My sister is waiting for me in the kitchen Monday morning.
“I knew you’d need coffee,” she says. “You drank coffee even as a boy.”
“Someone had to get up and take care of the family. I barely slept for years.”
I make my way around my sister without touching her, a feat considering her ample behind. She already has a cup by the machine, waiting. It’s a favorite mug of mine featuring Dorothy fromThe Golden Girlssaying, “No, I will not have a nice day.”
“Thank you,” I say, nodding at the mug. I fill it with a shaking hand.
“You drink too much, Teddy.”
I shake my head.
“And you judge too much.” I turn and look at my sister. “I have vodka, you have holy water. Each impairs our judgment. At least my addiction only harms myself. Yours has killed my community.”
“Please, I don’t want to fight, Teddy. I just want to talk.”
“Then talk.”
I lean against the island.
“I’m sorry for what I said about John. It wasn’t my place.”
“No, it wasn’t. You don’t even know why John killed himself, do you? Why it’s so hard for me to forgive you?”
She shakes her head.
I sigh.
“After the last election, we were walking in downtown Palm Springs, me and John, where we’ve always felt safe, and someone screamed, ‘Faggots!’ at us. John collapsed on the street. That single word on a sunny day in a safe haven broke him because he felt he’d never feel safe again. He believed the world was coming after him after all the years of finally feeling protected. Do you know what that is like? To not feel safe?”
“I’m so sorry, Teddy.” Trudy is quiet for a moment. “And I do know—whether you believe it or not—what it’s like to not feel safe.”
“Right.”
“Do you remember when we used to wake up early on Saturday morning and eat cereal and watch Saturday morning cartoons?” Trudy asks. “We loved Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. We went as them for Halloween.”
“I do,” I say.
“That was the last time I felt safe, Teddy,” she says.
Trudy takes a breath to continue, but her phone trills. “Oh, it’s Nina from church,” she says. “I’m sure she’s worried about me. I didn’t tell her I was leaving. I have to take this.”
God and image, one, Teddy, zero. That’s my sister.
As Trudy slides into the living room, I think of what she just said and the letter I never sent to her when I left Mama’s house for the last time. I close my eyes and can still remember every word. They are scorched in my soul, largely because I still read the letter every month.
“Sorry about that,” Trudy says, coming back in.
“I found a picture at Mama’s of us from Halloween when we were all dressed up,” I say. “In those hard masks. I should have kept it.”
“I still remember,” she says. “I could barely breathe in that thing.”
Trudy walks over and refills her mug. She looks out at the mountains through the windows.
“I always imagined the desert would look more apocalyptic,” she says as if to herself. “Brown. Dead. But it’s so lush... so alive...” A cloud slides away, and the mountains dance in sunlight and wind. The wildflowers—purple sand verbena, yellow brittlebrush, brown-eyed primrose—glow. “I never dreamed it would be so colorful.”
My sister is saying this to me, you understand. She just can’t say ittome.
