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“Dad built this house,” she said, glancing up at the porch eaves over our heads. “I was so mad that I had to leave Iron River right in the middle of seventh grade.”
“Yeah, your mom said the kitchen was a new addition, and that you guys had to share a room before that?”
“Well, Renee and I had to share a room. Molly came along later. She got her own room by being so much younger.”
“That doesn’t seem fair. It seems like the eldest should get the room to herself,” I mused.
“Thank you!” Susan said, finally turning to face me. “I mean, would it have been fair to stick Renee with a literal baby? No.”
She didn’t add a “but.”
Shaking her head fondly, she flicked the ash from the end of her cigarette. “You know how it is with siblings, though.”
“No, I don’t.” I shrugged. It was cold out. Really cold. The snow stretched off into the trees, where it would stay until early-June, probably, where the sun didn’t touch it. “I don’t have any siblings.”
After a long pause, Susan said, “Well, you didn’t. Now you do.”
“I’m glad you said that.” I wrapped my arms around my middle and wished I’d brought my coat out with me.
Susan gave me a puzzled look.
“I don’t want to be presumptuous,” I said, not knowing how, exactly, to put my inner turmoil into words. “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty when I say this, but...I don’t get the feeling that you want me around.”
“I didn’t,” she admitted plainly. “I hated you. Like, really, really hated you. You have all this money, you could help Molly in a way I couldn’t, and so much was riding on you caring. You held my baby sister’s life in your hands, practically.”
“And you thought I would use it to punish you?” It made a lot of stuff about our interactions make a hell of a lot more sense. I’d thought she’d just been envious that we were able to help Molly and that Molly had started to like me as a result of the material things I’d given her.
Susan shook her head. “No. I thought you might use it to punish dad.”
The statement hung between us, Joey Tangen’s two daughters, sitting together on the porch he’d built.
“I can’t hurt your father,” I said, my throat raw with pain I tried to hold back. Though she and I were sisters, it hurt to call him her father. “And even if I could, there’s no way I could ever hurt him as much as he hurt me. What would be the point?”
Susan inhaled again. The white smoke mixed with the fog of her breath and drifted out through the deepening twilight. “I hated him more than I hated you.”
“Oh?”
She nodded, her jaw set hard. “How could he have done this to us? To have a daughter he just hid the whole time? How could he love us and abandon you? Did that mean he could have done it to any of us?”
“I ask myself the same questions. Like, all the time. Even before I knew about you.” I took a deep, shaky breath. “How could he not want me? How could he walk away from his child? When I found out about you guys, all of that came rushing back. And to be honest...I kind of hated you guys, too.”
“I can see why,” she admitted. “I mean, mom knew about you. She could have made him...”
“Love me?” I finished for her so she could hear out loud how silly that sounded. “Your mom couldn’t have made him do anything. If he’d wanted to be a part of my life, he would have been. And yeah, your mom does some spectacular rationalizing about why it was better for me to have never known about them, but I don’t accept it. I do think she was just doing the best she could with the shit situation he put her in. I don’t see the point in holding it against her.”
“You don’t see the point, but you probably still do hold it against her, right?” Susan asked.
“I don’t know. Sometimes, yes. Other times, like now, when she’s welcoming me into her home and your lives...I wonder if she wishes things had been different. I wonder if she might have wanted me, after all.” I paused at the sound of Sasha’s voice inside. “But he didn’t. And he was the one who really mattered.”
“We can never make up for what dad did to you,” Susan said, her voice uncharacteristically gentle. “And I can’t promise that I’m going to have all these sisterly feelings toward you suddenly and I’ll never feel any resentment that you kind of showed up in the narrative of our lives. But I don’t want you to feel unwelcome. I want this to be something we can get over together.”
