Chapter 8

Jill walked through the door that was so familiar, and yet so strange. Always before, when she’d walked through this door, it had been to go to work. It had been to put on an apron, and serve Sal’s customers, make them happy, and hope for good tips in return.

Now that door seemed like something from a dream, long past. The dream intensified as the door pushed open and the smells of the diner hit her nose. She marveled at the sensations, trying to remember getting to smell that delicious aroma every day. She was somewhat saddened when she realized she’d taken that for granted back then.

Sal looked over, and his face rippled through a couple of unidentifiable emotions before he smiled.

“‘Bout time you came back to get a decent meal,” he said, trying to bluster.

Jill stared at him, looking so familiar in his own apron, stained with various food items. She realized she had taken him for granted too. She’d never really looked at him as a man. He was just ... Sal. That had all changed a mere half a month ago, when she had danced with him a dozen times in the heat of the night. He had still been Sal ... but he had suddenly been somebody else too. She’d thought of him dozens of times since then. He hadn’t called. She didn’t know what that meant, but there was a subtle disappointment there. It was that that had brought her into the diner again ... and not the food.

Still, she was unsure of herself. When she was with Bobby, she could be herself. Bobby took her any way she wanted to present herself, from blushing girl, to wanton slut. Bobby just loved her, and he’d made her feel truly alive again. Dancing with Sal, she’d wondered how he looked at her. Part of her kept saying that he’d only asked her to dance ... over and over again ... because he was being polite.

Her mind dredged up an attitude from the past ... an attitude that had displayed itself here, in this place, on a fairly regular basis.

“I haven’t been sick for a long time,” she said, grinning. “I thought I’d come by here and remember what it’s like.”

“I am wounded!” moaned Sal, clutching at his chest. “I thought you liked working here.”

He was joking. She knew that. She knew that he knew she’d been joking too, but it still didn’t seem nearly as funny as it might have a year ago.

“I didn’t really mean that,” she said, seriously.

He looked surprised, and then vaguely uncomfortable.

“I know.” He fidgeted. “Um ... what can I get you?”

About then the high school girl who had replaced Jill approached and offered to seat Jill.

“I just needed to talk to Sal for a minute,” said the former waitress.

She walked behind the counter, like she still worked there, and went to stand in front of Sal.

“How come you haven’t called?” she asked, unable to think of anything else to say.

Sal’s eyes darted around, for a single second or two, and his fingers fluttered against his apron.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” he said, looking scared, suddenly. It was a look she’d never seen on his face, and it looked wrong somehow.

“I think you were,” said Jill.

Sal’s eyes went round then, and he actually backed up a step.

“You mean it?” he asked.

“No, I just thought I’d come in here and tease you.” It was difficult to banish that old attitude, or the snide comments they had traded a hundred times. “Are you going to call me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he whispered. He looked like he was ready to bolt for the door any second.

“I’m going home,” she said as she pointed at the grill. “That burger is burning.”

She left, looking over her shoulder at him three times, watching him try to salvage the meat on the grill, and look over his own shoulder at her. She felt a surge of something very close to joy at the look on his face.

The twins were given even more to think about when Renee came home from the hospital with her new son. It wasn’t that it was Bobby who brought her home. That didn’t seem odd to them. Nor did it seem odd that Renee was almost jubilant, as she carried her son into the house.

What made them look at each other, with that look that only twins can trade, and which communicates much more than the looks that the rest of us give each other, was when they got introduced to the cute little baby boy. Renee uncovered his tiny face, and held him where both girls could see him.

“I’d like you to meet Robert,” said Renee, looking lovingly at the scrunched up face, with the thick mop of coal black hair above it. “Isn’t he just gorgeous?”

It didn’t take long, then. As if they were waking up from a comfortable dream, that they really didn’t particularly want to wake up from, the twins began to think about all the clues that had been all around them ... for years. They worked for Renee ... were around her all the time. They knew she wasn’t seeing any men. That she had gotten pregnant at all was one of the clues they had ignored.

It wasn’t that they were stupid. They just hadn’t been paying any attention to the world around them. Not really. They had had their own little world of friends, and school, and family, and in that world, women got pregnant. It was just something that happened, as far as they were concerned. Their mother’s friends got pregnant, without any particular man being identified as the father, so an unamarried pregnant woman wasn’t that odd to them. At the same time, the fact that women got pregnant was part of their thinking, at least when it came to what they had done with Chuck, their now ex-boyfriend. That’s why they had insisted he wear rubbers when he fucked them.

Now, though, their comfortable little world had changed. It had shrunk, a bit, which might explain why they paid more attention to what was going on around them. They didn’t see all their friends from school, now that they had graduated. They weren’t distracted by that part of their life any more. They worked with babies and children daily, now, for hours on end, and saw the personalities of those children evolve, with the extended exposure to them.

With that came a heightened interest in those children, and other children they saw, but didn’t necessarily take care of. And, with that heightened interest, they looked at those children in different ways than they had in the past.

After learning that Renee’s baby was named Robert, it was almost impossible for them not to connect the fact that the only man Renee spent much time with at all was ... Bobby ... whose formal name was ... Robert.

The epiphany they shared was so bright, and so obvious, that they disbelieved it, at first. It was like they went for a walk in one of the wheat fields they had worked in, as children, and were suddenly surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of trees. In this case, the trees were babies. There weren’t hundreds and hundreds of them, but to take the tree analogy perhaps a bit too far, they all seemed to be the same species ... with the same appearance.

And when they started looking for the gardener who had planted all those trees, the pool of possibilities was pretty small. In fact, it was a puddle, instead of a pool.

That’s what they couldn’t believe. They identified at least eleven boys who looked startlingly like Bobby, now that they thought about it. Two of those boys were delivered by their older sisters. One was delivered by their mother. And one, Kyle, had a twin sister, which meant that the father of Kyle was also the father of Katherine. That opened the can of worms that was girls, and there were half a dozen of them who were born to women who either had no husband, or who had a husband who didn’t seem to have given much to the appearance of their daughters.

You can’t just “accept” that your big brother has sired a dozen and a half children, with more than a dozen women, none of whom he is married to, and three of which he is related to by blood.

They didn’t argue about it. They just pointed things out to each other, and then traded off saying, “It can’t be. It just can’t be!“

And who do you ask, in that situation, for clarification, or information with which to form an alternate hypothesis? You can’t just go up to your mother and say, “Hey Mom, I was just wondering ... Theodore looks an awful lot like Bobby, and ... well ... did you, by chance, sort of have our brother’s baby?”

They couldn’t ask Mary either. Her two boys looked completely different. Besides, she was too much like their mother, in their eyes.

And you can’t go up to a woman you’ve known all your life, but who isn’t in your family, and just ask, “Hey, did my big brother just happen to knock you up?”

Then there was Bev. And they didn’t want to ask her either. It was still too easy to believe it was all some kind of massive conclusion they had jumped to, and they didn’t want Bev to hate them forever for thinking something was true that wasn’t.

That left Bobby.

In the end, as they finally thought of just asking Bobby, they couldn’t believe they hadn’t thought of that earlier. Bobby was ... well he was just Bobby. He was their big brother. He did chores with them, hardly ever bossed them around, played with them as kids, built things for them, including their secret tree house that their other sisters still didn’t know about ... he was just their big brother. He wouldn’t be mad if they were wrong. Somehow they just knew it. If they were wrong, he’d just laugh.

That was what led them to his bedroom door, on a hot night in late July, after everybody else in the house was in bed for the night.

Matilda turned the knob slowly. There was light coming from under the door. She pushed the door open slowly, not wanting to knock, for some reason. Bobby’s reading lamp was on, and there was a book lying on the sheet. It was summer, and that sheet was all that was on the bed, except for the book.

“Where is he?” asked Betty, from behind her.

“The light wasn’t on in the bathroom,” pointed out Matilda. “Maybe he’s getting a snack. We’ll just wait.”

Ten minutes later, they got tired of waiting, and went to the kitchen, which was dark and empty. Only one other light was on in the whole house, and that sent dim beams under their mother’s door. They could hear the faint sound of voices from inside. It had to be Bobby in there with her.

At that point, habit took over. They had been taught to knock, but Mamma’s room was different, somehow. Mamma was always alone. If her light was on, she was awake. Why knock?

They found out when they pushed that door open, and saw their naked mother, sitting upright, looking up at the ceiling, her mouth open and her eyes tightly shut. She looked like she was screaming, but only a long, low groan came from her mouth. Bobby’s fingers were pulling at both her nipples, stretching her breast flesh out until those breasts looked pointed, like a pair of very strange dunce caps or something. Bobby was naked too. His head rolled, and his blue eyes stared at the intruders.

So quickly that it seemed like a snake, his right hand let go of the nipple it was holding. The breast snapped back to its normal shape, and that hand whipped toward the two astonished girls, bending at the wrist, and then flipping toward them again. The meaning was as instantly clear as if their brother had barked: “Leave!“

Then his hand, still moving so fast it was almost a blur went to his face, and his index finger pressed to his lips, a silent caution for them to leave quietly. Only the fact that her fingers were between the door and the jamb stopped it from slamming shut, as Matilda’s butt backed into her sister and she pulled the door closed. She gulped breath, to keep a scream of pain inside, and extracted her fingers. Paying particular attention to the door, instead of the pain, she closed the door as quietly as she could. Then she danced, trying to be silent, shaking her fingers and moaning softly.

Betty wanted to talk, but Matilda pushed her. Somehow they ended up back in Bobby’s room, where the light was on. It only took half a minute for the pain in Matilda’s fingers to subside to the point where she turned to her still speechless sister and said, “It’s true!“