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will since year one of your marriage.” She leaned toward her sister slightly, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
    Grace took her stockinged feet off the coffee table and pushed Cig backward. She flopped back on a pillow.
    “So…?” Grace said.
    “You don’t know what I feel!”
    “Well, feel something! Say something. Do something.” Grace’s cheeks flushed. “I hate to see you suffer.”
    Cig sat up and twirled around, tucking her legs under her so she faced her beautiful sister. “Sometimes I hear the clock ticking. Sometimes I hear my heartbeat. I hear myself breathing. That’s my life that’s ticking away. I’ve never seen Paris. I’ve never been to Munich or St. Petersburg or Buenos Aires or Santiago or the fjords of Norway—you name it. Blackie took me to Ireland—once. I’d like to go back. I want to go places that are magnets for energy, for culture, for whatever the human race has thought and done over the centuries. I want to feel that crazy sweat running between my breasts when I see a man who excites me. But it seems out of reach… what I want. I can’t even pay my bills. I can’t imagine falling in love again. My one solace is foxhunting. FU still have that when the kids leave.”
    Grace grew solemn. “You know what I want? I want to go to the airport and hop on the first plane that has an open seat. I don’t want a plan, I don’t even want to know anyone wherever the destination may be—Istanbul, whatever. I just want to go. Maybe I want to forget myself. Maybe if I don’t hear English spoken I will forget myself.”
    “What’s keeping you?”
    “I don’t know.” Grace wistfully pushed a lock of hair off her forehead.
    “Will?”
    “God no.”
    “Dad?”
    “No.”
    “Me?”
    “I want to make sure you’re all right. I want to see you laugh again, really laugh. Then I’ll go.”
    Touched, yet somewhat disbelieving, Cig shook her head. “You are not your sister’s keeper.”
    “We all are. You said it yourself. You and I have unfinished business. Maybe when that’s done I can go.”
    This startled Cig. “What are you talking about?”
    Grace blinked. “I don’t know, really. It’s in the back of my head. When it comes to the front I’ll let you know.”
    Cig, long accustomed to Grace’s ways, didn’t press. Instead she asked, “Are you really that bored?”
    “Sometimes.” Grace shifted her position. “Aren’t you?”
    “The kids…” She smiled at Grace. “I think I want less than you do.”
    Grace started to speak then seemed to think better of it. “I don’t even know what I want.”
    Cig reached out to pat her sister’s hand. “I think the anniversary of Blackie’s death is hitting you harder than it’s hitting me.”
    Grace thought a bit, then said, “I miss him. He could be a bad boy but he was so much fun. Sheer irrepressible fun.”
    They sat a while longer before Cig observed, “You know how I know that Laura’s blabbing on the phone? It hasn’t rung once. She doesn’t quite get that the phone is business.”
    “You need another line.”
    “The noise! It’d be off the hook. Anyway, I can’t afford another line. I think I’ll go up there and yank the damn cord out of the wall.”
    “Later. Don’t you remember what it was like at that age—you had so much to say and it was the first time you’d ever said it? The first time you exchanged a confidence over a crush or talked about a book you loved and actually understood? I hear myself now and it’s like an old tape.”
    “Maybe you do need to go to Istanbul.”
    “You could come with me when Laura gets into college.”
    “Can you wait that long?”
    “I don’t know.” Grace became serious, then suddenlystretched out her arms and wiggled her fingers under Cig’s nose. “Snakes!”
    “Snakes.” Cig repeated the gesture, and they fell on one another laughing.
    Their mother used to do that whenever she wanted to hex somebody, usually at the card table, but she was known to do it