The Almost Archer Sisters Read Free Page A

earlier, I had walked in on my husband Beau having sex with Beth from behind, the default position, I suppose, of people who can’t bear to look each other in the eye. Beth screamed, “Peachy!” And for the first time since our Roman Catholic wedding, my entrance inspired Beau and me to invoke the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in unison.
    “Alrighty then,” I gently added, closing the door to the walk-in pantry. It killed me that even at the apex of my family’s apocalypse I was still polite. How I had willed my legs back upstairs to wake the boys in the middle of the night, I’ll never know. But I was grateful that I had Beth’s rented convertible as the draw.
    “Sam, get up. We’re going for a drive in Auntie Beth’s fancy car. Get your brother.”
    “What time is it?” he said, still surrounded by darkness.
    “Time to go.”
    Beth had promised them a ride that morning, not necessarily at four in the morning, but the hour didn’t dampen their enthusiasm. Sam ran downstairs bypassing the kitchen where his aunt and dad were now yelling at each other and furiously dressing. Jake trailed behind him. I grabbed my housecoat from the downstairs bathroom and calmly joined the boys in the carport where Sam was acting like a game-show model highlighting the convertible’s features.
    “Is Dad coming?”
    “Not anymore, Sam.”
    I noticed the keys had been left in the ignition. Beth not only didn’t want children, I thought, she wanted mine dead. An exaggeration, sure, but when people asked her if she wanted kids, her standard reply was that she was too selfish to be a mother. She’d sometimes glance toward me for a contradiction I never offered. Instead, I’d nod away as she’d explain how much travel is involved with her work, how being the host of a popular style show meant being away from home at least a third of the year. She came up with the idea for
Clothing for Cavemen
while working as a stylist at MTV, a job that seemed to involve a lot of sex and shopping. But after she’d told a famous country singer that his hat made him look like an ass, an executive who fell in love with her frank manner put her on TV. Thus
Cavemen
was born, a show that involved bossy Beth telling hick boys and blue-collar men how to dress like rock stars, for success—or just plain sex—a skill she had honed as a teen in our small town.
    “Sam, you buckle your brother in, okay?”
    He yanked the strap across Jake’s hip bones.
    “Mum. I have to pee bad,” Jake said.
    “That’s okay, sweetheart,” I said, throwing Beth’s rental into hard reverse. The tires spit a very specific hailstorm of gravel at the back of Beau’s Jeep. “You can pee in the car.”
    O F ALL THE idiot things to wake me. It wasn’t the sound of Beau and Beth wrestling in the pantry. It was forgotten meat. I had made a mental note to pick up steaks on our way back from the hospital. But my mental notes seemed to be written on blackboards left in the rain. I wasn’t new to the twin jobs of stay-at-home mom and full-time housewife, but I had always been lousy at them. I wasn’t a rememberer, a darner, a scrimper, a time saver, a coupon cutter (my sister-in-law, Lucy, kept a little file folio. She alphabetized the damn things!). I didn’t clean as I cooked. I watched too much TV, listened to the radio too heartily, pacing back and forth between the rooms in which they were left blaring: kitchen, living room, kitchen, living room, I paced, trying not to smoke, even though I had quit on our honeymoon eight years earlier, not for Beau, but for Sam who was five months old in my belly and already starting to swing from my bottom ribs. And even though I had the time, I didn’t volunteer to bring complicated platters to potlucks, smug upon my arrival. I was not the woman who said to the marvelers,
Oh, it was really nothing
, when, in fact, I had given it everything I had. Nothing I’d ever done turned out exactly the way it looked like in the picture. Not