Read Online Loving Frank by Nancy Horan - Free Book Online Page B

head, Mamah.” Lizzie patted her shoulder. “If you want to leave the children back here with me, go have yourself a vacation.”
    “No, I want them with me, and they’re excited about going. But thanks, Lizzie.”
    “I have a feeling you’ll see things differently with a little distance.” Lizzie stubbed out her cigarette, then took the butt back to the alley trash can. When she returned, she ran her hand over Mamah’s tousled head. “I’m headed downtown for a while,” she said. Her voice was sad.
    Mamah watched her sister walk toward the street. When she was out of sight, Mamah looked down at the flower bed along the porch stoop. She and Lizzie had planted it together last spring. Mamah had dug in plants donated by a neighbor—hollyhocks, spiky penstemon, huge-leaved rhubarb. Lizzie had gone out and bought low-growing alyssum plants that made a fragrant white blanket beneath Mamah’s raucous giants, somehow managing to pull together the whole crazy quilt with one soft stroke.
    The alyssum was pure Lizzie. She was continually moving quietly in the background, making things work. Only three years older than Mamah, she’d always seemed a whole generation beyond her. She was reserved, ladylike, with the kind of cool grace their elder sister, Jessie, had had.
    The two of them had been stars in the sky to Mamah when she was small. As the elder children, they’d had their own society, up to the day Jessie died giving birth. After that, when Mamah and Edwin took in Jessie’s newborn baby to raise, Mamah and Lizzie became a team. The space below the new house that Frank had envisioned as a built-in garage had become Lizzie’s apartment instead.
    People shook their heads in puzzlement that Lizzie had not married. They wondered aloud if there was a worm inside that perfect apple, maybe a bitter heart from an early love affair. Mamah knew different.
    There had been suitors, all right, but Lizzie preferred her independence. She had acquired a family by happenstance. What need had she of a husband? She liked going off every day to her job as a teacher at the Irving Elementary School. She liked coming home and smoking cigarettes to her heart’s content, with no one to apologize to. She did her part—more than her part—in raising little Jessie. After their sister’s death, she’d taken on the roles Jessie had played: organizer of holidays, maker of picture albums, rememberer of great-aunts’ names, keeper of Borthwick lore.
    Lizzie was as grand an auntie to John and Martha and Jessie as any child could hope for. But family life happened upstairs. Without saying a word, she trained all of them to respect her privacy. Her rooms downstairs were sacrosanct—one visited only when invited.
    At Christmastime, Mamah loved to enter Lizzie’s world. Every square inch of the apartment was covered with ribbons and paper and gift boxes that were wrapped or about to be. She was like that—wildly generous. She had paid for much of Mamah’s graduate school out of her meager salary; it was something she was proud of. But she was not the kind of person to loudly demand equal pay, even if she resented that her salary was lower than the male teachers’. She had never been a suffrage marcher, though her heart was in the cause. She guarded her opinions.
    No, Lizzie preferred to live unobtrusively, going about her business pleasantly, her delicate antennae cueing her to slip out of a room when talk turned private or uncomfortable. She had lived with Edwin and Mamah nearly all of their married life. It struck Mamah for the first time that other women might have found that trying. But not once had it been a burden. Everybody loved Lizzie, especially the children. Edwin showed her great deference, and she returned it.
    She’s the one who should have married Edwin,
Mamah thought.
Lizzie would have made him a great companion.
    She went inside then and composed a note to Mattie.

    Good news. I’ve decided to stay longer than two weeks.