Chapter 5

Serena

The Victoria’s Secret bag was still in Connie’s car, unworn and slightly unreal, when Serena woke the next morning and remembered everything about the previous day in the particular way you remember a day that changed something.

But that was getting ahead of it.

Connie knocked on her door at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning and told her to get dressed.

“Where are we going?” Serena said.

“Out,” Connie said. “Wear something you like.”

Serena stood in front of her closet for longer than she usually did. This felt important in a way she couldn’t entirely articulate. She settled on dark jeans and a soft cream sweater that Margaret had bought her last autumn and which she had always felt quietly good in without knowing exactly why. She brushed her hair and looked at herself in the mirror for a moment — the face that had always been almost pretty, the face that the disease hadn’t visibly touched yet — and then went to find her sister.

Connie was waiting at the front door with her keys and her jacket and the particular expression of someone who has a plan and is committed to it.

“You look nice,” Connie said. Simply. Like a fact.

Serena felt the warmth of it move through her chest.

They said goodbye to Margaret who was in the kitchen and who looked at her two daughters standing at the door together with an expression that was carefully composed and said only, “Have fun. Don’t tire yourself out, Serena.”

“I won’t,” Serena said.

Outside the morning was cold and bright, the suburban street quiet, their breath making small clouds. Connie unlocked the car and they got in and Connie started the engine and let it warm up for a moment.

Then she reached across the console and held out her hand. Palm up. Waiting.

Serena looked at it.

She placed her hand in her sister’s.

Connie’s fingers closed around hers. Warm and certain. Not tentative. Not performing. Just — holding her hand.

They sat like that while the engine warmed. Neither of them spoke. Serena looked at their joined hands resting on the console and felt something she didn’t have a precise name for yet. Not romantic acceleration. Something quieter and more fundamental. The specific feeling of being held by someone who chose to hold you.

Connie put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway one-handed.

The mall was forty minutes away and they held hands most of the drive, releasing only when Connie needed both hands for the highway and reaching back for each other when the road straightened. By the time they pulled into the parking structure something had shifted in the quality of the contact. The first ten minutes had been conscious — Serena aware of every point where their hands connected, the warmth of Connie’s palm, the slight pressure of her fingers. But somewhere on the highway the awareness had softened. The hand holding had stopped being a thing they were doing and had become simply how they were.