They were seven and nine when the school tested them, and after that, everyone had a shorthand. Del was the smart one. Josie was the other one — not stupid, exactly, nobody said that word in front of their mother, but the shape of it sat in every sentence that didn’t include her when the school called about the gifted program.
For a while it didn’t cost anything. Del got the extra worksheets; Josie got left alone with more time to build things out of whatever was in the garage, which she preferred anyway, or told herself she preferred.
It cost something at fifteen, when Del corrected her at dinner — gently, the way you’d correct a child, though they were the same distance from being children — and Josie stopped bringing things up at dinner at all, not out of hurt exactly, more like a room she’d quietly stopped entering because the last time she had, someone had rearranged the furniture without asking and called it help.
It cost more at twenty-six, when their mother got sick, and everyone assumed Del would manage the doctors and the paperwork, and Del did, competently, exhaustedly, alone, because nobody thought to ask Josie, and Josie didn’t offer, because by then “helping” felt like walking into a test she’d already been told the results of.
They didn’t stop loving each other. That was the strange, stubborn part. They just built two entirely separate systems for being loved — Del’s built on being needed, competent, correct; Josie’s built on being easy, undemanding, no trouble — and the systems worked, mostly, as long as nobody asked either of them to be something else.
It was Josie, in the end, who fixed the roof.
Not metaphorically — the actual roof, on the actual house, the summer their mother died and left it to both of them and Del was three states away being needed by someone else’s problem. Josie climbed up with a book she’d bought years ago and never mentioned to anyone, because mentioning things she’d taught herself had started to feel like an argument she didn’t want to have, and she fixed it, alone, and stood on the ladder afterward not knowing who to tell.
She called Del anyway.
“I fixed the roof,” she said, and there was a silence on the line that had thirty years in it — every worksheet, every dinner, every quiet withdrawal from every room — and then Del said, “I didn’t know you could do that,” and Josie said, “Neither did I,” which wasn’t quite true, and neither of them corrected it.
That was as close as they got, that year, to starting over. It was enough. It had to be. They were fifty-one and forty-nine, and there wasn’t a version of them left that had time to be anything but careful with what remained.
©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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