Fairy Tale Blues by Tina Welling

and met her laughter with my own. Who said coming at the same time was rare?
    I said, “Annie, I love you with my whole heart.” Tears came to my eyes and my voice cracked at the end. I had to love her to be whole. I didn’t care suddenly whether or not she loved me. I just needed to love her.
    â€œOh,” I said out loud, getting what she meant about winning and losing and how that didn’t belong in a marriage like ours.
    â€œOh, what?” she asked, her voice low and soft, almost a whisper.
    â€œOh . . . nothing.”

Thirteen
    Annie
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    W hen I reached Daisy’s house, no one was home. She and Marcus never locked the doors, so with my new puppy, Bijou, in my arms, I walked in and looked for a note. The red light on the message machine winked from the desk. Thinking Daisy might have put a message on it for me—she had done that before—I headed there. Knowing Daisy, I assumed she probably couldn’t find a pen or paper—I looked around—or a cleared surface to write a note on. No wonder Daisy trusted leaving her doors unlocked. A burglar would take one look at this mess and back right on out, figuring someone had already ransacked the place. Even I thrashed frantically around in my mind for an excuse to get a motel room, but I knew I was not allowed to do this and remain her sister.
    I set Bijou on the floor and pushed the PLAY button. My own voice startled me—Daisy had insisted I call the very second I was leaving so she’d know when to worry. I sounded like Mia Farrow on antidepressants. The voice informed whoever listened that I would arrive about five o’clock. I remembered hoping this might suggest pushing toys off the guest bed or—ever optimistic—putting dinner on the stove. I looked at my watch; I was an hour early.
    Really, Mia Farrow? I played the message again. Yep, same pauses and emphasis and same intensity of speech. As I listened, even I wondered if the person speaking had a very slight British accent.
    â€œI say,” I said, punching the DELETE button on my message. “Bloody awful here.” Bijou stalked piles of clothing on the floor and pounced on them in viciously friendly attacks, tail wagging.
    I walked into the kitchen. A child’s dirty sock rested beside the sink, which was full of melon rinds and cereal bowls with Sugar Pops dried to the sides. I said, “Bloody awful here, too.”
    I felt hungry and picked up a banana from the fruit bowl. A flock of tiny insects lifted into the air. I dropped the banana and opened the refrigerator. The butter dish was smeared with grape jelly and the stick of butter itself encrusted with toast crumbs. I always forgot this part. I felt so eager to see Daisy and Marcus and the girls that I could hardly get here fast enough and I always teared up when I left. Yet in between I could never find a place to sit in this ten-thousand-square-foot, six-bedroom house. Marcus’ T-shirt was tossed on the nearest end of the leather sofa, probably sweaty from one of his ten-mile jogs, one of the twins’ half-eaten sandwich lay on an upholstered chair, an uncapped tube of toothpaste on another; books and magazines were mounded into precarious heaps on seats around the kitchen table.
    I gave up the idea of finding a snack and closed the refrigerator door. Like a narcoleptic, Bijou had fallen into one of her spontaneous naps: all but her tail and hind paws was burrowed beneath an abandoned towel on the floor of the family room. I lifted the towel to peek at her. She was so small and beautiful in her variegated black-and-white shagginess. She would grow about three times her size now, but would still be no bigger than any of my Wyoming dogs had been as puppies. Even so, her mother looked sporty rather than frilly, and I counted on Bijou holding her own in the Wild West later on. I loved her immeasurably. She was sister to Shank and Lucille’s puppy, Mitzi, and they were happy