Different responses: Zoe rolled her eyes, Hyacinth made an expression of sympathy.
"Do dogs… can there be ghosts of dogs?" Hyacinth asked.
Cree shrugged. "I've never encountered one. But I don't see why not."
"So what are you going to do?"
"That's what I wanted to ask you guys. She was such a nice person. I wanted to help her, but I couldn't think of how."
"I know how," Zoe said. "You could do this, like, seance, and pretend you'd made contact with the dog. You could tell her the dog's ghost was happy and still loved her and would stay with her a Ways."
"Hmm. Yeah. But I don't like to lie to people. And then if she believed me, she'd want me to do it again, and pretty soon – "
Zoe scowled. "You could just tell her to get a new dog. I mean, that's what she needs!"
"No," Hyacinth said immediately. "That would be disloyal! And Aunt Cree couldn't suggest it without offending her, like her precious dog could be so… replaceable. She doesn't want just any dog, she misses that one."
"That's what I thought, too," Cree agreed. "You can see it's a quandary."
The girls put their chins in their hands and thought about it, taking it on face value, in their different ways allying themselves instantly with solving the problem. Cree looked at them and loved them fiercely. There had been times when she'd envied Deirdre her marriage, her living husband, her relatively normal life, and most of all these two. In tougher moments her longing hurt and knotted up dark inside, but more often it was like this: acute gratitude that these two girls were in her life. The best imaginable nieces.
They spent a few minutes coming up with suggestions of increasing complexity and unlikeliness, and then the phone rang. Hyacinth bounced off the couch to go to the kitchen to answer it.
Zoe watched her leave the room, then turned to Cree. "That's her boyfriend. You can tell by how fast she jumped up."
"Boyfriend! Really? At ten years old?" Cree could just see down the hall to the kitchen, where Hyacinth leaned in the doorway. She had cradled the phone between ear and shoulder and was speaking quietly into the receiver, very involved, swinging the coiled cord like a jump rope.
Zoe nodded. "At least I think it's a boy. But he looks like some kind of, like, rodent. The sad part is, I think she's in love with him because that's what he's like. She's so softhearted. 'Mommy, look, he followed me home, can we keep him?' " An acid caricature of a cutesy kid. "Pathetic."
Cree pretended to peer at her doubtfully. "Twins, huh. Which one were you, again?"
"Very funny," Zoe said acidly.
"You really are a menace, you know that?"
Zoe just nodded again in sober agreement. " 'Me-nace 2 So-cie-ty,' "she intoned. Then she sniffed indignantly, and her eyes widened in accusation. "You should talk!"
"Really like a rodent?
"I can hear you guys perfectly, by the way," Hyacinth called down the hall.
When Deirdre came in, banging through the door with a double armload of groceries, purse, key ring, newspaper, Cree and the girls took the bags and they all went to the kitchen to put things away. The two cats came to get underfoot as they opened and slammed cupboards and drawers and refrigerator.
"Leave the fish out," Deirdre ordered. "That's dinner. And one of those lemons, Hy."
"The girls were very responsible," Cree told her. "I can personally attest."
"This old lady wants Aunt Cree to hunt for the ghost of a dog," Zoe said.
Another minute of chaos and Deirdre paused to look her daughters up and down. "You know, girls, it's awfully crowded in here. I think Cree and I have this under control. Why don't you go get started on your homework and let us catch up. I'll call you when it's time to set the table." She turned back to the cupboard to stack cans of cat food.
The twins left, carrying the cats. Cree folded the shopping bags as Deirdre put on an apron and began washing vegetables. The music began again upstairs, this time the insistent, battering beat of Zoe's rap. Cree leaned against the counter, watching her sister's face in the mirror over the sink as they conversed. Deirdre was thirty-six, two years younger and, even in the thick-soled jogging shoes she always put on after work, three inches shorter than Cree. Now she was dressed in her teaching clothes, a white blouse and a practical floral skirt with a faint handprint of chalk dust on one thigh, a silk scarf at her throat, looking very much the middle school teacher at the end of a long day. Cree knew from experience that people seeing them side by side would recognize them as sisters but wouldn't be able to say which was older. Deirdre had prettier, more delicate features, made dramatic by darker hair and brows, but her face showed deeper lines of both worry and laughter, the paradoxical marks of teaching and motherhood. When they'd been in their teens, Cree had often felt largish and plain by comparison. Later, she'd discovered that men could fall just as hard for a fuller-bodied woman, and that had evened things out.
"Monday, huh," Cree inquired.
"It certainly is that." Deirdre put the greens in the salad spinner, set it aside, and began scrubbing some carrots. "What's this about a dog?"
"It's complex. I was just asking the girls for advice. Joyce said you called – anything urgent? I left a message."
Deirdre glanced at the blinking red light on the answering machine she hadn't had time to check. "Not urgent. Just that Mom called this morning. She likes to call up for heart-to-heart chats when I'm running around trying to get ready for school."
"Uh-oh. What was on her mind?" When their mother called Deirdre, it often had to do with Cree, and vice versa.
"She told me the doctor said she has congested coronary arteries."
"Well, we suspected as much."
"Yeah. So she's supposed to go in for an angioplasty – where they blow up this little balloon in your artery? She says her friend Marie Haskell had one last year, and it was no big thing."
"But you're worried?"
Deirdre turned her back to the sink, leaning against it with her arms crossed. "Well, yeah. You know."
"Was she?"
"She plays it down. But I'd say, yes. Can't blame her." Deirdre frowned, then brightened. "And then she talked about you."
"I figured."
"She told me her new heart doctor is a total dreamboat and is your age and recently divorced." A tight grin. She turned back to the sink but kept her eyes on Cree's in the mirror. "She thought maybe next time she went to see him, you could come with her – ostensibly to help her, you know, decide on treatment or whatever, did I think that was a good idea? I figured you deserved fair warning."
Cree laughed and gripped her head in exasperation. "So what was your verdict? Good idea?"
"Uh-uh. No comment. I'm staying completely out of it." Deirdre applied herself to the carrots.
It was all lighthearted, supposedly. Mother's concern for her widowed daughter's singleness, childlessness, strange profession, and bouts of existential anguish. Mike had died nine years ago, and Cree still wore her wedding ring. No, she hadn't gotten over it, didn't have a clue how to let go of the sweetness they'd had, and given what had happened when he'd died there was no way to explain to Mom the confusions that came with meeting other men. She was married forever to a dead man and devoted to a metaphysical quest, like some kind of nun in a strange religion with herself as its only adherent. You could laugh all you wanted at people's concern and matchmaking reflexes and the rest, but you still couldn't deny the pang of truth that came with it.
Deirdre had been watching Cree in the mirror again and must have seen her expression change. "Sorry," she began, "I didn't mean to – "
"No, it's all right. I'll call her. Thanks for the heads up."
They let it settle for a moment. Deirdre finished the carrots and set Cree up to slice them as she went to work on the fish. The girls were laughing together upstairs.