Page 148 of Forever Never
“You have really great handwriting,” Remi noted.
“Just what I wanted to be known for. ‘Age thirty-four, mother of two. Had nice handwriting.’”
“Okay, that sounds like the world’s worst obituary. Let’s drink some alcohol and talk.”
“You don’t want to hear your middle-aged sister complain about getting the life she always thought she wanted,” Kimber said, her gaze on the mason jar filled with a rainbow of dry erase markers.
“I want to talk to my sister about her life. I’m not here to judge you.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing to you.”
“Uh, yeah. Caught that,” Remi said. She stepped back into the kitchen and rummaged through cabinets until she found a bottle of vodka tucked behind two boxes of whole-grain organic pasta.
“Straight or what?” she asked, wiggling the bottle.
“Get the glasses,” Kimber said, pointing at a cabinet. Remi skipped the tasteful rocks glasses and found two tumblers with cartoons and big, bendy straws.
Kimber snorted when she saw them.
“These hold more,” Remi insisted.
Kimber mixed drinks and gave Mega his afternoon treat while Remi sat on the counter and listened.
“I remember thinking how much I liked Kyle’s ambition when we were in college,” her sister said.
“And now?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think I realized that his ambition would only extend to his job. Not his family or his home or his wife. I thought that I wanted to stay home and raise our kids. And for a while I did. But somewhere along the way it started to feel like not enough. Kyle got more important in his job, and that meant more money for us, but also more travel for him. He stopped being around. He goes days without talking to his kids. There are days when we only exchange one or two text messages.”
She blew out a breath and shook the ice cubes in her cup. “It’s like the more important Kyle got at work, the less important I got in my life.”
“Well, that’s bullshit,” Remi said.
“Excuse me. This is my existential crisis. Not yours.”
“I’m just saying, what’s more important—other people recognizing that you are more than just a label or a role oryourecognizing it?” Remi asked, then blinked. She swore softly under her breath.
“What?” Kimber asked.
“Ever give great advice to someone else that you should be taking yourself?”
“I haven’t eaten a salad in six weeks but I made Hadley and Ian try four different Brussels sprouts recipes last week. What do you think?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about.”
Kimber raised her cup in the air in a mock toast, and Remi did the same.
“I don’t even know if he’s happy,” Kimber said.
“Areyouhappy?”
“I’m fucking miserable. Haven’t you been listening to me yell at you?” There was no heat to her sister’s words. “I mean, I basically tried to pin years of dissatisfaction with my own life on you because you were handy and Kyle made time to be concerned about you.”
“What would make you happy besides selling your children to the circus and dumping Kyle’s body in the lake?” Remi asked.
“I haven’t really thought much past Ian on a trapeze and Hadley barking for the bearded lady.”
Remi felt the glimmer of recognition. A glimpse of the smart, snarky big sister she’d idolized. “Who could blame you? So what have you tried?”
