"Nothing is where it should be," Amy said, ostensibly to the air, but certainly in a passive-aggressive way to her sister when Toni stepped back into the kitchen. "You are going to have food coming in, and you can't find anything right now."
Toni didn't see anything wrong with the arrangement because it was not her arrangement. She had barely thought to try to find something here. Toni watched her sister shove a cylinder of salt beside a dusty spice rack, then toss the smaller spices in a drawer. Already, she could see that Amy had organized the non-functional pots and pans by size. Her sister could be attending more critical things, but Toni didn't yet have it in her to pull rank for this minor bout of organizational anxiety. Amy assured Toni that things would get done. There were hours in which to do them. The tent was up, and the tables were under it. Let Amy do this futile act to keep her engines revved.
Toni lifted her phone from the desk, swiping through its screen but seeing nothing much. She placed it back to finish charging.
"You don't leave your phone plugged in all day, do you?" Amy asked with contempt. "That's horrible for your phone and the environment if that is the sort of thing you care about." She cast a withering glance Toni's way. "And you should care about it. Do you know how quickly the ice caps are melting?"
"I don't think my phone is directly melting the icecaps," she replied in a low voice, but it wasn't worth the fight. Amy had no actual capability to choose her battles, so she resorted to picking every fight she could find in hopes that someone would take the bait. Toni assumed she got off on being righteous, which was a world different than being right. Amy was often the perpetrator of the same behavior that she berated in others, but she never let herself see the hypocrisy. Toni wondered if maybe this wasn't a long game, waiting to tear into the person who pointed out that she did not practice what she preached.
Amy was three years her junior but always acted as the beleaguered older sister, leading her stupid little sister through the wilds of life with persistent nagging. At this point, Toni was almost inured to it, though she knew that it still got on Jason's nerves. She tried to cushion the worst of it. Amy saw Jason not as an independent being but as an extension of Toni. How could he be worthy of her respect if he chose someone as insufficient as Toni to be his wife?
When Toni started dating late in high school - chaste, dull, awkward dates where she hardly ever ended the night with a kiss, relationships that existed as little more than passed notes and weekly phone calls - Amy and her friends made clear that she was the worst slut that have ever strutted on a street corner. Jezebel would have been scandalized by her whorishness. Jesus would have made an exception and let villagers stone her. When Amy cut a swath through her high school and college, bedding a dozen people in months, this was merely being sexually liberated and open-minded. Anyone who said otherwise was a puritanical prude who should get the stick out of their ass. When Toni went to a therapist for her social anxiety, she was a pill-popper and psychotic. When Amy went to one, she was exploring her mind and taking care of herself. When Toni bought herself an ice cream cone, she was disrespecting her temple of a body and putting on weight. When Amy did, it was self-care.
There was nothing about Toni that Amy did not see in the right light as a pathology. Of course, she did not think Toni's pathologies were subjects of sympathy but deep moral flaws.
When the mood struck her -- possibly when someone was present to admire her -- Amy could be startlingly generous, as Toni thought this weekend showed. She donated lavishly from a modest salary and sent regular payments to an orphan child she claimed to want one day to keep, though she'd yet to meet her outside letters and pictures. However, when it came to someone she was stuck with, family members most of all, her every interaction was informed by exasperation. How dare they drain her life away by wanting her company? Toni had learned to give Amy a wide berth, unsure what version of her would spring forth.
She missed the Amy she knew as a child, her playmate. She did not believe that this Amy still lived within the harridan that Amy could be in a bad mood, but Toni wanted to hope.
Jason had once given Toni a lecture about his feelings on compassion, that everyone wants to be happy, and the merciful thing was to give people what they needed and not what they believed they wanted. Toni suspected that what Amy wanted more than anything was for her family to cease to be themselves - or possibly to exist at all. Amy could barely tolerate Toni outside her comfort zone and was openly hostile to their mother whenever the occasion allowed.
Toni had no idea what Amy needed and thus had no way to give it to her, but she would have. For a chance to feel close to her sister again, she could give her a slice of her liver and a handful of her bone marrow, though maybe not a kidney.
She loved Amy, of course. Above most else, Toni had a strong sense of family and didn't want to lose a moment with the one biology had given to her. She loved Amy, but she couldn't understand her. Maybe it wasn't love if you couldn't understand the other party, but they had a girlhood together. Before Amy knew of the world outside their house, Toni remembered them as best friends, exploring the glacial boulders in their backyard, running lemonade stands, painting one another's nails, being warriors and princesses among the autumn leaves. Maybe adulthood didn't suit either one of them. Toni retreated into second adolescence as an artist, and Amy tried to be much older than her years. Maybe Amy was only her friend until she let the world outside their shared bedroom soured her. Perhaps this was all a part of her rebellion.
It changed once their father left. Toni never knew why, but she thought Amy blamed her for the divorce, as though Toni had been the one to introduce their father to Cathy. She didn't believe that Amy had any more love for their father than she did, but he had the grace to live in a different state from them, so his annoyances were novel. Amy could love something distant from her, someone whom she could only love by saying it and sending gifts on the holidays, not someone who required demonstrations of this love. Amy could never love something she could touch, not for long.
Amy had a host of mental and emotional issues that sprung up without antecedent, which seemed to exist only to draw further attention to her. Doctors couldn't diagnose her because, Toni thought, there was nothing wrong with her except the desire to be different, to fit in among the outcasts. Among her clique, daring to let oneself be anything other than unusual was practically a sin. When Toni did something that Amy didn't instantly like -- talking on a topic Amy didn't wish to discuss, remaining quiet against her critical barrage, cuddling against Jason in a childlike fashion -- Amy diagnosed it. As far as Amy was concerned, Toni had ADHD, autism, mania, bipolarity, depression, processing issues, and an emotional disturbance. Toni was sure she had few of these. She was just a person having experiences. Well, a person having experiences who had social anxiety disorder kept in check by the occasional prescription, but it was nothing terminal.
Amy's actual profession was some technical government job. Toni was never clear about the specifics, only that Amy wielded slightly more power than a meter maid and made sure everyone noticed it. As far as she could tell, Amy was well-regarded, but that might only be because her coworkers and clients got to see Amy in a constructed environment where she was in control. It played upon her intellect and skills. Best of all, it kept her away from most people who might annoy her. Her previous job was working with disabled children. Toni assumed she liked that job because it made her feel saintly while advocating for a group that could not ask for her help. She wanted to be superior and unaccountable, even if they paid her less than she was worth.
Toni had her trump card that this was her wedding. In the end, her wishes had to be respected and obeyed. Amy understood a pecking order and a higher authority. Toni was not sure what she wanted, but she was positive she needed this wedding to go off with as little trouble as possible because she would not get another chance to marry Jason. Oh, sure, he already talked in his starry-eyed way about a massive renewal of the vows ten years hence, but she had to get through this day so she could get to the tenth anniversary.
At once, it occurred to her that she had not seen her mother in half an hour, which might mean nothing. Her mother was an adult, after all, and could be trusted to maintain herself. There was much to do and only so many hands, but her absence felt uncomfortable.
After a brief search, mostly keeping away from people who might want to tell her that she looked beautiful or do something about the fact that she did not yet, Toni found her mother on the porch, petting a stray cat that seemed to be in love, as most cats were with her mother.
"You okay, mommy?"
Her mother looked up but did not slacken her efforts in winning this cat more to her side. "Oh, yeah. I just found a kitty." She rubbed him between his eyes, turning his purrs audible.
"We're going to do our hair and makeup soon."
"That's fine," her mother said distantly. "I just need a few more minutes with the cat."
Toni understood. Her mother had taught her a host of important life lessons, but the one that marked her deepest was how to avoid uncomfortable social situations, which it was plain her daughters each processed in their own ways. Her mother could be physically present anywhere and a dimension away simultaneously. Toni couldn't find offense that her wedding ranked among these, dripping with emotions as it was. It made her the most uncomfortable anything ever had, but she did not have the luxury of dissociation.
Toni didn't know that Amy would ever marry -- too independent and annoyed with romantic partners as a rule -- so this might be the only time her mother had the opportunity to be the mother of the bride. Though likely an inevitability in Toni's case, she couldn't promise that her mother felt much of a way about the idea. Her mother loved Jason, of course, enough to lower her walls around him. He would never reach the heights of a stray cat her mother had found on a porch, but Jason sufficed.
More than likely, Toni had inherited her social anxiety from a mother who hid within books before meeting her father and retreating further once he left. It was clear to Toni that her father had been the outgoing one, the one to sway her mother and briefly try to show her the outside world. Was this how Jason was for Toni? But, no, she couldn't get that Freudian with it. No matter how much of her mother was in Toni, her father had his hand in raising her enough that she didn't need Jason to engage with the world.
Her mother was a competent adult, but Toni couldn't help wanting to protect her, given how overwhelming this day was sure to be. Toni knew she couldn't be this for her mother now and loved her too well to let her sister know. When she was ready, her mother would rejoin the party with enough time to make sure everything was done. As Toni saw it, her mother's most significant contribution to the wedding was birthing her decades ago. She didn't need more pressure than that.
There would be time. And until that time came, her mother would cuddle with the stray cat.
Toni couldn't help but envy that, but cat hair was certainly not going to complement her dress.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.