Step-Ball-Change by Jeanne Ray Read Free Book Online

feel raw. Coupled with my impending company, I wasn’t so interested in anyone else’s problems. Suddenly Kay looked fifteen to me and I wanted to know why her room wasn’t clean.
    She slapped the pages closed. “If you’re not interested.”
    “Taffy’s going to be walking through the door”—I looked at my watch, hoping to say, In half an hour from now, but no such luck—“any minute. I’m going to need some help here.”
    “This is my wedding . This is the most important thing that’s ever happened in my life. Would it be so terrible to sit down and talk to me about it for a minute? Woodrow was talking to me.”
    “I came in to get the paint cans,” Woodrow said in his own defense. He pointed out the row of paint cans that lined my kitchen counters just in case I hadn’t noticed them. “I was going to put them out in the garage.”
    “Why does Taffy have to come now, anyway?” Kay’s voice was a knot of petulance. “Can’t you call and tell her this isn’t a good time? We have so much planning to do.”
    “Not unless I call her on her cell phone as she’s driving up the driveway.”
    “You don’t even like Taffy. You like her even less than the rest of us do. I don’t see why it would be so hard to tell her no.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. It was her way of saying that she was completely right and I was completely wrong. I know. I’d been watching her do it since she was three.
    If I had been the kind of mother who recorded all the golden moments of her children’s lives with a camcorder, I would take this opportunity to premiere the montage of Kay’s finest moments. I would show what kind of person my daughter had been before the five-and-a-half-carat diamond was implanted on her left hand: Look, there is Kay at four, giving her bucket and shovel to the kid in the sandbox who doesn’t have one. There is Kay at seven, reviving the starling that thunked itself cold against the living-roomwindow (a lice-infested starling, mind you, not a cute little chickadee). There is Kay at every year of her life bringing home some animal that had been left mangled or abandoned by the side of the road. Kay at eleven giving all of her allowance to the Haitian relief fund after the priest’s Sunday sermon about the suffering in Haiti. Kay at fourteen using her baby-sitting money to buy George the iguana that he wanted and I refused to pay for. Kay at thirty working in the public defender’s office, for God’s sake—what more proof did a person need than that? Is it possible that an engagement ring could change a person’s brain chemistry?
    “Listen,” I said. “Give Taffy a break. She’s having a very hard time right now.” I wasn’t being coy. I had every intention of telling them the nature of her hard time, but as soon as I said it, the vacuum was turned off and the doorbell rang and the three of us were suspended in a sudden void of silence.
    “I’ll get that,” I said.
    There stood my sister at the front door with a small red leather suitcase at her feet and a white wire-haired terrier named Stamp in her arms. Even though she had been the bane of my childhood, even though we had never been close as adults, my blood recognized her blood and I remembered what my mother worked tirelessly to drill into us: that a sister was a valuable thing to have in this world.
    “Welcome home,” I said.
    “I look like hell,” she said.
    Taffy didn’t know the first thing about looking like hell. Despite having found out that her husband was leaving her yesterday, despite driving since the crack of dawn to get here, she was still nothing short of radiant. If the only thing Taffy had going for her was the hand that nature dealt her at birth, she would havebeen a beautiful woman. But she had more than that. She had taste. She had a personal trainer and a brilliant colorist she saw every six weeks. She had good jewelry, flashy Italian shoes, and a very, very