Free A Soft Place to Land by Susan Rebecca White Page A

overgrown, very pretty child,” said Julia. “And now she’s supposed to be my mom.”
    Julia turned over and lifted her shirt around her shoulders. Ruthie still owed her eight minutes.
    The next afternoon when Julia and Ruthie arrived home from school—they had returned to Coventry that Monday, after taking the week of the funeral off—Mimi was sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking a glass of white wine and flipping through a Horchow catalog.
    “Hi, beauties,” she said, smiling sadly.
    During the week and a half that Mimi had been with them, her moods had been erratic. Sometimes she was all spirit and energy, as if it were up to her to replace her nieces’ grief with joy. Other times she would burst into a little crying jag, apologizing between shakes if either Ruthie or Julia was around.
    “Hi,” said Ruthie, dropping her L.L. Bean backpack—heavy with books—onto the floor. Julia, who carried her books in a woven Guatemalan bag that Dmitri had given her back when they were dating, placed the bag on the counter. Judging from its drape, it didn’t look as if it had much in it.
    “Ruthie, you want a Coke?” Julia asked as she walked toward the refrigerator.
    “Okay.”
    Julia prided herself on drinking regular Coke and not Diet, and she impressed upon Ruthie that this was an important choice for girls to make, so they wouldn’t appear to be vapid, only concerned with looks and calories. Julia also told Ruthie that it was necessary for every woman to know how to drive a straight shift. Jake had taught her how, using his dad’s 1974 BMW 2002.
    Julia retrieved two red cans of Coke from the middle shelf ofthe fridge, along with two packages of string cheese. She handed one of each to Ruthie, then sat beside Mimi on one of the bar stools by the counter.
    “So, Meems, I have a question for you.”
    Mimi raised her brows a little but didn’t say anything about being called Meems.
    “Say my dad wasn’t around.Say something awful happened to him and he was dead. What would have happened to me? Do you think Mom and Phil would have had me go live with you? Or with Aunt Linda, or what?”
    Linda was Naomi’s older sister who lived in Memphis. She had gotten pregnant at age sixteen, which had scandalized Naomi’s parents, as well as their fellow members of First Methodist Church in Union City, Tennessee. But Linda had made it work. She married the boyfriend who impregnated her, had the baby, finished high school, had another baby, and proceeded to earn her BA in elementary education. By twenty-four she was a second-grade teacher. By the time she was thirty-eight both of her sons had left home for college and she and her husband started taking backpacking trips through Europe every summer, reveling in their long-awaited freedom.
    Surely Linda would have resented being asked to finish raising another child after forfeiting her adolescence in order to raise her own. Plus, she and Naomi were not close. Linda had been unsympathetic regarding Naomi’s decision to leave Matt; when Naomi tried to explain to her sister that she was
driven
to leave Matt for Phil, that it was as if she had no choice, Linda told her that she was acting like a child, and that for her own child’s sake she should “just snap out of it.” Naomi used to tell her daughters that she was happy that the two of them had each other. That it was important to have a sister you could trust and confide in.
    Ruthie, who had also settled on one of the stools and was halfway through her piece of string cheese, did not say anything about the unlikelihood of Linda’s taking Julia, fearing that her sister would feel unwanted. Instead, Ruthie teased Julia.
    “Say something awful happened . . . ,” she echoed, attempting a deep Jersey accent, as if she were a member of the Mafia. “Jeez, Julia, what are you going to do, put a hit on your dad?”
    Ever since the accident Ruthie had found herself full of a sort of dark, inappropriate