Blood Sisters by Jo Barney

Author:Jo Barney [Barney, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-944179-84-7
Publisher: Penner Publishing

24

I’m remembering my first time pushing through the hedge. The hole may be bigger this time, but sharp branches jab my ribs. I wipe a threatening stick out of my way, get through with only a scratch on my arm. I also did not warn my neighbor I am coming. I have realized, despite my annoyance at Patsy, that I need to know why tears had tracked her cheeks when she picked up Izzy that night. Something either bad or important happened while the little girl, Jim, and I got acquainted. Maybe Patsy will tell me through the screen door.

I am let in, offered a cup of coffee. A packet of tissues peeks out of her pocket. To wipe her nose, probably. I can see that she is sad. I hear her mother’s voice in another room talking to Izzy.

“I’m intruding,” I say. “I’ll come another time.”

“Please don’t leave.” Patsy shuts the door between her mother’s voice and us. “I need a friend.”

I have never had anyone say that to me, like I actually have something to offer. “Okay,” I say to Patsy, staring into her moist, dark brown eyes. “I’m here.”

Patsy leads me to the living room sofa, and we get comfortable, me with my knees bent, legs under me, Patsy with her feet on the coffee table. She begins, “Two nights ago, when my husband was led away to go into a rehab treatment facility, possibly for three months, he looked at me and shouted that I was the reason for his going into treatment. That’s true, of course. I organized the meeting, got his boss involved with the plan, and I was glad he agreed to go into treatment. I loved his tears. I thought that meant he was ready to change, that we had a chance as a family. Then he asked, ‘Why have you done this to me?’” The Kleenex is now in her hand.

“It took me until now to realize I probably am the cause of Ray’s Coke and bourbons, his distancing from his daughter, his coldness toward me as he realized that he wasn’t first in my life anymore. It happens, you know, when a baby comes—the relationships change. The wife takes the lead, as much as she can; no longer is the husband king of the mountain. A squirming, screeching, smelly, loveable six-pound being rules the house, demanding both special attention and overwhelming worry. Izzy.”

Patsy lays her head against the sofa, her eyes closed. “I knew how this could happen, from textbooks, from clients, and I did nothing. I should have been able to handle it, support our marriage, cheer my husband into fatherhood. I knew and still didn’t see what was happening in my own home.”

I’m reminded of something from forty years ago. “Once, when I was studying to be confirmed into my family’s Lutheran church, we studied a passage in which Jesus was taunted and someone yelled, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ It took me a while to understand that it probably means that before one notices the problems in others’ lives, she should look to her own life.

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