Jo bit off her next words and hung up. She stared at the instrument, sitting all innocent on the kitchen counter. You could talk all you want, but that didn't mean you'd communicate. It was the main reason why she only talked to her mother about once a month--a kind of predictable catharsis.
Sometimes she thought Momma's delusions seemed worse than Maureen's. Married since seventeen to a drunken, abusive brute who cheated on her every chance he got, and she chewed out Jo for insisting on a test-drive before she got serious about a new man. Hell, Dad was probably at the root of half of Maureen's troubles. "Man" equaled "Pain."
And all that treatment their parents had paid for was private, the soul of discretion, no records without a court order. It left nothing to show up on a background check. The little twit could lie when she went for her gun permit.
God.
Jo shook her head. She wouldn't kick her baby sister out. She couldn't. Stone-ass crazy or not, Maureen was the only family Jo cared about. Some ways, Mo was still the five-year-old redheaded mirror with smudged cheeks and scraped knees climbing trees and babbling about what the wind in the leaves was telling her. She was still the warm body sitting snuggled up against her older sister while Grandpa told stories he had heard from his grandpa, the scared voice in the darkness during thunderstorms when they had shared a room. Maureen just never grew up.
The hell of it was, between these "episodes" they got along as well as sisters ever did. Some of Maureen's spaced-out fantasy world might even be fun. Not the part that had her carrying a gun, or the part that called a phallus a torture instrument. Jo didn't have a clue where those came from.
They had come early, she knew, pre-puberty. 'Way back as far as Buddy Johnson. Whenever Jo brought a boy home, Maureen would cringe away. That fear went back as far as Jo's enthusiasm the other way.
But Jo thought she wouldn't mind a world in which the trees talked, in which Grandpa O'Brian's Bean Sidhe howled for the death of a wicked chieftain, in which the Puca drummed his hooves three times on the hillside and a door opened down into the realm of the fairies. It sounded like a nice place to visit.
And the Lurikeen's everlasting pot of gold would be useful as hell.
Fat chance of that. Well, maybe little Mo could just vanish under the Sidhe hill for a night and come back ten years later. Cured. As much as Jo loved her sister, some problems didn't have acceptable solutions.
Others did. She picked up the phone again.
Five rings, and a groggy voice answered. A groggy, male voice, grunting, and she felt warm all over.
"David?"
"Uh."
"What the hell you doing still in bed?"
"Gotta sleep sometime."
"I didn't get any more sleep than you did and I'm up. Put in a full day at the office, even."
"Um. Takes more out of a man. We give out, you take in. Hard work."
"Look, Maureen's pissed."
"Wha' about?"
"Us. Last night. She still thinks I stole you from her."
"Got no cause. Why last night? Not our first time."
"Wake up, damn you. Maureen's funny that way, you've got to rub her nose in it about five times. She still hoped you were coming over to see her."
Sounds of movement came over the phone: a crash of something knocked over, muttered cussing, a few coughs. Homo sapiens became vertical on the far end of the line. It had taken the human race a million years or so. There was no reason to expect it would get easier on a daily basis.
"Jo, let me get my head together. Your sister thought I used to be interested in her?"
"The man is slow, but it sinks in after a while. Now she's throwing things and foaming at the mouth. You got any suggestions?"
"Jesus."
"He ain't available. Try again."
The phone line crackled, and this time it wasn't long distance. The noise had to be in the local system--Alexander Bell must have installed the damned wires himself, back in 1883. And done a lousy job of it.
"Jo, I swear I never gave her cause. We talked music and Irish legends. Closest I ever got to her was touching her hand across the table."
Jo sighed. "You don't know Maureen. Holding hands is the equivalent of unprotected sex, to her. I'm surprised she didn't ask you for a blood test. She's scared of men."
"Oh, lord."
She listened to line noise for a minute, wondering if David was calculating the genetic odds on hereditary insanity passed to any hypothetical children of any hypothetical future union of the Marx and Pierce bloodlines. He wouldn't be the first man scared off by exposure to her crazy sister. Mental illness had to be about the worst skeleton you could find in any family closet.
Used to be, people kept their skeletons locked up decently in an asylum. Jo had to live with hers.
"Jo?"
"Right here."
"Look, I'm not going to give up seeing you just because your sister's screwed up. We can't sleep together over here, five guys living in an open loft. I don't think you're interested in that big an audience."
She giggled. "I don't know. Performance art is big these days. Maybe we could sell tickets."
"Bullshit. Jo, I'll talk to her, try to smooth it over. Look, we've got a gig tonight, down at The Cave. Why don't both of you come over and we can sit out a set. Tell her it's not her fault, not your fault, not anybody's fault. She might not throw a scene in public. Look, she's a nice kid, but I'm not interested in hauling that kind of baggage around for the rest of my life."
"You and me both, lover. You and me both." She swallowed the rest of her comments. "I'll try. Maureen's not all that rational."
"I'd noticed. See you tonight. Manim astheee hu."
"Yeah, and my soul's within yours, too. Cut the blarney, you
