“I want you to start the car.”
She stared at me blankly. “What part of ‘this car doesn’t start’ don’t you understand?”
“What part of ‘start the damn car’ don’t you understand?”
She eyed me curiously before climbing into the driver’s seat. A look of disbelief crossed her face as the engine roared to life. “What the...”
I shut the hood of her car.
“Meet me at Maisano’s on Scottsdale Road at six, sweetheart.”
“Wait. How did you…”
I laughed, starting towards my truck. “Maisano’s at six—be there.”
ONE
KARI
APPROXIMATELY ONE AND A HALF YEARS LATER
The box Jada handed me felt light in my hands. It jingled as I turned it over, the contents clamoring inside. It was the size of a shoebox but held enough memories to fill a Mack truck.
A sharp pain tore through my chest at the realization that my secrets had been in someone else’s hands.
I looked up at my sister. Jada’s long brown hair was in a knot at the top of her head, her round cheeks pink. She looked a lot like me, only my hair was a lighter shade of brown and falling across my shoulders. Our noses were identical, our eyes a bright shade of green. We had our mother’s dark complexion, although Jada was much more like her than me.
My eyes settled on her growing belly.
And, right now, she’s a lot more like Mom than I’ll ever be.
“Did you look inside?” I tried to keep my voice even. The thought of her possibly knowing the items buried at the bottom of the box made me queasy.
At one time in our lives, I would have told her my secrets. Ineededto tell her. But she was dealing with her then-husband Decker at that point and didn’t need any more stress. When I called her thatday to tell her what was going on and she was already crying, I choked. I masked the pain from my voice and worked her through her problem.
Sadly, even to me, that was something I was pretty good at. It was a coping mechanism I’d learned at a young age. Things were sometimes easier to deal with if you just kept them to yourself.
Our mom died when I was eleven, Jada fourteen. Mom was pregnant and died from an ectopic pregnancy. It was hard on all of us, but Jada seemed to pick up the pieces faster than I did.
Dad had done his best to keep things from falling apart. His secretary at his realtor office, Alice, came to the house a few days a week to help out. Alice was great and did our laundry, made cookies, and tried to talk to us the best she could. But our mom was perfect and, as much as I loved Alice, she always seemed like a fill-in. I remember watching her mill around Mom’s kitchen one afternoon a few months after the funeral, Jada sitting at the table peeling an orange. Alice was making plans to take her to a play she wanted to see.
I sat and sketched on a notepad, drawing little doodles of arrows, and felt so utterly alone. I just wanted to scream that everything was wrong, pound my fists on the table and yell at Alice to get out! To stop touching all my mom’s things. Every item she moved made things a bit farther from the way Mom had left them. It destroyed me, but I felt trapped. I didn’t know what to say.
When I tried to bring it up to Jada later, she shushed me. She told me that I didn’t need to be so hateful and that we were all doing the best we could. That we were in it together.
Over the next few years, I mastered the art of being “in it together,” yet being absolutely alone.
I realized that saying how miserable I was only made Jada more miserable, too. So I learned to keep my mouth shut and deal, to not spread the pain. Let happy people be happy—why ruin that?
It was a life lesson I learned way too early. Pick your heart up off the floor when it was smashed, put it back together asbest you could, and paste on a smile. You could be a mess on the inside but still look put together on the outside. As long as thingslookedokay, everything was fine. Smoke and mirrors wasn’t just acceptable, it was preferred.
Sad but true.
The sunlight streamed through the windows of Jada’s bedroom and I turned to look at my sister. The light made her even more radiant.
“I didn’t go through it or anything,” she said. “As soon as I saw the cassette tapes, I knew it was yours so I closed it back up.”
I released a heavy breath and walked to the window looking over the base of the mountain. Cane Alexander, Jada’s husband, had positioned their bedroom for optimum viewing pleasure. They could literally lie in bed and watch the lights twinkle below. He hadn’t missed a single detail, which was a testament to how much he loved my sister. Cane typically did things with wider brush strokes. But when it came to Jada, his attention to detail was relentless.
