Between Sisters

Her fingers tightened around the railing. Dr. Bloom was wrong. Talking about Me

ghann’s painful choice and the lonely years that had followed it wouldn’t help.

Her past wasn’t a collection of memories to be worked through; it was like an oversize Samsonite with a bum wheel. Meghann had learned that a long time ago. All she could do was drag it along behind her.

Each November, the mighty Skykomish River strained against its muddy banks. The threat of flooding was a yearly event. In a dance as old as time itself, the people who lived in the tiny towns along the river watched and waited, sandbags at the ready. Their memory went back for generations. Everyone had a story to tell about the time the water rose to the second floor of so-and-so’s house . . . to the top of the doorways at the grange hall . . . to the corner of Spring and Azalea Streets. People who lived in flatter, safer places watched the nightly news and shook their heads, clucking about the ridiculousness of farmers who lived on the flood plain.

When the river finally began to lower, a collective sigh of relief ran through town. It usually started with Emmett Mulvaney, the pharmacist who religiously watched The Weather Channel on Hayden’s only big-screen television. He would notice some tiny tidbit of information, something even those hotshot meteorologists in Seattle had missed. He’d pass his assessment on to Sheriff Dick Parks, who told his secretary, Martha. In less time than it took to drive from one end of town to the other, the word spread: This year is going to be okay. The danger has passed. Sure enough, twenty-four hours after Emmett’s prediction, the meteorologists agreed.

This year had been no exception, but now, on this beautiful early summer’s day, it was easy to forget those dangerous months in which rainfall made everyone crazy.

Claire Cavenaugh stood on the bank of the river, her work boots almost ankle-deep in the soft brown mud. Beside her, an out-of-gas Weed Eater lay on its side.

She smiled, wiped a gloved hand across her sweaty brow. The amount of manual labor it took to get the resort ready for summer was unbelievable.

Resort.

That was what her dad called these sixteen acres. Sam Cavenaugh had come across this acreage almost forty years ago, back when Hayden had been nothing more than a gas station stop on the rise up Stevens Pass. He’d bought the parcel for a song and settled into the decrepit farmhouse that came with it. He’d named his place River’s Edge Resort and begun to dream of a life that didn’t include hard hats and earplugs and night shifts at the paper plant in Everett.

At first he’d worked after hours and weekends. With a chain saw, a pickup truck, and a plan drawn out on a cocktail napkin, he began. He hacked out campsites and cleaned out a hundred years’ worth of underbrush and built each knotty pine riverfront cabin by hand. Now, River’s Edge was a thriving family business. There were eight cabins in all, each with two pretty little bedrooms and a single bathroom and a deck that overlooked the river.

In the past few years, they’d added a swimming pool and a game room. Plans for a mini golf course and a Laundromat were in the works. It was the kind of place where the same families came back year after year to spend their precious vacation time.

Claire still remembered the first time she’d seen it. The towering trees and rushing silver river had seemed like paradise to a girl raised in a trailer that only stopped on the poor side of town. Her childhood memories before coming to River’s Edge were gray: ugly towns that came and went; uglier apartments in run-down buildings. And Mama. Always on the run from something or other. Mama had been married repeatedly, but Claire couldn’t remember a man ever being around for longer than a carton of milk. Meghann was the one Claire remembered. The older sister who took care of everything . . . and then walked away one day, leaving Claire behind.

Now, all these years later, their lives were connected by the thinnest of strands. Once every few months, she and Meg talked on the phone. On particularly bad days, they fell to talking about the weather. Then Meg would invariably “get another call” and hang up. Her sister loved to underscore how successful she was. Meghann could rattle on for ten minutes about how Claire had sold herself short. “Living on that silly little campground, cleaning up after people” was the usual wording. Every single Christmas she offered to pay for college.

As if reading Beowulf would improve Claire’s life.

For years, Claire had longed to be friends as well as sisters, but Meghann didn’t want that, and Meghann always got her way. They were what Meghann wanted them to be: polite strangers who shared a blood type and an ugly childhood.

Claire reached down for the Weed Eater. As she slogged across the spongy ground, she noticed a dozen things that needed to be done before opening day. Roses that needed to be trimmed, moss that needed to be scraped off the roofs, mildew that needed to be bleached off the porch railings. And there was the mowing. A long, wet winter had turned into a surprisingly bright spring, and the grass had grown as tall as Claire’s knees. She made a mental note to ask George, their handyman, to scrub out the canoes and kayaks this afternoon.

She tossed the Weed Eater in the back of the pickup. It hit with a clanging thunk that rattled the rusted bed.

“Hey, sweetie. You goin’ to town?”

She turned and saw her father standing on the porch of the registration building. He wore a ratty pair of overalls, stained brown down the bib from some long-forgotten oil change, and a flannel shirt.

He pulled a red bandanna out of his hip pocket and wiped his brow as he walked toward her. “I’m fixing that freezer, by the way. Don’t you go pricing new ones. ”

There wasn’t an appliance made that he couldn’t repair, but Claire was going to check out prices, just the same. “You need anything from town?”

“Smitty has a part for me. Could you pick it up?”

“You bet. And have George start on the canoes when he gets here, okay?”

“I’ll put it on the list. ”

“And have Rita bleach the bathroom ceiling in cabin six. It got mildewy this winter. ” She closed the pickup’s bed.

“You here for dinner?”

“Not tonight. Ali has a Tee Ball game at Riverfront Park, remember? Five o’clock. ”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll be there. ”

Claire nodded, knowing that he would. He hadn’t missed a single event in his granddaughter’s life. “Bye, Dad. ”