My Sister, Myself

“YOU WANT TO HOLD her?”

Tory sat back on the couch in the comfortably elegant, glass-walled family room of the Parsons home and shook her head as Becca offered her month-old daughter.

“I’ve never…I wouldn’t know…”

The child terrified her. Babies were far too fragile to be part of Tory’s life.

“Come on,” Phyllis coaxed, taking little Bethany from Becca’s arms. “She’s an absolute charmer, and I ought to know. I spent every single day with her until you got here.”

“I’m sorry,” Tory said, stricken, as she looked from Becca to Phyllis. It had grown increasingly obvious during the course of the evening that the two women had become close friends over the past two months. “I didn’t mean to take you away from what you’d normally be doing.”

“It’s okay,” Becca was the one to answer, smiling at Tory. “August was kind of a rough month around here.” She stopped, sharing a secret though somewhat sad smile with her husband. He’d just entered the room with a tray of drinks, his protective glance shooting toward his daughter, then to his wife. Tory had been a whole lot more comfortable when it was just the four females in the room. Even with one of them being only a month old.

“I needed a keeper,” Becca continued, “and Phyllis was kind enough to volunteer. Nowadays, I have more people around than I know what to do with.”

“You reap what you sow, my love,” Will said, setting glasses of iced tea down on the coffee table. He’d exchanged the suit he’d worn to work for a pair of denim shorts and a polo shirt. It felt odd to Tory, seeing her boss so casually dressed. Odder still for him and his wife to insist she call them Becca and Will.

Leaving her daughter with Phyllis on the couch, Becca moved to stand beside her husband. They were a striking couple. Wearing a pair of pleated off-white shorts with a tucked-in emerald silk blouse, Becca wasn’t as casually dressed as her husband, but she complemented him perfectly.

Tory wondered if the love they exuded was real.

“Becca’s the town’s go-to person,” Phyllis explained. “She runs the town council, every committee that’s worthwhile in town, and has time left over to take care of the rest of us.”

“I’m not that bad,” Becca told Tory wryly.

“Yes, she is,” Will inserted, giving his wife a sideways glance that was clearly a special communication between the two of them. “And now that she’s a mom, she’s thinking about organizing an afternoon social time for mothers with new babies, too, so they can exchange dirty-diaper stories.”

“I am not!” Becca said. “I merely said I can’t wait until Sari has her baby so I’ll have someone to share colic stories with.”

“Sari’s Becca’s younger sister,” Phyllis informed Tory. “And really, if you ever do need to get something done in this town, Becca’s the one to go to. Doesn’t matter that she’s home with Bethany now. She still manages to make things happen. Still makes it to her council meetings, too. She had that statue of Samuel Montford erected downtown this summer. And after organizing the Save the Youth program for the city’s teens, she and her sisters did a load of research and a friend wrote a play for the kids to do depicting the life of the town’s founder.”

“Wow.”

“It was so good I stayed awake through the whole thing,” Will teased.

Despite her general discomfort with men, Tory had liked Will when she’d met him briefly that first day of class. She liked him even more now.

Which made her eager to leave.

“Stop it, you two,” Becca said, watching Bethany sleep snugly in Phyllis’s arms. “You’re going to have Christine thinking I’m an old fusspot.”

Christine.

For a moment there, Tory had forgotten who she was.

“SHE’S NICE,” Becca said later that evening as she lay beside Will in their bed, nursing Bethany.

“I told you she is.”

“I know.” But that was last spring when she and Will had hardly been speaking, when her marriage had been on the brink of collapse and Becca was half out of her mind with fear. And worry. And so in love, in spite of the odd midlife crisis that had caught her and Will unawares.

Will was gazing at Bethany, his eyelids drooping, almost as though he was falling asleep. But Becca knew he wasn’t. Not until Bethany was finished and he’d had his chance to burp her and put her back in the cradle at the end of their bed.

“You were right about Christine. Her eyes hold a lot of secrets.”