Then one night, I came home early from work and found Rachel and Kevin sitting on our front porch together. Very close together. Rachel was sixteen. She had her head on his shoulder.
When she saw me, she jumped up and laughed.
“Oh my God, relax,” she said. “We were just talking. It’s a joke. You’re so serious all the time.”
Kevin and I broke up two weeks later. He started dating a girl from his community college. Rachel
acted like she didn’t even remember his name.
My mother’s answer was always the same.
“That’s just Rachel.”
It was like a spell she could cast. Anything Rachel did, any mess she made, any thing she took or broke or ruined, three words made it okay. That’s just Rachel.
My father never said much. He’s a quiet man. A retired high school shop teacher who builds
birdhouses in the garage. But sometimes, when Rachel did something and my mother said that’s just Rachel, I’d see my father look at me across the dinner table. Just a look. Like he wanted to say something and didn’t know how.
I learned early to keep things away from my sister. To not show her what I loved. To not let her know what mattered to me, because the things that mattered to me were the things she wanted most.
