Stay With Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

know your sister."
    I lived with him when I was in the fifth grade. I probably do know him better.
    "Elsa, that's not right," Da says. "The girls love Leila."
    The girls. I try sending my mother
be quiet
signals. This is just too hard for him. I look at Da, saying that I'll be fine, of course I'll be fine. It's easier for me, I say, meaning easier than for Clare and him. Rebecca was my sister, yes, but not in a daily way. More like a special treat sister. I miss her, but not the way you'd miss air.
    "A special treat," Da says, his voice and face both revealing that he hardly knows what he's saying. "I like that, a special treat."
    He's an easier sell because he really has to go. He'll see what he needs to, and I was kind of counting on that. Mother's another story.
     
    I like my mother. She's fair and reasonable and, when she chooses, funny. If I'd rather be like Janie, it's not because there's anything wrong with Mom. She wears pants she's had since medical school and really expensive jackets over men's shirts that are too big. She's as tall as I am (as Janie was) and her shoes, which have no heels, never look comfortable or stylish.
    I like it that before my father, my mother's great love was her work and that what caught her attention was that Da needed her. This isn't anything she's told me, of course. But anyone could take the facts of my father's two marriages and put a story together. I may have put the story together incorrectly, but it's the one I like best. Mother helped Da use the pieces he had from his first life and they've built a whole new thing.
    When the old thing (by which I mean Janie, Rebecca and Clare) bumps into her new thing, Mother makes it fairly smooth. So when she comes into my room as I am dressing to go out with Ben and says she wants to talk, I try to be as much like her as possible. She is, after all, someone who can build or fix almost anything.
    "Let's assume Clare agrees to this," Mom says, getting right to the critical question.
    I notice that no one has asked Clare since William talked to my parents. She's been over a few times. She and Da sit in the living room, combing through the details of Rebecca's plan. The drugs, the friends she saw, the hope to expand the store, what to do with the store. They go over everything except the
why.
For them, the
why
needs no discussion. They seem to feel that the way Rebecca died was as much a part of her as her height and her collection of silk scarves.
    Clare's lost weight since returning from Budapest, something she hardly needs to do. When my mother asked if she was eating, my sister shrugged, saying, "Oh, you know. At work, they say I treat grief like a diet."
    "Clare will agree," I say to my mother now. "She'll want to do this for Da."
    "Assuming she does," Mom repeats. "It's going to be very hard for you. Harder than you're thinking."
    "I
am
thinking it'll be hard," I say. "But not impossible."
    "It's not being with Clare that will be hard," my mother says. "Clare is a remarkable person."
    I think that's probably right even if she's a remarkable person I hardly know.
    "It's more, that eventually you're going to feel as though I chose your father over you," Mom says. "That I thought of him more."
    "I'm not," I say. "I'm not going to think that."
    And so what if I do? I don't have to be a genius to know she can't be in two places at once. I'll get over it.
    "You might, Leila, and it's normal. All I want to say is that when it happens, please know I'm sorry. You'll be right to be angry, but never think this was an easy choice."
    For as much as I like my mother (and I love her too, of course, but everyone loves their mother, that's no accomplishment), her insistence on not only telling me what I will think but also trying to shape the outcome of those thoughts makes me very uncomfortable.
    "Okay," I say. "I won't."
    I still have to put my hair up and pick out a sweater. My mother and I consider each other. She is not as easy to lie to as Da is. But