1
A moment’s silence fell between them as the two sisters ate their supper, its preparation becoming a ritual of duties shared ever since Joan, the younger of the two, had moved into Old Prairie Place. What remained of the farmhouse and outbuildings, after the land had been sold off by its previous owner, an aging farmer, had been converted into a home for Doris. But her divorce had seen her living in the sprawling place on her own. So, the notion of Joan moving in with her had been the ideal solution, for the two of them. Joan too was single once more, bruised and lonely. But her work of restoring and painting old furniture, ‘bringing new life to it’ as she was often heard to say, kept her from falling into depression. She made money, more than shared the cost of living in a small, and sprawling, community not so very far from Des Moines.
“It’s become a home for us old and lonely girls,” Joan had opined, her voice teasing and light. She was the fleshier of the two of them and not as good-looking as Doris, but they each had a luxuriant mane of hair to crown slender, high-cheeked faces; both of them inheriting their father’s genes when it came to how tall they stood. They each reached somewhat higher than Carl’s shoulder and were surprisingly strong; shared in the burden of tending the plot of ground and a garden that the place was blessed with.
“Less of the old,” Doris had corrected and meant it. “The lonely part’s correct but I couldn’t go through another day with what I had with Carl’s father, as you know. And then…”
Doris’s voice had trailed away, and she had shrugged, had even smiled as the subject of Carl’s changed place in their altered lives together was hinted at.
“And then you and I got involved with him is what you were going to say…”
“Yes, I was,” Doris chose to agree, “but you’re the one Carl chose, and for reasons I can understand.”
Joan met her sister’s stare as she sipped on some fruit juice, their suppers finished and, as they usually did of an evening, sat and talked, drew out designs for work in progress or to be done, the kitchen table lit by a reclaimed and ornately framed converted oil lamp, creative work that Doris thrived at and made money from. The two of them certainly had creative streaks and that seemed to have been extended, in Joan’s case, to her unashamed involvement with Carl and which Doris had bought into but could not easily explain even if she wanted to do that. She didn’t, and that was before she had prevailed on Carl to spend some time with her too.
“Our parents, Tom and Ruth Hansen wouldn’t recognize the women we have become,” Joan ventured, reaching out to touch her sister’s arm as they sat side-by-side at the table and offered suggestions on the work being planned. “But then, they didn’t go through what we both went through in our marriages…”
“It still doesn’t excuse it, what you and I did with him,” Doris sniffed, but Joan wasn’t taken in by the haughty look cast her way. “Carl works so darn hard it’s a wonder he has the time to be with us, to help you out especially. He paid quite a bundle for that trailer I sometimes see him bring here.”
“It’s gotten to be so that I can’t do without that.”
“Or him, sis…it can’t and shouldn’t go on.”
“I sure know that and Carl does too, but you have your friends,” Joan replied in an even voice, “and I don’t, or things might change for me too. Carl wants to be with me and…”
“And I don’t want to hear the rest. I’ve been there too, remember?” She shivered as images of her first time with Carl were recalled, played out over the back of her closed eyelids as if in a newsreel of long ago. Doris opened her eyes suddenly and looked across the space between them. “I’ll go and make us a coffee.”
“I do remember,” Joan answered and put a consoling touch on Doris’s arm, then restrained her from leaving the table. The rest of the kitchen was in darkness. “We live this out while we can, and need to, is all I’m wanting to say.”
“It’s crazy, and you’re obsessed more than I am with what we’ve gotten into doing. I can’t believe we’re even talking about it, or that Carl’s going along with it.”
“Blame me…one moment of his understanding me led to so much more.”
Doris nodded and sat back in the wooden chair, its arms worn smooth by countless hands and the polish rubbed away long ago. She regularly smoothed furniture wax over the paler wood along with the rest of the chair, and others around the table, but otherwise their appearance was as she had always known them. The dates she was invited to go out on, the men who asked did nothing for her and there were nights when she lay in her bed, Joan asleep in her part of the house, and she would drift into satisfying a raging need by slipping fingers into her body and bringing herself off; the image of a handsome young guy, not Carl, pleasuring her, the older woman. What a lie she was living in suggesting to Joan that her behavior was inexcusable. Her sister had given in to her needs, and Carl had pandered to her and satisfied his wayward imagination.
“We’re all so different, under our skins and in our thoughts,” she finally said and replying to Joan’s confession of how her affair with Carl had begun, for an affair it certainly was.
She had once been the object of his pubescent imagination and she, not his father, had helped him to deal with his sexual development until trade schools and college, had brought him into the company of young women and, finally, Evelyn with whom he had set up home. Both she and Joan had become reckless distractions from all that he had with a young woman so clearly in love with him.
“How can we put all of that at risk?” Doris said, looking across the space between them.
“Put what at risk?”
“Carl and Evelyn’s relationship, that’s what!” Doris pushed back her chair and went to the sink, filled the coffee machine, and prepared to make them both an after-supper drink. “The longer we fool around with him, seek some distraction from what’s happened to us, we risk all of that.”
Doris leaned back against the countertop and waited for the coffee to be brewed and Joan’s answer to what had been said. Joan was seen to snap shut her sketchbook and twist in her chair to look her way. She thought that she saw fear in her sister’s eyes, that her source of solace and raw physical satisfaction might yet fall from her grasp.
“He’s become a loving obsession with me, along with the help he gives in bringing things back here and for me to work on. He says that Evelyn agrees to him being here whenever he can.”
“And you demand it of him.”
“I don’t have that much control over him!” Joan snapped in reply and closed the space between them. She stood by Doris’s side and knew again from what they had been speaking of, and her sister’s appearance, how Doris dressed, her blonder hair, even the softness of her hands, how different they were. “Just let me work it all out, what to do, and how to bring it all to an end. He makes me feel good…wanted.” Joan sighed on meeting her sister’s look upon her. “I’m not going to say anything about what may go down between you. Carl says nothing about it, just as I reckon it should be…”
“We, neither of us, can be jealous of the other. That’s not how this works, isn’t that so? “We’ve gotten into a real tangle with Carl, and that goes for you more than me,” Doris ventured.
She had turned to look Joan’s way even as she finished preparing their coffees and sliding the small cup, on its saucer, over the countertop to Joan. It suddenly registered that Joan had lost some weight, her slacks fitting her hips and thighs so much better, and her maroon tank top hung looser, though it shaped her breasts and the soft swell of her tummy. She never could get close to that look, and it might explain some of Carl’s behavior; his lust for Joan, and his explicable restraint with her.
Joan followed Doris back to the table, the night outside pitch dark and the table bathed in a pool of warming light. “Yes, neither of us should be jealous, although I do wonder about that sometimes, and that makes it all so much harder to deal with.”
In a couple of days, Carl would again be helping her take a large piece of restored furniture to a customer, the drive there longer than usual. There might, then, be time to take stock of how her affair with Carl could be pursued but at a lesser frequency and level of intensity.
To give up completely was not in the mix as far as she was concerned, but she wasn’t attached and living with a man. Carl had ‘his Evie,’ as she was often referred to and she knew that she had no right to put that relationship at risk.
Affairs soon ran into the sand, wasn’t that so?
2
She would meet his stilled look upon her and would wonder what lay behind those dark eyes, what had provoked the set of his lips, and what thoughts raced through his head, under that tousled mane of brushed-back brown hair. There would be the quick sweep of a hand through it as it tumbled down on one side of his face and he spoke to her again, prompted by the silence that had fallen between them or in response to something she said, but now a touch to his arm. She had often wondered about his motivation for helping her, the prospect of pursuing an affair a thin reason for doing so, but his passion and raging moments of lust pushed all thoughts of that to one side. She felt that too in her aging body, slimmer than it had been for some time, but his vitality in loving with her also left her weak, her lips and hips aching from his kisses and crash of their bodies against each other; how they loved defying who they were to each other.
Remembering such moments with him made it abundantly clear that Doris could not share in them in the ways that she did with Carl, but neither did that excuse what she had found with him. Explanations were few and none would ever be sought, but her talk with Doris a few nights ago had left its mark.
“Is it getting too much for you, being with me? Or is it affecting how you are with Evelyn? You…you sure want to love with me, when we can do that.”
She turned in her seat and saw the trees of the woodland they had been driving through, gradually thinning out and then ending, open fields of the prairie flashing past the window as Carl drove on.
“Doris is making her feelings known about us. After all that I’ve done, to make up your rooms, I don’t want things going sour between you two on account of me. I’ve been selfish but that’s how being with you makes me feel. I’ve become obsessed with what we can find. I’ve said it before…”
“Yes, you have,” she murmured in reply.
His look upon her confirmed what Carl had just told her. The flouncy, summer dress with its floral pattern in a variety of greens, billowy sleeves, and frilly hem to the skirt had been just perfect for the weather. She had chosen to ‘smarten up,’ her words, for the trip of taking furniture to new customers. They had been thrilled by the results of her work, the service, and the price she had charged for the makeover of two sideboards.
“How you dressed for the trip was something new and I wanted some time together. I see you in work clothes too often and I saw another woman.”
Other truths about her place in his thoughts were being expressed and she did not doubt their genuineness.
“Was that the reason we stopped?” she asked with a brush of her fingertips to his face. The car park by the lake, bounded by the pine trees, had been empty and he had pulled in, the Jeep and trailer rocking on the dry and uneven dirt and gravel surface. “Yesterday afternoon wasn’t enough for you, was it?”
He was seen to pout as if thinking over what to say in reply.
“I wanted you again…call me obsessive after Doris had had her say. She sure talks as if to send me on a guilt trip, only I don’t feel that.”
“And I couldn‘t stop you or myself.”
Even though she brushed her fingers over the back of his hand as it gripped the steering wheel, Joan looked away and out of the window. She had again become as if a moth attracted to the light until the flame got too hot. Carl had used the word that summed up her feelings too. Like him, she had become obsessed with what they could do with each other, but what she had shared with him back there in the parking lot had scaled new heights of depravity.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked as the low hill that Old Prairie Place stood on, and the trees that surrounded it, came into view, the early afternoon sun almost directly overhead.
She sighed and looked his way, met his concerned look. The scented wipes that he had in the car, the easy-seal packet in the passenger door that she leaned against, had been used to clean the skin of her thighs and mop up what had leaked out of her after Carl had withdrawn and tugged up his briefs and pants.
“No more than usual,” she answered, finally, hearing him sigh and nod in acknowledgment. “I always know how it’s been for you.”
Joan took the opportunity of him slowing down and then stopping, to allow a line of cars and utility trucks to pass the entrance to her home, to lean over and kiss him as he turned to look at her for an instant.
“We’ll get to the end, we’ll of….love things through.”
“You were right the first time, we’ll fuck things through, ‘cos that’s all there is between us if we’re both being honest and what Doris is hoping for. It goes the same for her, I guess though you haven’t said a thing about that and neither has she.”
3
“Are you two okay?” Doris called out to them. She had been seen standing in the doorway to her studio talking on her cell phone and now stepped across the yard to join them, as Carl took to unhitching the trailer. He had nowhere to park it, where he lived, and it was used mostly to help Joan. “I answered a call for you, Joan…went into your workshop to do that.”
“Thanks, so few people call me on a landline,” she smiled in acknowledgment, taking in what her sister was wearing. “Have you been out too?”
“Nope! I’m giving myself a day off, seeing as I’m right up to date with my work. The home décor places in the city are stocked up with my things…”
“They’re selling?” Carl asked as the three of them walked along the path to the house. He gazed out over what passed for a garden lawn and saw that it needed cutting. He might even offer to do that as he was in no rush to get back to his home.
Impetuously, Doris grabbed his arm and clung to him. “Yes, and don’t be so surprised. I work on smaller things that’s all, glass and pottery are my specialty, so I don’t need a big trailer as your aunt does.”
Joan saw her sister’s shrug of the shoulders but didn’t rise to the bait. “I’ll go check on the messages I’ve had.”
“Do that, the woman calling was asking about a complete room makeover. She wanted you to go there and apologized for the rush and the short notice.”
Joan stopped their progress, turning on her. “You listened to it all the way through?”
“Why yes, of course, I did. She rang twice and I sure didn’t know when you two would be getting back here… distracted as you so often are when I see you two together.”
Carl pulled his arm free of her continuing hold on him. “Leave it, will you…the sniping, or just come out and tell us what’s on your mind!”
“It’s this, only this!” Doris flared. “Think of me, will you, think of how it is for me knowing what’s going on between the two of you! I’m sure glad we live out here and not up in the city! Secrets there don’t keep, and I sure hope it stays that way out here!”
Joan stepped away. “We spoke of this the other night…”
“We sure did, and now I’ll have to talk with Carl if he’ll listen.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” she heard him reply, a sullen look that she knew so well from his younger days to be seen on his face. Along with that came an appraising look upon her. “Go and sit on the terrace under the parasol I see you’ve put up, and I’ll get us all a drink.”
“Not for me, thanks. I’ll get changed and head into town. That way I let the heat between us cool down a notch or two.” Joan had turned away, but she said in afterthought, “Thanks for what you did, Carl. You were of help to me, as ever.”
♥
They had been seated on the terrace for only a few minutes, cool drinks set on the table, when Joan came out of the house…
