Free Love Me Tender by Audrey Couloumbis

grandmother's style.
    “I could get up there too,” Kerrie said, only because she wanted to be included. She was never a climber.
    “You still won't be tall enough to reach,” Mel said to her. “And if I catch you trying, I will snatch you bald-headed.”
    “Melisande!” The grandmother put her hands over Kerrie's ears. “Is that any way to speak to a child?” My sister looked a little bewildered. Mel tended to make colorful threats, but we never took her seriously.
    “It's the way you always talked to me, Momma,” Mel said, dabbing soap onto a sponge she found in the sink. She handed it to me.
    “This sponge is going to get all black,” I said after the first swipe.
    “Don't bother about it,” Mel said. “It'll wash or it'll throw. We can get more.”
    “You can get them right there under the sink,” the grandmother said helpfully. She started messing with spray bottles and drying rags and offers of iced tea. All things the job didn't need, but I liked the feel of this shared activity. We talked very little, we fought not at all.
    Kerrie, meanwhile, showed Aunt Clare her body roll-on, and the both of them wrote their names on their legs. Kerrie told her sad story of the eyelashes. I glanced at Mel and she gave me a firm look, one that said,
Who cares if she tells?
    There was some tsk-tsking and a remark from the grandmother that we were all lucky Kerrie didn't go blind. I didn't look down to see if any of it was aimed at me. Wall washing, that was all the meaning in my life.
    The water dripped down my arm and off the sharp point of my elbow, and Mel dried the counter before it be-came slippery. Every couple of minutes, I handed a black-ened sponge down to Mel for rinsing and resoaping, until it wouldn't come clean anymore.
    The smoke stains were oily, and there had been an old coat of kitchen grease on the cabinets before the fire. I was tired, but I was also glad I had something to do.
    “I wish I could offer to help with the cabinets,” Clare said three times in about an hour. “If I had known we'd be working on a kitchen project, I would have dressed accordingly.”
    “We have enough hands at work here,” Mel said.
    Mel was no doubt happy to have Kerrie occupied, even if the eyelash fiasco was now known to all. Although it did seem to me it ought to be Mel sitting in the chair and Aunt Clare soaping the sponge. No one said anything along these lines, but Aunt Clare couldn't leave it alone.
    After a few harmless remarks about the trip we made, she began to take potshots at Mel again. “How are you feeling?” Aunt Clare asked. “Do you find pregnancy more of a drain, being an older mother and all?”
    “Not in the least,” Mel said, a hard edge creeping into her voice. “It makes me feel twenty years old all over again.”
    “Well, you look wonderful,” Aunt Clare said in a falsely flattering tone.
    In fact, Mel looked like someone who had driven through the night without sleeping more than a few minutes at a time, and there was no one there who didn't know it. I looked at Mel with what she sometimes called “a speaking glance,” but she only shook her head as if to say,
Don't get into it with her.
    So all right, I wouldn't. But I couldn't keep entirely quiet either.
    “Why is it that the
e
in Clare is pronounced but the final
e
in Melisande is silent?” I asked, in the direction of the ceiling.
    It seemed they were stumped for an answer.
    I handed Mel the sponge and saw that she'd thinned her lips till they were practically gone. I grinned and she laughed.
    That made me laugh in this strange contorted way, like my voice came through a spiral straw. The grandmother and Clare didn't see anything funny. Mel laughed harder, like she was crying, and then I did too. Laughed so hard, I felt weak in the belly.
    “They're both punch-drunk,” the grandmother said.
    Kerrie said, “What does that mean?”
    Mel slapped my leg with the sponge before she gave it back to me; our laughter had become