ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching
Book Two, Chapter 288: A Letter to My Sister
I need a break. I compose a letter to my younger sister, who lives a few states away.
Remember our phone conversation last Christmas Day when you invited me to your home, and I said I would know when the time was right? Perhaps that time is fast approaching. I don’t want a vacation. I want to see how you live. I want to meet your cat. Perhaps become re-acquainted with David. He and I have only seen each other a few times since you and he married all those years ago.
Tish is the middle sister. She’s always been a reader. Growing up in our childhood home she’d climb a tree, book in hand, to escape the unpleasantness within the house and escape into the pleasantness within the book. Is it any wonder she’s a librarian?
Her blind spot was David. He drank so heavily his liver turned on him. On that first emergency run, when the nurse turned to Tish and asked: “What’s he had to drink this morning?” she said: “To drink? Only water.” The reality was, his body was so loaded with alcohol it wouldn’t accept any more alcohol. Eventually, Tish found Al-Anon to help her detach with love and focus on herself. Eventually, David stopped drinking and joined A.A.
If I visit Tish I’ll take only a few clothes, my face cream, whatever book I’m currently reading — just now it’s Robert Crichton’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria — and hop a Greyhound toting my clipboard, papers, pencils, and pencil sharpener. I’ll do there what I do here — eat, sleep, bathe, read, write, walk. Occasionally clean a dish.
Every month or so Tish flies to Charleston, where David rents an apartment while he manages a construction site for his company. If she visits him while I’m visiting her, I’ll house-sit with her cat, Shadow. If David flies in while I’m there, we three will share a dinner or two — David’s great at seafood. But I don’t want to interrupt their life.
What will Tish say to my request? She’s a private, protective person. She doesn’t open her life to many people. I don’t know what she’ll say.
Ernie liked Tish. Before she and David married she often spent her vacations with us. She’d bring a supply of money, and we three would go grocery-shopping — her treat. That was our Big Fun, our High Entertainment. One summer day we bought a turkey that I roasted. In the middle of preparing that dinner I burst into tears, and I didn’t know why.
Tish and I haven’t seen each other for years and years except at my youngest sister Jude’s house back in the spring. Over these years we’ve talked to each other on the phone only once — last Christmas Day. Is this why I burst into tears all those years ago? Because none of us really knew any of us?
If so, my tears knew more than I did.
