Sugar Beth occupied herself with the eggs and let Winnie answer that one. “Not friends. No.”
Gigi’s forehead crumpled. “You still hate each other, don’t you?”
“I don’t hate anyone,” Mother Teresa replied, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Sugar Beth hid another snort by cracking an egg.
“If I ever had a sister, I wouldn’t hate her.” Gigi sat on the floor by the door so Gordon could snuggle up to her.
“We aren’t regular sisters,” Winnie replied, taking a seat at the table.
“Half sisters. You had the same father.”
“But we weren’t raised together.”
“If I found out I had a half sister, even if we weren’t raised together, it would make me happy. I hate being an only child.”
“As you’ve mentioned at least a hundred times.”
Gigi gave her mother a reproachful look. “I don’t understand why you have to hate her so much.”
“Gigi, this isn’t any of your business.”
The temporary truce between mother and teenager came to an end, and silence fell over the kitchen, broken only by the soft, contented moans of a basset having his ears rubbed. Sugar Beth tapped the whisk against the sides of Tallulah’s old spongeware bowl. Gigi intended to cast her mother as the bad guy, with Sugar Beth as the injured party, which meant it was time to come clean. She consoled herself with the reminder that she owed Winnie one after the trick she’d pulled last night. All right. She owed Winnie more than one.
“The truth is, cupcake, I pretty much made your mother’s life miserable.”
Gigi abandoned Gordon’s ears to gaze up at Sugar Beth. “What did you do?”
“Everything I could think of.” Sugar Beth concentrated on dredging the bread so she didn’t have to look at either one of them. “Your mother was shy, and I used that to my advantage to make her look bad in front of the other kids. Whenever somebody wanted to be her friend, I found a way to break it up. I made fun of her behind her back. I even found this diary she kept and read it out loud to everybody.”
“I don’t believe you,” Gigi replied, too loyal to abandon faith in her new aunt so quickly. “Even Kelli Willman wouldn’t do something like that.”
“Believe it.” Sugar Beth threw a slab of butter into the skillet. She’d forgotten to turn the burner on, so it sat there in a hard lump. She picked up a tea towel to wipe her hands, then turned to face them both. Winnie had the coffee mug cradled in her hands, her expression unreadable.
“My senior year, I did the worst thing to her I’ve ever done to anybody.” Sugar Beth looked at Gigi because she didn’t want to look at Winnie. “Your mom was in a show at school-”
Winnie rose from her chair. “There’s no reason to go into this.”
“It’s my shame, not yours,” Sugar Beth shot back.
To her credit, Winnie sat down again. Maybe she realized, as Sugar Beth did, that the time had come to drag the old ghosts out into the sunlight.
“She had paint all over her,” Sugar Beth said, “so I knew she’d have to go to the locker room to get cleaned up when it was over. I waited till she had time to get into the shower, then I sneaked in and hid all her clothes. I hid the towels, anything she could use to cover up with.”
She half expected Winnie to make another protest, but she simply cradled her mug and gazed straight ahead.
“That wasn’t as bad as reading her diary to everybody,” Gigi said.
“I haven’t finished.”
Gigi drew Gordon’s head farther into her lap while Winnie sat stone-faced.
“I was with some boys,” Sugar Beth said, “and I dared them to go into the locker room. I made a big joke out of it. They didn’t know your mom was in there, so they went along with me.” She fiddled with the tea towel. “Your dad was one of those boys.”
The muscles worked in Gigi’s throat as she swallowed. “Did he see her?”
Sugar Beth nodded. “Yes. And she had this huge crush on him. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But she liked him so much, and she was humiliated.”
“Why would you do something so mean?”
Sugar Beth gazed at Winnie. “Maybe you’d like to explain this part.”
“How can I explain it when I never understood it myself?” Winnie said stonily.
“Sure you did.”
“There was no reason for it,” Winnie retorted. “You had everything. You were legitimate. You had a real family.”
“And you were popular, too,” Gigi said. “So what did you have to be jealous of?”
Winnie knew, but she wasn’t going to say it.
“My father loved your mother, but he didn’t love me,” Sugar Beth said. “The truth was, he could barely tolerate me. I giggled, I got lousy grades, and I made too many demands on him.”
“I don’t believe you,” Gigi said. “Dads love their kids, even when they screw up.”
“Not all dads are like yours. Mine didn’t hit me or anything. He just didn’t like being around me. But he loved being with your mother, and that made me hate her.” Sugar Beth turned back to the stove and flipped on the burner, aware of how much the past still hurt. “Whenever I saw them together, he looked happy with her in a way he never looked with me. I couldn’t punish him for it, so I punished her.”
Gigi swallowed hard, trying to make the best of it. “Teenagers do dumb things. I don’t see why it should still be a big deal.”
“You’re right,” Sugar Beth said. “It shouldn’t be.”
Winnie continued being unhelpful by taking another sip of coffee and not saying a thing. Sugar Beth concentrated on the French toast. Finally, Gigi set Gordon aside and rose to her feet, a little furrow in her brow. “Did you take my dad away from my mom in high school?”
“Now
“He was your boyfriend for a long time, right?”
“Until we went to college. Then I dumped him for another guy. A guy who wasn’t half as nice as your dad. But you have to admit that turned out to be a good thing because, if I hadn’t cheated on him, your dad and mom wouldn’t have gotten to know each other, and you wouldn’t have been born.”
“They had to get married. Mom got pregnant.”
Sugar Beth glanced at Winnie, but she had that miles-away expression she used to wear sometimes in school.
“I’d never be stupid enough to get pregnant if I wasn’t married,” Gigi said.
“That’s because you’re not going to have sex until you’re thirty,” Sugar Beth replied.
Something that might have been a smile caught the corner of Winnie’s mouth, but Gigi didn’t see the humor. “Are you, like, going to try to take him away from her again?”
“No!” Winnie smacked her hand so hard on the table her mug rattled. “No, Gigi. She’s not going to do that.”
Gigi moved to her mother’s side, relaxing almost imperceptibly.
Sugar Beth tossed the bread into the skillet. “Honey, I couldn’t take your dad away from your mom even if I tried. He loves her. He doesn’t love me.”
Still troubled, Gigi gazed at her mother. “I don’t understand how you could let her do so many bad things to you. Why didn’t you stand up for yourself?”
“I was a wimp,” Winnie said, looking surprisingly formidable in her oversize clothes.
Gigi nodded with the wisdom of the ages. “You didn’t claim your power.”
“I didn’t know I had any. You should have seen her, Gi. She was so beautiful, so confident. Her hair was perfect, her clothes perfect, her makeup always right. And she had this amazing laugh that made everybody want to laugh with her. Nothing was ever boring when Sugar Beth was around. When she walked into a room, you couldn’t look at anybody else.”
“She’s still kind of like that,” Gigi said. “People pay attention to her.”
“Hey, I’m standing right here, in case you’ve forgotten,” Sugar Beth said. “And nobody outside of Parrish even notices me.”
