The Oleander Sisters. Elaine Hussey

Three

      WHEN SIS LEFT THE KITCHEN she could hear Sweet Mama down the hall, singing some rollicking old song from the Jazz Age. Did she know about the bones in the garden? The last thing Sis wanted to do was ask her and completely undo a mind already coming unraveled. Instead, she hurried up the stairs and tapped on Jim’s door.

      “Come in.” He was standing on his crutch at the window with his back to the door, his shoulders hunched in a too-big pajama top and his sleep-ruffled hair sticking up like Andy’s.

      The brother she’d sent to Vietnam was one she’d have confided in about the skeleton in the garden. This brother she wanted to fold into her arms and croon to the way she had when he was a child crying over a skinned knee.

      “Jim, I’ll be heading to the café soon. Would you like to come with me?”

      “Not today, Sis.”

      He didn’t even turn around, just kept staring out the window as if he couldn’t believe the blue Gulf spread out before him, the white sand dotted with umbrellas and tourists, the seagulls wheeling through a sky the color of a robin’s egg. Sis didn’t even want to think what hell he’d seen over there, a vague euphemism she’d hated until she discovered there’s only so much horror a person can stand in one day.

      “That’s okay, Jim. Take your time. Beulah’s going to be here today, cooking up all your favorites.” That turned her brother from the window, brought the ghost of a smile. “And I imagine Em’s make you something special at the café.”

      “Tell Em not to worry about me.”

      “I will.” Not that it would change a thing. Emily had always shared everything with Jim, the heartache, the joy, even the measles. Sis watched her brother standing there, sagging, a posture so foreign to him she wanted to cry. “It’s a beautiful day, Jim. Why don’t you get out your convertible and take Beulah for a spin?”

      “Some other time, maybe.”

      What would he do all day? Hole up in the room staring out the window? Sis stood in the doorway torn between the urge to stay and take care of her brother and the need to go to the café to help Emily and Sweet Mama take care of business. In the end, her practical side won. If the café failed, they’d all go under.

      She hurried to her room to dress, and then got into her Valiant and followed along behind Sweet Mama in her ancient, oversize Buick. Thank God her grandmother wrecked nothing but a hydrangea bush backing out of the driveway. And miracle of miracles, she stayed on her side of the road all the way to the café.

      Still, by the time Sis got there, she was a nervous wreck. She made herself stand still in the center of the room, just breathing, grounding herself in the familiar smells of bacon and coffee and sugar and sweet, ripe peaches. Emily had already baked six Amen cobblers that were cooling on the countertop, and Sweet Mama was standing safe and sound at the coffee urns making a special pot for her customers who always asked for chicory—Burt Larson, the mailman, Tom and James Wilson, the brothers who had a barbershop next door and Miss Opal Clemson, the music teacher who claimed she’d once played the piano for a concert by Leontyne Price, Mississippi’s famed opera singer.

      It seemed so much like an ordinary day that Sis could almost forget her grisly find in the garden. But the Amen cobblers were sending up thick steam you could get lost in and never find your way out of, a sure sign of a disaster so huge even Sis wouldn’t be able to contain it. The bones in the garden were just the beginning.

      She pulled herself together and found her sister in the kitchen wearing a pink shirt with long sleeves, for Pete’s sake, and it was already hot enough to fry an egg in the parking lot. Still, the sight of Emily covered with a dusting of flour and elbow deep in German chocolate cakes gave Sis a momentary respite from thinking about portentous cobblers and backyard bones.

      “Hey, Sis!” Emily said, smiling as she poured batter into cake pans. “Where’s Jim?”

      “He’s not up to socializing yet, Em.”

      “I should have known that.” Emily scraped batter off the bottom of the bowl and held out a wooden stirring spoon. “Do you want to lick the spoon?”

      She took up a spot by her sister and opened her mouth for the taste of raw batter, rich with sugar and butter. It brought back memories of childhood, with Jim and Emily perched on stools at Sweet Mama’s side and Sis standing at her elbow, listening to stories of the café in its infancy, waiting their turns to lick the batter from the latest confection in progress—a German chocolate cake, a lemon icebox pie, a Coca-Cola cake or Emily’s favorite, Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.

      “Beulah said for you to wait on these cakes,” Sis said.

      “If I had waited, there wouldn’t be any spoons to lick.” Emily bumped Sis’s hip, teasing her, and then crammed the huge stirring spoon into her mouth. It left a smear of cake batter on her cheek that made her look like a little girl.

      “How do you know, Em? Someday I might make a cake.”

      Emily whooped. “I want a picture of that. It would be one for the walls.”

      Sis stuck her finger in the bowl and dabbed batter on her sister’s nose. Emily paid her back with a smear on the chin, and soon they were doubled over with laughter.

      “Oh, my goodness.” Emily put the bowl and spoons into the sink. “If I don’t get this mess cleaned up, I’ll never be ready to open.”

      “I’ll rinse.” Sis wiped cake batter off her face and moved to the sink. “You load the dishwasher.”

      “Good,” Emily said. “That gives us time to talk about the wedding. I was thinking of putting flower baskets in the garden instead of depending on the roses.”

      Pricked with sudden alarm, Sis just stood there with the water running unheeded over the dishes.

      “I don’t think you ought to have it in the garden.”

      “Since when? Just this morning you said it would be fine.”

      “I checked it after we talked. It looks awful out there.”

      “I know it’s not at its best this time of year, Sis, but I’ve always wanted a garden wedding.”

      Sis had an awful vision of Emily standing atop the bones saying I do.

      “It’s too hot, Em. Everybody will parch.”

      “We can put the chairs under the shade.”

      “I have a better idea. Wait till November when things have cooled off.”

      Could she report the bones and get the mess cleared out of her garden by November?

      “I will not have Andy start school without two parents. Okay?”

      Was Emily remembering walking the halls of Biloxi High to whispers of easy and slut, her baby bump showing and Mark Jones already enlisted and gone? Was she thinking about how she’d had to sit on the sidelines while the rest of her classmates walked onstage to get their diplomas?

      “Nobody’s going to call him names, Em. Not while I draw breath.”

      “What are you going to do, Sis? Go to school with him every day?”

      “I’m not above it.”

      “You’re not going to get me to change my mind, and you might as well quit trying. I will not have my son called bastard.”

      “All right. I understand. But at least think about getting married in Sweet Mama’s living room. We could buy some of those pink roses you love so much and put them in wicker baskets on either side of the mantel.”

      “Forget it, Sis.”

      “You could walk down the staircase and not have to trail your wedding dress in the dirt.”

      “Good