What Makes a Family Read online

  Books by Colleen Faulkner

  JUST LIKE OTHER DAUGHTERS

  AS CLOSE AS SISTERS

  JULIA’S DAUGHTERS

  WHAT MAKES A FAMILY

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  What Makes a Family

  COLLEEN FAULKNER

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  1 - Abby

  2 - Sarah Agnes

  3 - Abby

  4 - Birdie

  5 - Abby

  6 - Celeste

  7 - Sarah Agnes

  8 - Abby

  9 - Birdie

  10 - Abby

  11 - Sarah Agnes

  12 - Celeste

  13 - Birdie

  14 - Sarah Agnes

  15 - Abby

  16 - Celeste

  17 - Sarah

  18 - Sarah Agnes

  19 - Birdie

  20 - Sarah

  21 - Abby

  22 - Sarah Agnes

  23 - Abby

  24 - Birdie

  25 - Sarah

  26 - Sarah Agnes

  27 - Abby

  28 - Sarah Agnes

  29 - Celeste

  30 - Birdie

  31 - Sarah Agnes

  32 - Abby

  33 - Celeste

  34 - Sarah

  35 - Abby

  36 - Birdie

  37 - Abby

  38 - Celeste

  39 - Birdie

  40 - Abby

  41 - Abby

  42 - Celeste

  43 - Abby & Birdie

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

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

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Colleen Faulkner

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61773-936-1

  eISBN-10: 1-61773-936-7

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: February 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-6177-3935-4

  1

  Abby

  “She looks dead.” My fifteen-year-old daughter leans over her namesake to get a better look.

  “She’s not dead.” I sound more certain than I am. Sarah’s observation is pretty accurate. My grandmother already looks dead. Of course I know she’s not because the hospice nurse just left. The nurse would have known if Mom Brodie were dead, even if none of us were sure.

  I take a step closer, coming to stand beside my daughter. I can’t take my eyes off the collection of skin and bones in the bed that barely resembles my grandmother . . . or any other human being, for that matter. I suppose this is what I’ll look like someday if I’m lucky enough to live to be a hundred and two. I stare at her comatose body; her eyes are closed, her thin, gray lips slightly parted. Her arms are pressed to her sides, making her look awkward, as if she’s about to march up and out of the bed.

  My grandmother’s marching days are over. Cancer. Eaten up with it, is how Birdie put it. Whatever that means.

  With great care, I take Mom Brodie’s hand in mine, almost afraid it will shatter if I squeeze it too tightly. Her hand is cool to the touch, her skin wrinkled and so thin that I can see the gnarled blue lines of her veins like the protruding roots of the old oak tree where I used to swing on a tire in the backyard.

  Sarah leans closer, studying the shrunken body lost in the folds of clean sheets that smell the way only line-dried clothes can. Like sunshine and something more elusive. Less tangible, but nonetheless present. The scent of the bedsheets instantly takes me back to my childhood on the island. This house. A part of me wants to embrace it, to bury my face in the pillow and inhale the perfume of all it means to be a Brodie. A part of me wants to run from the house, screaming.

  The truth of the matter is that I’m not ready for this.

  I’ve been preparing myself for years, of course. I knew Mom Brodie would die. We all die. Typically, before we reach three digits. I can usually be impartially logical about things like this, but not here, not now. I want to shake her awake and holler, not yet, not yet. I want to beg her not to leave me. I want to be her little girl one more time and curl up in the bed beside her and smell her peppermint breath and listen to her talk about people on Brodie Island, some I know, some who are long dead. Some I suspect might be born totally of her imagination. I want her to read one more chapter of Robinson Crusoe to me.

  “Mom,” Sarah says in the teenager tone that makes it clear she thinks I’m an idiot. She’s not in the least bit upset by her great-grandmother’s condition. All my worry about bringing her here for this vigil was for nothing. “She definitely looks dead. And kind of . . .” Sarah takes a step back as if studying a piece of artwork on the wall of a museum. She wrinkles her heavily freckled nose. “Kind of flat . . . like Tiger after he got run over by that car.”

  I brush the tears from my eyes and lower my grandmother’s hand to the bed. Back to marching position because that’s the way the nurse left her.

  I can’t believe I was concerned it would frighten Sarah to see her great-grandmother this way. Clearly, she’s not distraught. “She’s not dead,” I say, trying not to sound impatient. But what mother doesn’t lose patience with her teenage daughter? Particularly when said teenager is comparing her great-grandmother to a dead cat. And Tiger wasn’t even our cat; she was the neighbor’s. “Not yet.”

  I pull the flowered sheet up a little higher, covering my grandmother to her knobby chin that’s spiked with gray hairs. Mom Brodie has always been modest. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her bare arms above the elbows, or legs above the kneecaps. She always wore a calf-length flowered housedress, with a full apron in a competing flowered pattern over it. Now she’s in a baby-blue hospital gown.

  I fight a sob that lodges in my throat. I need to be strong for Sarah. For my Sarah. To show her that dying is a natural part of living.

  But they’re both my Sarahs. I need to be strong for them both.

  Releasing the sheet, knowing there is nothing really to be done, nothing I can do, but be here for them both, I exhale and step back. My mother ordered the bed from a medical supply store on the mainland last week when my dad decided to bring his mother home from the hospital to die. I’ve heard about the bed in great detail in phone conversations with Birdie over the last couple of days: the extravagant cost, what insurance will and won’t pay, its electric high/low elevation feature, and the trouble over making it with sheets from the linen closet. I talk to my mother often on the phone, but never about things that matter. Never about things I imagine mothers and daughters should talk about. The things I hope my daughter and I will always be able to talk about. Birdie and I only discuss trivial stuff like the features of a leased hospital bed. It’s Mom Brodie who’s been my confidant since I was a little girl, and now I can never talk to her again.
/>   “It’s just how a body looks when . . . when it’s slowing down,” I tell my daughter. I cross my arms over my chest and stare down at the silent, motionless body that really could be a corpse. The only indication Mom Brodie is still alive is the slightest rise and fall of the sheet over her.

  I can’t believe Mom Brodie is really dying. I was awake all last night going over it in my mind, trying to grasp it. How could she die and leave me? Who will I be without her? Because more than anything else, more than a daughter, a wife, or even a mother, I’m Sarah Brodie’s granddaughter. She’s been my identity since I was aware of my existence and my relationship to others, somewhere around four years old. She’s been the identity of all of us Brodies.

  And what about all the others? What will Brodie Island be without the matriarch who’s reigned over her for more than eighty years? Will the island just vanish, like on the TV show Lost? Will all of the descendants of the Brodie family disappear in the blink of an eye with Mom Brodie and the island? What about those of us who live on the mainland? Will my life end when hers ends?

  When I speak to my daughter again, I use my parent voice. The tolerant, understanding one, not the irritated one. “I told you it would be this way. The body’s organs all slow down, almost as if going into hibernation, and then eventually . . . they just shut down. She’ll stop breathing.” I take a deep breath and go on. “Her heart will stop beating and that will be the”—my voice catches in my throat—“and she’ll die in her sleep.”

  Sarah takes one more good look at her great-grandmother and then backs away from the bed. She glances around the room with its ugly, dated wallpaper and too many pieces of mismatched furniture pushed against the wall. It used to be Mom Brodie’s sewing room when I was a little girl, back in the days when many of the women on the island still made their own clothes.

  Sarah looks at me with an innocence born of not yet having lost a loved one, and I have the sudden urge to hug her tightly. I don’t. I stand there, hugging myself. Sarah has made it clear that she needs me to respect her space. No touching unless invited, which is hard for me. I’m a huggy, touchy person, particularly with my children. Maybe because my mother never was. I’ve never been to a psychiatrist, or even had counseling, but I’m pretty sure that would be the conclusion at the end of a long billing cycle.

  It was Mom Brodie who hugged and kissed me, growing up in this house. She was the one who wiped the blood off my scraped knees and gave me a grape Popsicle to ease the emotional suffering of a fall from the chicken house roof. She was the one who told me it was okay when I didn’t win the state spelling bee in the seventh grade when I misspelled totipotency. Mom Brodie was the one who took me to the movies, driving me all the way to Salisbury, the night Billy Darlen escorted Tabitha Parker to my junior prom instead of me. I still have the blue dress I never wore.

  From the bedside table, Sarah picks up a photograph of Mom Brodie and my grandfather, Big Joe. It’s a faded black-and-white photo, him in a porkpie hat, slender, dark tie and suit, and her in a flowered dress and hat. The most interesting thing about the photo is that Mom Brodie appears to be wearing lipstick; she never wore lipstick. The photo was taken in the mid-forties, I would guess from the style of their clothes. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the photo before. I wonder where my mother found it.

  Sarah regards the photo for a moment. “She was really pretty.”

  “She had freckles like yours,” I tell my daughter. Sarah’s freckles are a constant source of worry and complaint these days. She’s heavily freckled across her nose and cheeks, unlike me, who just got the usual ginger curse of a splattering of freckles everywhere.

  Sarah sets the framed photograph down beside a glass of water and several prescription bottles.

  I wonder absently why the pills are still there. Mom Brodie is past the point of swallowing pills. We have an eyedropper of morphine to ease her passing.

  Sarah looks up at me. “Did we miss dinner? I’m hungry.”

  “Supper was at five.”

  “Five? Who eats at five?” Again, she wrinkles her nose, far too indignant for such a trivial matter. My children seem to thrive on indignation, this one in particular.

  “Your grandmother and grandfather do. We always had supper at five. Everyone on Brodie Island eats at five. It’s . . . the farm way.”

  Sarah ambles to the doorway. In the last six months, she’s gone from moving like a giraffe, with awkward, long limbs, to moving lithely, like some kind of freckled jungle cat. Her newfound grace is harder for me to accept than the stilt-leg phase was. She looks so adult-like all of a sudden with her poised presence. So . . . sexual that I find it startling. Sarah wears no makeup, her pale red hair is piled on top of her head like a bird’s nest, and she’s wearing a paint-splattered T-shirt. Her freckles, which I think make her model-beautiful, are the first thing anyone sees. She looks like a woman, and I wonder when that happened and where I was as it was happening.

  “No one who has field hockey practice eats at five,” she points out. “Doesn’t anyone play field hockey at Brodie High?”

  “There is no Brodie High anymore.” I walk to the foot of my grandmother’s bed, wondering if she can hear this inane conversation. If she could open her eyes and see Sarah, would she ask who stole my sweet baby girl and left this nimble feline in her place? Or would she even notice?

  My grandmother and Sarah were never close, not the way I had hoped they would be. My husband Drum says it’s my fault. (Not in an accusing way. He’s not that kind of husband. But he is the kind who calls it as he sees it. No sugarcoating.) He thinks that my avoidance of my mother has kept our kids from having deeper relationships with the rest of my family. He might be right, but I don’t have time to feel guilty about that right now. There are more pressing guilt trips for me to take this weekend.

  “Everyone goes to Princess Anne for middle school and high school,” I explain. “Just the little kids go to school here, now.”

  Sarah shrugs. “You said it was a crappy school, anyway.” She walks out of the tiny room that’s beginning to feel claustrophobic. “Birdie!” she calls down the hall. “You have anything to eat?”

  “That’s Mom-Mom to you,” I tell my daughter. “You shouldn’t call her by her first name.”

  “You do. And it’s not even her name,” Sarah throws over her shoulder. “If I was going to be disrespectful and call her by her first name, I’d have to holler hey, Beatrice!”

  I don’t respond, and Sarah vanishes from my view, down the hall. I know I should call her back and ask for an apology. Drum says I shouldn’t let her talk to me that way, but sometimes . . . I just don’t have the energy to fight her on every little thing. Pick your battles. That’s what Mom Brodie always told me, and I’ve tried to live by that. You pick your battles, not just with your kids and your mother and your boss. You pick your battles in life. You keep in mind what’s really important and what’s not. Ask yourself, “will this matter in five years?” It might be one of the sagest pieces of advice she ever gave me.

  I return my attention to my grandmother. Mom Brodie hasn’t moved since we got here, and I have to stare for a minute to confirm that she’s still breathing. I’m relieved she is. I’d feel bad to have to call the nice hospice nurse who just left. She’s the one who will call Mom Brodie’s death when it comes. Gail. She lives all the way in Salisbury, though, and it’s Thursday night. I’d hate to have to ask her to turn around and drive back.

  I sigh and walk to the single window in the room, unlock it, and give it a shove. I don’t care that the air conditioning is running in the house; my mother probably has the vent closed in the room. She closes them all the time, to save on the electric bill, which makes no sense to me, but then little my mother does makes sense to me.

  It takes two tries to ease the window up a couple of inches. The house is more than one hundred years old, built by my great-grandfather Joe Brodie, Sr., Mom Brodie’s father-in-law. A house this age always needs work. I don’t k
now why my parents don’t have the windows repaired. Or replaced.

  They certainly have the money to do it. I don’t know what they’re worth. It’s not something we Brodies talk about—money. Because my grandparents lived through the Great Depression, my mother wears her Keds knockoffs until the rubber soles fall off them, my father carries a ten-year-old wallet, and they wash and reuse Ziploc bags. I suspect their net worth is in the millions.

  They could build a new house if they wanted. Something single-story and smaller, more manageable. That had been the plan at one time. My brother, Joseph, the fourth, and his family were going to take this house, and Dad and Birdie were going to live in the new house. Then Joseph’s marriage fell apart and so did the house plans, I guess.

  I take a deep breath, closing my eyes. It’s still August, and we’re in the heat of the late summer, but I exhale and inhale deeply, filling my lungs with the briny, salt air of the Chesapeake Bay and all that it means. The good and the bad.

  I stand there breathing in the evening air, listening to the insect song and the distant croak of frogs. I can’t imagine ever living anywhere but on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Drum keeps talking about moving to the ocean, maybe a little place on the Delaware shore. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to be conceived, born, and bred here. He doesn’t understand that the bay is in my blood.

  Realizing I’m not alone in the room anymore, we’re not alone, Mom Brodie and I, I open my eyes and turn quickly to the doorway. It’s my mother. For her size and weight, she’s stealthy. She can walk soundlessly when she wants to; she’s like a big mouse in a flowered apron. She listens in on conversations not meant for her ears. She’s a shifty one, my mother. Always has been. I remember once, as a teenager, demanding furiously why she was listening in on one of my phone conversations, why she was so prying and underhanded about it. She said it had been the only way to survive in this house, growing up. I never quite understood what she meant, but I never asked her to explain, either.