The Butterfly Sister Read Free

evading any pain that might have flashed through them at the mention of Dad. “So it’s not my problem.”
    Mom curled her fingers over my shoulder then. “Call the girl, Ruby,” she said. “You’d want someone to do the same for you.”
    It was a valid point, but I knew Mom was picking up where Gwen had left off. If I called Beth Richards, I’d be forced to reconnect with someone from Tarble, a private women’s college in Kenosha just over the Illinois-Wisconsin state border. I’d dropped out of Tarble my senior year, one semester short of graduation.
    â€œBut I don’t have her phone number,” I spat back. “We didn’t stay in touch.”
    â€œYou could call the college,” Mom suggested. “The alumnae office, perhaps.”
    â€œI didn’t graduate.”
    â€œWho cares?” She waved her hand through the air, as if batting a fly. “If you ever went to a school, you’re an alumnus.”
    The delivery woman impatiently tapped her clipboard with a pen, as if keeping time.
    â€œPeople sometimes keep important information inside their suitcase,” she said. “Maybe there’s anotha tag somewhere. You can look. I can’t. I just deliver. And speakin’ of deliveries, I gotta get goin.’ What do ya want me to do?”
    Mom seized the suitcase handle. “We’ll take care of it,” she announced, and I forced a scribble on the clipboard.
    When the delivery woman began to drive away, though, I stopped her. The van lurched when she hit the brakes.
    â€œWhat if I can’t find her?” I shouted through the window glass.
    The window came down, and she handed me a business card. “Just call,” she said.
    And then I watched the van disappear into the setting sun.
    Mom pulled the suitcase into the house then. “You’re sure you don’t have Beth’s phone number?” she asked, as if she’d done nothing wrong, as if we’d been in on the whole thing together.
    â€œWe weren’t exactly friends,” I explained. “More like acquaintances.”
    My relationship with Beth Richards had been one of supply and demand. I’d needed a larger suitcase for a trip to Paris with my mom. And Beth, who lived three doors down from me in North Hall, had offered her bag. I recalled Beth Richards then, her golden hair and almost six-foot stature.
    â€œThe alumnae office would be happy to help you,” Mom offered again.
    â€œYou know I can’t call there.”
    â€œYou have no reason to hide.”
    â€œIt’s Sunday night,” I noted. “The alumnae office won’t open until tomorrow morning.”
    â€œCouldn’t you call Heidi?”
    Heidi Callahan was my former roommate at Tarble and subsequently, former best friend. We’d met at freshman orientation. Over weak coffee and Maurice Lenell cookies, we discovered a mutual passion for hazelnut creamer. One morning of talking turned into a friendship, and by the next semester, we were roommates. Boyfriends came and boyfriends went, but most weekends, it was always the two of us watching romantic comedies, eating pepperoni and green pepper pizza, sipping cheap boxed wine out of plastic tumblers. But all of that changed senior year. She moved out at the end of first semester, and I hadn’t talked to her since.
    â€œCan’t we just look inside?” I begged.
    We handled Beth’s things gingerly, spreading them on the foyer floor like jigsaw puzzle pieces, so we’d be able to put everything back the way we’d found it. It all added up to the inside of a woman’s suitcase. A pair of Gap jeans. A gray hooded zip-up sweatshirt. Socks and underwear. A cosmetic case full of Redken, MAC, and Colgate. A travel sewing kit. None of it told me how to find Beth Richards.
    And then Mom discovered a thin book in the folds of a T-shirt and held it out at arm’s length, like she does when she