie would be right, of course; he’d be completely justified to say those things. I was a failure. I was a failure as a girlfriend. I was a failure as a sister. Hell, if you listened to Marlene talk on the days she was off her meds, I was even a failure at selling thongs.

  Lise

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little hard on Danitra?” I asked John, forcing a smile in the hope of taking the sting out of my criticizing words.

  It was always hard not to be critical of John, who was always so critical of everyone else.

  But John was not to be condescended to, even if his professor was smiling while doing so.

  I sometimes wondered what I looked like to my students, perched as I was then on the edge of my desk: spiky black hair streaked with auburn highlights, brown eyes behind dark horn-rimmed glasses, my white Oxford shirt beneath a brown tweed jacket, jeans like any of them might have worn, and the pump at the end of my foot every now and then swinging with the motion of my leg as I danced the occasional nervous twitch. Did they find me formidable? Did they, perhaps, laugh behind my back?

  “No,” John said, clearly taking himself at least as seriously as any twenty-year-old intent on writing the “Great American Novel” ever has. “I don’t. Isn’t the saying ‘show, don’t tell’? Did you hear the section she read? She told everything!”

  The sheer outrage of it. Still, it wouldn’t be proper to laugh at him.

  “Well,” I said, considering, “Danitra did tell an awful lot. But here’s something you need to keep in mind: you write drama, Danitra writes comedy. They are, at the end of the day, two very different animals. If your goal is to create the first, you need to create fully developed characters and draw scenes in much the same way you’d paint a picture. Usually. But with the latter? Your goal is to make people laugh, and sometimes the quickest way to do that is by telling a few things, skipping the reader along to the funny bits. Neith
er way is superior,” I shrugged, “just different.”

  It was a good thing John was looking at me, because he missed it when Danitra stuck out her tongue at his profile. I stifled a laugh. In the short time since the winter semester had started, I’d already noticed what a resilient creature Danitra was. She was the classmate John most criticized—well, they all criticized her—but she just took it with good humor, making appropriate revisions, vastly improving the work each time, and discarding without malice the suggestions that didn’t make sense to her. She had a good editorial ear. She would go far. And John? John might go far too, if his ego didn’t stumble him up. John never took criticisms graciously, including mine; he was always certain the way he’d written it first was best.

  “Oh, come on,” John scoffed. “How can you even suggest comedy is as good as drama? You must know one is superior. And which one.”

  “Basta,” I said, hopping down off my perch. “Enough. I want you to finish the chapters you’ve been working on and polish them to the best of your ability—and that means you too, John; none of this ‘It was perfect the first time I wrote it’—and have it ready to read next Tuesday. I haven’t decided yet who’s to go first, so you’d better all be ready.”

  Twenty faces met the news with dismay and groans about “But there’s a football game on Saturday!”—as if any of my budding writers cared about football; besides which, our team sucked—and “There’s an all-weekend party in Kent Quad!”

  It didn’t matter that they were all in college and taking their writing seriously enough that they were actually bothering to take Writing Workshop, an advanced single-genre course with the focus on either poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction—in my class it was straight fiction, and students in the know knew that if they were ambitious enough, I’d actually let them attempt novels—they were still all just kids.