Free Sisterchicks in Sombreros by Robin Jones Gunn Page A

me all the significant details of your life.”
    “Okay, what do you want to know?”
    “Everything. Whatever you want to tell me. I’m trying to say that I want to be in your life more. You know how you said the older you get, the more you realize how important it is to be close to family?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, the older I get, the more I’ve come to realize I only have one sister, and I don’t think I fully appreciated you when I had the chance.”
    Joanne teared up. “Better late than never.”
    We hugged, and she pulled away with a bright expression. “I came to love you late! That’s been the message God keeps bringing to me.”
    I wasn’t tracking with her again.
    “You have to hear this.” Joanne hopped up and pulled a journal from the outside pouch of her suitcase. “Listen.”
    She stood in the center of the room and read to me from her journal.
    “I came to love you late, O Beauty so ancient and new; I came to love you late. You were within me and I was outside where I rushed about wildly searching for you like some monster loose in your beautiful world. You were with me, but I was not with you. You called me, you shouted to me. You broke past my deafness. You bathed me in your light, you wrapped me in your splendor, you sent my blindness reeling. You gave out such a delightful fragrance, and I drew it in and came breathing hard after you. I tasted, and it made me hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned to know your peace.”
    She looked up at me, her face glowing, and I thought,
My sister has turned into a fascinating woman. I didn’t know she had such deep and passionate thoughts locked up inside her
.
    “That’s powerful,” I said. “Did you write that for anyone in particular?”
    “Oh, no, I didn’t write it. Augustine did.”
    I probably should have known who Augustine was, but I didn’t. My ignorance wasn’t something I wanted my sister to know so I merely remarked, “Oh.”
    “It’s astounding to me,” Joanne went on, closing her journal and putting it back in her suitcase. “That a monk in the fifth century could articulate so clearly the same things I felt when I came into this fresh relationship with Christ.”
    “Oh,” I said again. “Yes, he’s very articulate.”
    “Of course, he wrote that in Latin, but I bought this modern English translation, and I think I’ve read through the little book five times.”
    “Oh,” I said for the third time. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with my sister. At least, I thought she was my sister. She looked like Joanne, but she kept surprising me with traits I’d never seen in the Joanne of my childhood.
    “I should probably finish packing.” I rose to my feet and tried to find a task. Being busy with my hands was usually the best way for me to clear my mind, and at the moment, my previously overloaded brain was about to spin out of control.
    Joanne fell asleep before I did. I felt a heaviness pressing against my chest. Her last words before she snuggled under the covers, with the strangely adorable twisted swan towel still at her feet, were, “Don’t worry about anything, Melanie. God is going to work out everything in ways that will make our hearts swell and our mouths drop open. I love you, Melly Jelly Belly.”
    I told her I loved her, too, but I didn’t call her Joanna Banana because I still wasn’t sure who she was. Or maybe I should say I didn’t recognize who she had become. I also wasn’t sure I liked the idea of my heart swelling or my mouth dropping open.
    In the engine-humming, slightly rolling silence of the cruise ship, I lay in the darkness and reviewed the clues to the mysterious woman in the bed next to mine. She was in love, but the romance was reportedly with God and not a new boyfriend. She was not planning to be a nun, yet she wasreading and quoting a monk’s ancient confessions. She was hoping to move from Toronto to get away from some unnamed man, and to top it off, I had found out