Shortly after they settled in a waiter came and took their orders for pastry and coffee, but by that time Hunter was starting to cry. The server, a prissy young college aged man, gave them a withering look as if his café didn’t serve crying babies. Joan felt defensive. “He’s hungry. Just bring me some hot water and some ice water as well, and a big glass and a spoon, and he’ll be good as gold.” The waiter stared at Joan, uncomprehendingly, so Lissa translated.
The server returned soon after with the requisite liquids, and Joan got to work quickly, handing Hunter the bottle as he grasped for it. A moment later he was sucking greedily.
While Hunter ate, the two sisters fell into a comfortable silence. Lissa’s phone rang, but she didn’t even reach for her handbag.
“You’re not going to answer that?”
Lissa pulled out her phone after it finished ringing, the powered it off.
“Whatever it is, it can wait.”
Their hot coffees and pastries arrived. Little by little, while they ate, they began to speak of their mother. They talked about her in familiar stories, the way loved ones did when they’d gathered to say goodbye to the recently dear departed, but it had been almost two years since their mother had disappeared and was presumed to be dead.
They talked of their earliest childhood memories of their mother.
Joan was too young to remember her when they’d lived with their father, but Lissa remembered him and explained again how their mother had fallen for a humble hardware store clerk, and how he’d died from a heart attack when Joan was barely two years old, and Lissa had just turned five. Lissa told Joan how their mother had held down two and three jobs at a time, put herself through secretarial school, then sold everything and moved them to New York where she’d found a job at an advertising agency.
Joan knew the rest of the story after that. Their mother had parlayed her secretarial career into a man-catching net and had married one man after another, wealthier than before after each divorce. By the end of the third marriage, she’d earned enough from her settlements to stop needing to marry any man. By then, Lissa was off to college and her dear mother, Annabelle Edwards, dedicated her life to turning Joan into a supermodel.
“You were like her doll. I used to be so jealous,” Lissa admitted.
“You were jealous of me? I was jealous of you. She was always talking about how smart you were, how you would go to college and take over the world. She held you up on a pedestal. She told me that since I wasn’t very smart, that I had to use the assets God gave me, namely my pretty face.”
“She didn’t think you were stupid,” Lissa said, trying to soothe her sister.
“Well, it sure sounded like that to me. I never even finished high school,” Joan said, sadly. “I was only sixteen when she took me to Paris. Why would she do that if she didn’t think I was nothing more than a pretty face?”
“But, Joan, you’ve got this all wrong. It’s like your trying to say that she twisted your arm, that she wanted you to be a model more than you did. That’s not how I remembered things. You were the one who wanted to be a model. Don’t you remember? She was just helping you fulfill your dream.”
“Here you go again, always on her side, never on mine,” Joan said as she crossed her arms and tightened her mouth.
“Joan, I’m on your side, I’ve always been on your side. Same with mom. You were just too stubborn to notice.”
They sat in silence for a while. Joan crossed her arms and furrowed her brow. She wasn’t stubborn. Her mother had been a controlling, manipulative bitch that had abandoned her to the wolves when she was too young to handle it. She’d never forgive her for that.
Joan decided to change the subject. “Lissa, I’m still worried about you. You say you cried before, but from what you said earlier I think this is the first time you accepted our mother’s death. Am I right?”
Lissa nodded. “Yeah, I guess you are. I just couldn’t believe that she was dead, you know? I think before I was just going through the motions because I had to. But, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking that it couldn’t be true. That it was all some elaborate hoax, that any second she’d walk through the door and yell, ‘surprise!’ ”
“Oh, yeah, that would be just like her,” Joan said. She pushed her chest out, waggled her tits, and put her nose in the air with her best Annabelle Edwards imitation spoke in their mother’s affected voice. “Oh, darlings, I do hope you don’t mind the imposition. So terribly sorry to be off the grid for a bit, but you know how these things go, don’t you my dears? So, which one of you lovely darlings will be a dear and bring your mother a cognac. I’m simply parched.”
After they’d stopped laughing, they used the remaining napkins on the tables to wipe away the happy tears. Despite the jovial chatter, Joan could tell that Lissa was still processing her grief. She was glad she hadn’t had a chance to tell her sister about her plans to quit. She would postpone her plans and stick around Europe a few more months until she was positive that Lissa was coming to terms with her grief.
They got back to their stories. This time, Joan took charge and told Lissa about how she’d learned of their mother’s death. She told her that she’d heard it from a scumbag paparazzi, who’d showed up on her photoshoot set and told her about it, while she was getting photographed.
“I’m so sorry, Joan, I didn’t know that’s how you found out. I was trying to get hold of you, but you’d changed your number and your agent wasn’t returning my calls.”
Joan felt a rush of guilt. She’d been ignoring her sister then because Lissa had been pressuring her to make peace with their mother. Joan and Annabelle had been on the outs for almost six months at the time, their longest tiff yet. But, Joan wasn’t ready to forgive her mother, at that time, perhaps she’d never be. She shook her head, not wanting to get into that. She’d never told Lissa what her mother had done, and she wasn’t going to bring that up today, not after Lissa’s breakdown at the tailor.
Joan realized that her hostility towards her mother for that unforgivable act had lessened over time, especially since her mother was dead. If her mother could come back for a day, she would forgive her for coming between herself and the only man she’d ever come close to loving... but, her mother wasn’t coming back for a day or a minute. And neither was he.
It wasn’t worth talking about. Instead, she went back to telling her story. “So, I was on the set, covered in axle grease crouched on a fake tree trunk with a boa constrictor wrapped around my waist. And this asshole reporter comes onto the set and starts shouting at me. “Hey, Joan, how does it feel to find out
that Annabelle Edwards drowned at sea?”
“I flipped out,” she went on. “I started screaming at the man, calling him a liar. He threw the newspaper at me, and I read it, it was right there, billionaire’s superyacht sinks off the Horn of Africa. But, I still didn’t believe it.”
“Oh, Joan, how horrible.”
“Then the guy yells, ‘read the passenger manifest, on page 2,’ so I did. And there she was, our mother, Annabel Marie Edwards, in black and white. I wanted to puke, but instead, I just launched myself at the bastard.”
“And that’s when he got the photos?”
“Yes, the bastard caught me flying through the air, face contorted, claws out ready to kill with a snake flinging off my body behind me. That photograph saved my career, actually, but at the time I didn’t know because I stormed out of that photo shoot and went on a bender for I don’t even know how long.”
“It was a week,” Lissa said.
“I know you tracked me down, and I’m sorry I wasn’t very hospitable at the time.”
“I understand, sis, I’m so sorry you had to hear about her death in that way. You know I was trying to find you.”
“I know, it’s not your fault, I was ignoring you because you were always beating the same dead horse. ‘Forgive her. She’s your mother. Make peace with her, blah, blah, blah.’”
They were silent again, as both young sisters reflected on the memories of the night when Lissa had located Joan crashed at a drug house, dragged her out of there and taken her to a hotel. Joan wasn’t ready to go back on the straight and narrow at that time and Lissa, after making sure her sister had a safe place to stay for the rest of the week, had gone back to New York fearing that her sister was lost to her for good.
But, Joan had surprised Lissa. “You got yourself together, after that, for a while at least.”
It was true. After her first major screw-up, Joan had cleaned up her act all on her own. She’d left France, moved back to her apartment in London, and moved her portfolio to a different agency, which was happy to represent her. She went back to work, the fame from her freak out only making her a hotter property in the world of fashion. But her return to the top didn’t last long. Lissa told Joan about the call that her younger sister had overdosed and was in a hospital in Milan. “The guy didn’t identify himself, and I never knew who it was, but I think he saved your life.”