Becoming the Talbot Sisters Read online

  She glanced at the clock. Five minutes until the taxi was due to arrive. Zipping the suitcase, she straightened, smoothed her skirt, and took a deep breath, trying to recall anything she might have forgotten.

  And then she felt it—a sharp gripping in her abdomen, like the closing of a tiny fist over her womb. It was a familiar sensation, one that rooted her to the carpet in sudden horror. She swallowed hard, all her attention focused internally, pinpointed on the spot where she had felt the cramp.

  “Oh no,” she whispered. She felt hot and cold, and slightly nauseated. Outside she heard the crunch of tires on the drive and a moment later the honk of the waiting taxi. And then she felt it again, another cramp, harder this time, unmistakable.

  In the spacious pearl-gray master bathroom, Waverly sat down on the side of the soaking tub, her hands clenched tight, willing the sensation to go away, willing herself to be wrong. She waited for one breath, then another. Outside the taxi honked again, but she ignored it. The gripping again, low in her pelvis, so familiar and so shattering.

  For a moment she rested her forehead on the ball of her hand, not moving, feeling unutterably weary. The taxi honked again, and then a minute later she heard it drive away. She should call the doctor, she knew, arrange to go to the hospital, call Andrew to meet her there. It was a familiar routine by now. And she needed to contact Beau to cancel the flight and let Jillian know she would not be flying to Ohio tonight. But somehow she couldn’t, not this time. Instead, she sat motionless in the quiet calm of the bathroom as the seconds ticked by, paralyzed with disbelief and the dawning realization that what she had longed for and lost so many times before was again being taken. But this time, unlike all the others, there would be no chance to try again.

  CHAPTER 2

  Cooksville, Ohio

  Charlie Talbot sat at her great-aunt Mae’s Formica kitchen table, the one with silver tinsel starbursts embedded in the plastic, nursing a jet-lag headache and a cup of cold black coffee. Aunt Mae’s funeral was over, and friends, neighbors, and extended family were slowly filling the cramped front rooms of the small white farmhouse that Aunt Mae had called home for her entire life. Waverly was preparing refreshments, and ostensibly Charlie was helping. In reality, Waverly was doing all the work while Charlie sat still and tried to orient herself. She’d arrived from Budapest early that morning, sleep deprived and heavy-eyed with grief and disbelief.

  She traced a tinsel starburst with her finger. The table seemed almost retro cool now, though it had been dated even in the early nineties when she’d first laid eyes on it. It reminded her of New Year’s Eve fireworks from a bygone era, a little whimsical, a little gaudy. Waverly had never liked it. She’d gotten all the design aesthetic in the family. Today, for instance, she had dressed for the funeral in an appropriately somber but elegant gray silk cocktail dress with a single strand of pearls, looking for all the world like she was starring in a fifties high-society movie. In contrast, Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn a dress. She had found her navy-blue jersey sheath at a boutique at the airport after she landed. She couldn’t remember if she’d shaved her legs. She was pretty sure she hadn’t.

  “Why do people feed grief?” Waverly asked, eyeing the mound of Tupperware containers and Saran-wrapped plates loading the table. All morning before the funeral, there had been a steady stream of people dropping off food.

  Charlie shrugged. “Gives them something to do so they don’t feel helpless.”

  Waverly made a tsk of disapproval. “Well, I wish they’d bring actual food and not this processed stuff.” She picked up a plastic plate piled with mini hot dogs wrapped in refrigerator biscuit dough and wrinkled her nose.

  Charlie reached over and snagged one, popping it into her mouth. “But processed stuff is so tasty,” she said.

  Waverly peeled the foil and plastic wrap off the plates of food, taking inventory. The church had overflowed with people paying their respects to Aunt Mae. Cooksville was a small, working-class town in the southern Ohio foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Aunt Mae had been born and raised there, and much of the town had turned out to mourn her. Now several dozen guests were packed into the front rooms, spilling from the parlor into the dining room. The twins’ second cousin Crystal had offered to preside over the table of coffee and tea set up under the big window. Charlie could hear Pastor Shaw regaling a group of Aunt Mae’s friends and neighbors with a story about bagging a huge buck last deer-hunting season.

  Waverly’s husband, Andrew, was here as well, tucked away in the back bedroom on a conference call for work. He’d arrived just before the service with enough time to envelope Charlie in a warm hug of welcome and murmur a few kind words of condolence, then hold Waverly’s hand through Pastor Shaw’s eulogy, a crisply ironed handkerchief at the ready if either sister needed it. Charlie hoped she’d see more of him after the crowds cleared. She was fond of her brother-in-law, whose dry wit and calm demeanor added an air of civility to every situation. Besides, she owed him a rematch game of Scrabble. The last time they’d played, more than two years ago now, she’d won by a hair with ominous, walking away with a box of gourmet dark chocolate truffles as her prize. She’d shared them with Waverly and Andrew afterward. The pink peppercorn and sea salt flavor had been particularly good.

  Oddly, the kitchen was empty except for the two sisters. People in Cooksville usually gathered in kitchens—commiserating about politics in Washington, DC, the Ohio tornado season, or the disappointing finale of The Voice. But now they poked their heads around the doorway, saw Waverly and Charlie, and retreated. Charlie didn’t know if they were intimidated to be in the kitchen with the famous Food Network star Waverly Talbot or if they were leaving Mae’s girls alone out of respect for their loss.

  Charlie scrubbed her hands over her face and ran her fingers through her sandy-blond pixie cut, grown a little shaggy at the edges, trying to keep the creeping fatigue at bay and press the reality of the situation into her brain. It felt unreal to be sitting in the house where they had spent their adolescence. The kitchen still smelled like canned soup and the downstairs bathroom like Aunt Mae, a combination of Irish Spring and Johnson’s baby powder.

  She took a swig of coffee, pulled a face at the taste, and looked around. The kitchen had not changed in the twenty-three years she’d known it. Small, tidy, shabby at the corners. The counter was the startling yellow of cheap margarine. By the electric oven there was a brown scorch mark on the linoleum where Charlie had dropped a smoking pot of popcorn her freshman year of high school. She’d opened all the windows to air out the stench, and after that left the kitchen to Waverly. Charlie liked to eat and Waverly liked to cook, so they made a good pair.

  In one corner, within sight of the stove and looking incongruously new, sat the flat-screen color television the girls had purchased for Aunt Mae a few years before. Waverly had finally given up buying her aunt luxurious body-care products and satin pajama sets from Bergdorf Goodman after happening upon an entire drawer of gifts still in their iconic lavender shopping bags in Aunt Mae’s spare room. That year the twins had split the cost of a new television and a cable channel subscription that they renewed yearly.

  The gift was a hit. Aunt Mae hadn’t bothered with any channels except the Food Network, where she could watch Waverly’s Simply Perfect air on Fridays at two, and the Travel Channel, so she could keep up with all the places Charlie traveled for work.

  “That Rick Steves sure gets around,” she’d said to Charlie the last time they’d spoken, more than a month ago. “He just did a show on Budapest, and I felt like I was right there with you. It sure is a pretty city.”

  Charlie’s heart squeezed with a sudden pang of grief, picturing her aunt cooking a solitary dinner on the stove, her eyes glued to the TV as she tracked her nieces’ disparate lives so far away from the tiny square of a kitchen in rural Ohio. Charlie’s job had seemed so exotic to Aunt Mae. She was responsible for organizing health education seminars in schools and communi
ty centers around Central Europe, an occupation that kept her on the road many months of the year. She had called every month or so to regale her aunt with another wild tale—her overnight train ride from Kiev in a sleeper compartment filled with Slavic men in white undershirts, the air close and heavy with the scent of sausages. Fighting off a pack of feral dogs on the streets of Bucharest with a furled umbrella and handfuls of pea gravel. Taking a wrong turn in the mountains around Sarajevo and ending up on a dirt road plastered with signs warning about the presence of live land mines in the forest on either side.

  When she’d gotten Waverly’s initial call, Charlie had been in a village in Moldova running a self-defense seminar for middle school girls. She’d had to wait for a colleague to come from Budapest to take her place, and after that it had taken her over thirty-five hours of travel time to reach Columbus, with long layovers in Munich and DC. She’d barely had time to get changed and ready for the funeral and hadn’t had a chance to really talk to Waverly until now. They’d exchanged a few texts, but reception was spotty in rural Moldova. She got the voicemail from Waverly about Aunt Mae’s passing the day after it happened and exchanged texts with her sister between flights at the airports, but just basic information—arrival time, funeral service details. Now was the first time they’d been able to talk alone.

  “I can’t believe she’s gone,” Charlie said at last, stunned by the realization. “We’re orphans twice over.”

  Waverly pressed her lips together and nodded, not looking up from arranging a platter of chunks of cheese speared with toothpicks festooned with a fringe of colored cellophane. Party toothpicks for a funeral. Charlie helped herself to a cube of cheese.

  Twice orphaned. She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the notion. Aunt Mae had been a rock for them, steady and immovable, since the small plane crash that had claimed the lives of their parents a few months before the twins turned thirteen. In the melee of their parents’ death and the ensuing ugly lawsuit and custody case among their mother’s extended family, the twins had found solace in Aunt Mae’s practical, no-nonsense care. Although they were her nephew’s children and she’d only seen them once or twice in their lives before they came to live with her, Mae had never wavered in her devotion and duty to the two awkward girls entrusted to her by the court system. To find her absent now was disorienting, like finding a gaping hole where there had always been solidity.

  Charlie kept looking up at the doorway, expecting Aunt Mae to come around the corner wearing one of her polyester housedresses, perhaps the mint-green one with the pussy willow pattern. It had been her favorite. If this were someone else’s funeral, Mae would have made her signature sour cream dill spread on Triscuits.

  “I didn’t know . . . it would go so fast.” Charlie cleared her throat, wrapping her hands around the mug of coffee. She didn’t particularly like coffee and only drank it out of necessity or politeness or to fight jet lag. She was more of a whiskey-straight-up kind of girl, all bite at the front and a warm caress at the finish. She looked down at the contents of the mug and grimaced at the bitter overbrewed Folgers.

  Waverly transferred brownies to a plate, arranging them to look better than they actually were. Boxed brownies were fairly foolproof, but Martha Hanson, the neighbor who’d brought them, was a notoriously poor cook.

  “It was a surprise to everyone. Aunt Mae had been failing in the last two months.” Waverly spoke evenly, concentrating on arranging the hardened brownies. “But I didn’t know it would be so quick, not until Jillian texted me.”

  Jillian was the personal health aide that Waverly had hired to help Aunt Mae as soon as the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer was confirmed. Aunt Mae had been only seventy-four, spry and feisty.

  “Five months.” Charlie shook her head in disbelief. “Is that normal?”

  Waverly let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s cancer. Is anything ‘normal’?” She critically examined a homemade cheese ball coated in chipped ham, the offering from Methodist church pianist Florence Walter for every funeral and Christmas party on record. “Nothing says 1979 like a ham-coated cheese ball,” she murmured, sliding it onto a plate and fanning Ritz crackers around it.

  Her sister’s hands were beautiful as they handled the food. It was like watching a commercial for the crackers. Cue the background music and soft lighting.

  Stomach growling, Charlie reached across the table and swiped a cracker from the plate, scooping out some of the cheese ball. She was starving; her body was still on European time, and it was past dinner-time in Budapest. She munched the first cracker and took another.

  Crystal poked her head into the kitchen. “Hey, folks are getting hungry in here. Food ready yet?”

  In reply, Waverly handed her cousin the brownies and the much-maligned cheese ball, sweeping it out from under Charlie’s poised cracker.

  “Start with these,” she instructed Crystal, ignoring her sister’s sound of protest.

  “Hey, have some pity. I don’t even live in this country,” Charlie argued.

  “That’s your choice, so don’t complain about it,” Waverly said tartly, picking up the mini hot dogs. “Besides, you should eat some real food.”

  Charlie shrugged and popped the plain cracker into her mouth. “Pretty high and mighty for a girl who grew up on Campbell’s soup and canned green beans like the rest of us,” she teased, crunching the cracker. “Did you make anything for today?”

  “Yes. Can you guess?” Waverly asked.

  Charlie surveyed the food on the table, her gaze settling on a dense golden cake covered in perfectly shaped whorls of pale golden-brown frosting. “You made 1–2–3–4 cake with browned butter frosting!” she said in surprise. “Aunt Mae’s favorite.”

  It was a touching gesture. Waverly, who could have made anything in the world for the funeral, had stuck with an old, familiar recipe, almost embarrassing in its simplicity. The cake was so named because it contained 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, and 4 eggs. Aunt Mae had not liked things fancy.

  “She would have been seventy-five in November,” Waverly said softly. “I made her a cake every year and sent it to her on her birthday. It seemed fitting to make it now.”

  Charlie tried to swallow around the lump in her throat. “I didn’t know you did that,” she said.

  “Well, the last few years I had one of the kitchen prep girls make it,” Waverly amended. “Here, would you like a piece?” She proffered the cake platter and a fork. Charlie nodded and cut a thick slice. She had learned early on never to turn down Waverly’s food. There was a good reason her sister’s two books of recipes for home entertaining were climbing the sales charts at a fast clip.

  In the three years since Charlie had last visited the States, Waverly’s career had blossomed remarkably. Now she made the rounds of the morning talk shows and hosted recognizable Hollywood names as guests in her studio kitchen. Just a few months before, Charlie had stumbled upon a YouTube clip of her sister making homemade pickles with Bruce Willis. Waverly Talbot and Simply Perfect were fast-rising stars in the food and entertaining circuit—not yet in the top tier with the likes of Rachael Ray and Ina Garten, but gaining ground in brand recognition and viewership.

  Just that morning Charlie had passed a life-size cutout of Waverly in the airport bookstore at Dulles. She’d stopped in to see if they had a Faulkner novel to replace the one she’d accidentally left behind in Budapest. No luck, but as she was leaving she turned around and there was Waverly, clad in a canary-yellow apron with a print of little green finches and holding a glossy lemon drop cocktail. Charlie almost didn’t recognize her. When she did, she stopped and stared, disconcerted to see that her own twin sister seemed like a stranger.

  No one ever guessed that Waverly and Charlie were twins. Sisters perhaps, but never twins. With her pale blond hair, porcelain complexion, and softer curves, Waverly looked more like their mother, while Charlie’s lean, athletic build and smattering of freckles called up their father’s side of the family.
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  They were as different in personality as they were in appearance. When their trust funds were finally released to them on their eighteenth birthday, their lives quickly took markedly different paths. On a whim Charlie booked a ticket to South Africa, desiring to retrace her parents’ final footsteps. In Africa she found something she had not even known she was searching for. She had not returned to the US except for brief visits every few years. Waverly, meanwhile, won a coveted spot at the Culinary Institute of America, then went on for additional training in Paris. She launched her first show just a year before meeting Andrew and never looked back.

  As children Charlie and Waverly had been able to read each other’s thoughts. A quirk of an eyebrow, the flare of a nostril told them all they needed to know about what was going on in the other’s head. That was no longer true.

  Charlie looked at Waverly in her expensive dress, the curls falling loose at the nape of her neck as she carefully cut the remainder of the 1–2–3–4 cake into symmetrical slices, and drew a complete blank. With a pang she realized she had no idea what her sister was thinking. A thousand choices, some large, some small, had widened the distance between them. At thirty-five, Charlie felt her sister was more of a polite acquaintance than the inseparable other half of a perfectly fitted whole. The realization was both saddening and inevitable. They had brought the distance upon themselves.