Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters by Natalie Standiford Page A

Brooks said. “I’ll be in touch. Ciao! ”
    He returned to the counter for his mother’s medicine. I grabbed a Mounds for Jane and paid the cashier. Then I ran out to the car.
    “Did you see anybody in there?” Jane asked, because we almost always see somebody we know at Roland Pharmacy.
    “Brooks,” I said. “And you’ll never believe what Almighty did.”
    “Oh, I’ll believe it,” Jane said. “There’s nothing you can tell me about Almighty that will surprise me.”
    “You’re lucky, then,” I said. “Because she sure shocked the hell out of me.”
    And it wasn’t going to be the last time, was it?
     
    “Ginger!” I yelled when I got home. I threw my coat down at the foot of the stairs. Jane gleefully hovered nearby, ready for a dustup. “Ginger!”
    It was strange that she wasn’t in the sunroom with a cup of tea, talking on the phone with one of her friends. I don’t know why I yelled for her. I wanted her to fight for me—for my rightto choose my own escorts, to live my own life. But of course Ginger was probably in on the whole thing, wasn’t she?
    At last she appeared at the top of the stairs, looking rattled. She had her glasses on—her big bug-eye glasses—and her hair was half-teased on one side and flat on the other. She was wearing her flowered silk pajamas. Obviously something was wrong.
    “Stop yelling and come upstairs, girls. Something’s happened.”
    Jane and I looked at each other. Jane was anticipating something juicy. Most of her facial expressions contain an element of satanic glee.
    We went into Ginger’s room and found Sassy facedown on the bed, sobbing. Takey patted her clumsily on the head.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “Wallace is dead,” Ginger said.
    “What?” Jane cried.
    Ginger shook her head and sat down next to Sassy, rubbing her back. “Sassy found him. She was leaving Almighty’s and saw Wallace in his car. Dead.”
    “Just sitting there?” I asked.
    “With his eyes open,” Takey reported.
    Sassy lifted her wet, rosy face and nodded.
    “Oh! Creepy,” I said.
    Jane and I curled up on the bed with the others. “Poor Sass,” Jane said.
    “It was awful.” Sassy sobbed harder.
    “How did it happen?” I asked.
    “We’re not sure,” Ginger said. “Your father’s at the hospital now, with Almighty. I’ll bet it was a heart attack. What if it had happened while he was driving? He might have hit someone.”
    Sassy cried even harder, then bolted up. “I can’t stand it! It’s too awful!” She jumped off the bed and ran out of the room. A second later we heard her bedroom door slam.
    “Why is she so upset?” Jane asked. “I mean, I know she just saw her first dead body, but she’s acting like she killed the guy herself.”
    “He was always kind of a stiff,” Ginger said.
    I sighed. They were heartless. We all were.
    The phone rang. Ginger reached over to get it. From the way she talked to the person on the other end I could tell it was Daddy-o.
    “He’s on his way home,” she said, hanging up. “The doctors said it was a stroke. The funeral is on Friday.”
    “Poor Wallace,” I said.
     
    Having St. John and Sully home felt like a holiday, and Jane and Takey and I had trouble suppressing our happiness at seeing them in our time of mourning. Only Sassy grieved consistently. She sat quietly with us, listening to St. John’s and Sully’s stories of adventures in the wider world, wearing black at all times—she’d even dug up black pajamas somewhere—and bursting into tears over nothing. She was sadder than anyone else in the family, but that wasn’t so strange, for Sassy.
    On Friday we all dressed up in our black clothes and piled into a limo that took us to the cathedral.
    I couldn’t see your face very well through your lace veil. It was hard to tell exactly what you were feeling. I think you loved Wallace, but who knows what secrets you keep locked up in your heart?
    I tried to stop Takey from pretending to shoot the