Half Sisters: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY VIRGINIA FRANKEN

  Life After Coffee

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

  Text copyright © 2022 by Virginia Franken

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542037488

  ISBN-10: 1542037484

  Cover design by David Drummond

  For Fizzle Pop, with great thanks.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1 MADDY

  CHAPTER 2 MADDY

  CHAPTER 3 EMILY

  CHAPTER 4 MADDY

  CHAPTER 5 MADDY

  CHAPTER 6 MADDY

  CHAPTER 7 EMILY

  CHAPTER 8 BEE

  CHAPTER 9 BEE

  CHAPTER 10 MADDY

  CHAPTER 11 BEE

  CHAPTER 12 MADDY

  CHAPTER 13 MADDY

  CHAPTER 14 EMILY

  CHAPTER 15 MADDY

  CHAPTER 16 MADDY

  CHAPTER 17 MADDY

  CHAPTER 18 MADDY

  CHAPTER 19 MADDY

  CHAPTER 20 MADDY

  CHAPTER 21 MADDY

  CHAPTER 22 EMILY

  CHAPTER 23 MADDY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  MADDY

  She’d sat on the news for four long hours. Reined in the urge to divulge it via text. This was not news for texting. She’d held it in as Bee had bustled through the front door, Fergus and Robbie in tow, Robbie in full tantrum mode. Waited patiently for Robbie to calm down and, when requested, made a guess at what he wanted for his birthday. Then watched as Bee smoothed out the ensuing fistfight after Fergus blurted out what it was (a Nerf Blaster), spoiling Robbie’s guessing game. But now, the boys were finally occupied, their hands full of the grass, dead leaves, and shards of old brick they were industriously collecting and dumping in a pile in the middle of the lawn. Dirt in their hair and under their nails. Content.

  Now, both women had glasses of chilled rosé cupped in warm hands and had taken up their seats in the rockers. Always the same: Maddy on the right, Bee on the left. Maddy gently bit the rim of her wineglass as she listened to Bee talk and focused on the hazy landscape directly in front of them—her gaze lingering just above the final line of houses. She always thought those huge divots in the hillside looked like oversized eye sockets this time of day. The empty black eye sockets of slumbering giants. Bee reached a natural pause within her PTA rant, and Maddy opened her mouth to share her news, but Bee got there first.

  “I mean it’s not like I’m asking them to scrub public toilets for eight hours straight. It’s two hours of selling books to children. Their own children! On one day. Maybe two days if they can possibly bring themselves to do it.” Maddy had heard it before. Had taken a shift herself at the bookfair in the past, just to make it stop. But she didn’t make the offer today, even though she knew that was why Bee had brought it up.

  Instead, she stood, topped up Bee’s glass and her own, then wedged the bottle back behind the big cactus planter. In lieu of a tabletop where a bottle would be safe from getting kicked over by little feet, it was what they did—they’d lost too many bottles in the early days. Of course, Maddy could have purchased a table. Just something small that could house a bottle of rosé and a couple of glasses. But whenever she’d start to eye one, not knowing what was going to happen with the house had always prevented the purchase. She couldn’t sidestep the logic that there was zero point in furnishing a place that she might have to move out of at any moment. Because she knew that once she bought herself a tidy wine table, it wouldn’t stop there. After the table, she’d need to swap out the too-hard rockers, and then with new porch furniture installed, she’d notice the paint on the railings really was too flaky to tolerate, and wasn’t it time to replace the ancient doormat? And then into the front hall to fix the uneven parquet flooring, make the living room lighting less dungeony, and so on. And that would be how she’d end up refurbishing a house she had no idea whether she’d be able to stay in. But now she knew. There had been news.

  Bee’s monologue finally came to an end, and a short silence followed, silence that Maddy was supposed to fill with empathetic murmurs on the self-centered nature of the St. Novatus parent body. Instead, Maddy took a small sip and considered which words, exactly, she should use to spill the beans. But before she could compose the perfect sentence, Bee drew a breath to start into wave three, so Maddy decided she’d best just say it.

  “We found her.” The words finally spoken out loud caused some amorphous mix of relief and fear to unspool inside her stomach.

  “Found who?” asked Bee, though from her face she could see Bee already knew who. She just couldn’t believe it.

  “We found Emily.” The ensuing silence expanded until Maddy felt compelled to glance over at Bee to see what the deal was. To create an epic silence in the presence of her best friend was no small feat. But if there was any one sentence that was up to the task, it was the one that Maddy had just spoken.

  “And where was she?” asked Bee finally, matter-of-factly, as if Emily were a lost belonging accidentally stuffed into the wrong drawer and not a person.

  “New York. Joseph found her.”

  “Joseph? How?”

  “They were at the same party last night.”

  “What? So she just walked up to him all: Hi there, here I am, your long-lost sister-in-law? Does she even know she’s his sister-in-law?”

  “I have no idea. The details were not forthcoming,” said Maddy as she downed the last of her wine and headed for the cactus pot. Her husband was famous for failing to pick up imperative information. The few times he’d gone to social occasions without her, he’d provided shamefully sparse reports upon his return and had been unable to answer fundamental questions such as: What did they name the baby? Had the bride worn pale blue, like she’d threatened to, or opted for fail-safe white in the end? Were Aunt Jan’s eyebrows really completely paralyzed after her latest round of Botox, or had his mother been exaggerating? Vital questions. All unanswered. But this one, this Emily discovery, was going to have to be the exception. Because Maddy had questions, major ones.

  “There’s got to be more!” Unlike her brother, Bee was an enthusiastic gatherer of all detail. “He didn’t just say: I’m at a party, I found Emily, then hang up.”

  “He didn’t say anything. He texted me. The next day.”

  “Texted you?” Bee was incredulous. And Maddy could see why. She’d been surprised he hadn’t called her from the party, or at least afterward. Or just waited till he got home to tell her. A text seemed inappropriate, anticlimactic. Plain wrong.

  “He said he’d had a crazy morning and his battery was dying.” Those were the excuses he’d given Maddy, so she churned them out dutifully for Bee.

  “Are we sure this is a real thing that happened? I mean, maybe he was hungover and he meant to say he thought he saw Emily.”

  “It’s real. I didn’t believe him at first either, so he sent a pic.”

  Maddy bent down and scooped her phone off the floor, but as soon as she had it, Bee took it out of her hands, unlocked it, and navigated to her texts. It was fine. Maddy and Bee’s friendship predated the smartphone; they had phone-grabbing rights. Bee opened the text from Joseph, took a quick scroll to confirm that, no, there really wasn’t any extra detail to be had, and then hit the photo he’d attached. Maddy pulled Bee’s hand toward her so they could see the picture at the same time.

  “My God,” said Bee after a second. “Is there a filter on that?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Maddy. “That’s just what she looks like when she’s not scowling.” Emily stood at the edge of a rooftop garden, the lights of distant skyscrapers just visible through the mesh railings behind her. The expression of pained hostility Maddy remembered from their short-lived sisterhood was no longer visible and had instead been replaced with a smile that suggested its wearer had never known anything but good times. Neat fat curls had replaced the frizz that used to stick out at all angles, and she was wearing a diamanté headband nestled in among the curls. Maddy couldn’t help but wonder how she herself would look wearing the same accessory. She’d look like a schoolgirl. But the way Emily wore it was both regal and bohemian. She was still so beautiful.

  “Twenty years on and she looks just the same,” said Bee. “So we know one thing for a fact, then.”

  “What?” asked Maddy.

  “She doesn’t have kids.”

  Maddy didn’t know that to be a fact at all. It was true that Bee’s face and body had aged in a way that Maddy’s had so far escaped. But who knew if that was kids or genes or eating the right kind of kale or what. As far as Maddy was concerned, they still had no firm facts about Emily. She could be a mother to triplets for all they knew. But the not knowing would all change tonight, upon Joseph’s return.

  “So does thi
s mean you’re going to sell the house now?” asked Bee.

  “I think we’ll have to,” said Maddy. “It’s not like we can buy her out. Even if we somehow could, this place is a money pit.” Though undeniably elegant with its gingerbread trim, half-moon windows, and wraparound porch, her parents’ house needed work. Expensive work. Pile House, named after William Pile, the Civil War general who had commissioned it, used to be a reason to stop and stare. But her parents had bitten off more than they could chew with the purchase of a grand dame Victorian, and maintenance while they’d lived there had been cursory at best. These days the fish-shingle cladding that wrapped the exterior was dotted with dark spots, and the stained-glass window above the front door was cracked in three places. Inside, the wallpaper was peeling, the window beams were gently rotting, and parts of the bedroom ceilings were about ready to buckle. And that was just what Maddy could see with a layman’s eye. God only knew what they’d find when professional inspections began. Sometimes Maddy called the place Pile Pile, though only to Bee. Joseph didn’t need any further ammunition for his ongoing argument that the place was a dump.

  “Joseph still not getting paid, then?” asked Bee.

  “I mean, dribs and drabs. Nothing you could actually live on.”

  “How does it all just dry up overnight?”

  It hadn’t been overnight, exactly. But the flowing faucet that was the cash from her husband’s career in music production had been slowly inching closed over the last couple of years, and now it was practically rusted shut. Bee’s was a good question, one that Maddy didn’t really have an answer to. She didn’t know where the money had gone. Probably on to an industry that had worked out how to stop its consumers from taking its product for free. These days her husband still took gigs, but instead of getting payment, he got promises of payment. Promises that rarely seemed to be fulfilled.

  But now that they could finally sell the house, there’d be a glorious, if temporary, reprieve from being broke. Pile Pile was a hot mess, but this was still Southern California. Property prices hadn’t been much to write home about the last time she’d lived in Myrtlebury, but in recent years there’d been a mad gold rush on property here as the good citizens of Los Angeles had finally discovered that there was one last picture-perfect, affordable suburb with well-rated schools. And all within commutable distance of where the good stuff happened. Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena all lost to rampant house prices, but Myrtlebury had remained. The last bastion. That is, until recently, when it had been discovered and then rapidly developed. The original brickwork on Main Street, the unspoiled mountain backdrop, the art deco fountains dotted around town. Once one developer had had the idea, all the rest had followed, and Myrtlebury had transitioned from badlands to the darling of the San Gabriel Valley almost overnight.

  After the sale, she estimated there’d be enough to bail them out of their tax issues, pay off the mounting debts, and start again. It was lucky—very lucky—that Joseph had bumped into Emily. Otherwise they’d have been saddled with three more years of waiting. Three more years stuck in her parents’ world with its constant reminders of what she’d lost. The scent of her mom’s perfume that still drifted around the drawers of the dresser. The way Maddy always pointlessly took care not to use the next-to-last stair when going up to bed in case its squeak woke her parents. The fact that whenever she heard the opening front door catch on the floor in the hallway, she expected to hear one of them calling up to her. Maddy! Are you there? Yes. She was here. Still here. But not for much longer.

  “What time are you expecting Joseph?” asked Bee.

  “Ten or so.”

  “Right. Guess I’ll miss him, then.”

  “You could always put the boys to bed and come back.”

  “Could,” said Bee. But they both knew she wouldn’t. If Maddy had pushed her on it, she’d have cited the exhaustion of motherhood as her excuse. But that wouldn’t have been the real reason. “I saw more of him when he lived half-an-hour’s drive away.”

  “That’s not true.” But it was true. Embarrassingly true.

  “I mean, it’s fine,” Bee went on, her tone belying the fact that it was fine. “But it’s the kids I feel bad for. They’re missing out on an uncle.” Maddy considered protesting that Fergus and Robbie had the most loving and involved of uncles in Joseph, but that would have been a lie. It was Maddy who chose the birthday and Christmas gifts, Maddy who bought the poor-quality wrapping paper from the boys for their school fundraisers, who bent her schedule to pick them up after school whenever Bee couldn’t. And she often couldn’t. But Maddy’s diligence couldn’t cover up the missed opportunities to wrestle with someone who was unafraid of pulling at little legs and arms too hard, to fart at full volume and then pretend their mother had done it, to fill them in on all the embarrassing stuff Bee had done as a kid. The uncle stuff.

  In response, Maddy did what she did best. She topped up Bee’s glass once more, and then she changed the subject.

  “You, however, will be an amazing aunt,” Maddy said, and raised her glass in a toast to Bee’s future greatness in the aunting department.

  “You mean, if my brother ever manages to knock you up, I’ll be an amazing aunt,” said Bee. “Oh my God, what if you’re pregnant right now!”

  Maddy raised an eyebrow as if to say: Who knows. Though she knew. There was no chance. She’d been tracking her ovulation over the past year with more intensity than she’d ever tracked any other nugget of data. She knew when an egg was due, when it was in situ, and when its unfertilized empty sack floated down into the detritus of her uterine lining. Joseph had been out of town the last time she’d ovulated, so there was zero possibility.

  It’d all been too easy for Bee, who’d fallen effortlessly pregnant on her honeymoon and then again when Fergus was eighteen months old. Not so for Maddy and Joseph. They’d done it and done it and nothing. But the money would change things. Health insurance could be upgraded, decent consultants could be consulted, IVF could be procured if it came to it. Anything and everything was possible now that Emily had been found. Bee didn’t know about the year of not trying but not preventing, followed by the year of intense trying. Maddy, who preferred to keep her cards close to her chest, hadn’t planned on saying a word about any of it until Bee had come across Maddy’s stash of pregnancy tests in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cabinet when she was digging for a tampon. Bee didn’t know the half of it, which is why Maddy let the comment go—even though it stung.

  “Well,” said Maddy, lazily considering the last couple of inches left at the bottom of the bottle. “If there is a baby in the middle of my middle, it’s well and truly pickled by now.”

  “It’s fine,” said Bee. “It doesn’t count till after the six-week mark. It’s too microscopic before that to get pickled.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “In that case,” Maddy said, pouring half the remaining wine into her glass and then offering up the rest of it to Bee.

  “Go on, then,” said Bee, after thinking better of it for half a second.

  “It’s okay. We’ve just had two glasses each, and this is just the end bit.”

  “Two big glasses.”

  “A glass is a glass is a glass.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I insist so.”

  “I love you, Maddy.”

  “I love you too, Bee.” And she did. Maddy truly loved Bee, and Bee truly loved Maddy. It’d been that way for nearly thirty years. Maddy’s friendship with Bee was the longest relationship she’d ever had. And now that her parents were gone, it was also her most valuable. Not including Joseph, of course. He was number one. He was her husband. But his sister was a photo-finish second.

  They considered opening up another bottle, but evening had undeniably turned into nighttime, and so a tipsy Bee scooped up Fergus and Robbie and trailed around the block, back home. After she left, Maddy stuffed down some aging lasagna, watched some random documentary on the invention of the lie detector, then eventually made her way to her perch on the window seat to await Joseph’s arrival. No matter what time of night he got home, she always made sure she was awake and waiting for him when he arrived. It was their thing. Something she’d done in the early days that had stuck.