While my sister was forming in my mother's belly, my cousin Deborah Anne was dying in her mother's arms. The two events were unconnected. My mother never thought to have another child, and Deborah Anne had been dying ever since I could remember. She’d been born with wheezy lungs and wasn’t supposed to live past infancy, but she’d managed to hang on for years. Of course, the image of my aunt Doris holding her dying daughter holds more poignancy for me now than it did when I was ten, but it was summer, I was full of myself, and Deborah Anne was a whiny kid. 

            So, on that summer morning when Mother told me my cousin was dying, I might have said something like “Again?” while trying to restrain a grin. I didn’t like Deborah Anne. None of us cousins did. She had a stick body and an over- large head. Her expression was sanctimonious, as if death were a treat she’d taste first because she was good, and we were bad. Both of her names had to be said, and if any of us kids skipped a syllable, Aunt Doris would cut a switch and use it, even on Marty, who played lineman on the middle school team. Deb-or-ah Anne. Each syllable pronounced distinctly, chiseled by teeth and tongue, followed by the hush of a middle name. 

            John Harry Hoop was the best thing about Deborah Anne. John Harry was Deborah Anne’s older brother. He was thirteen to my ten, and everything in his house revolved around Deborah Anne. For seven glorious years, John Harry had had little to no adult supervision. He was well cared for (Good heavens, his mother was a Sunderland!), but John Harry had long had the freedom of dressing however he wanted, eating what he wanted, bathing when it suited him, and riding his bike at night on the sidewalks around town.  

            I adored him. 

            And the best thing about Deborah Anne’s turn for the worse was that I’d be seeing more of him. John Harry was spending the summer at Grandma’s. That’s where I was headed that morning, to a huge white house a block and a half away with a front porch and swing. I knew he’d be waiting, and I’d rushed to dress, clad in pair of cut-offs and a cotton blouse left from last year. I was shoeless because we were making forts and tunnels on the hill and yesterday’s clay had left my tennis shoes so stained Mother said it would take a bottle of bleach to get them white again. 

            I was nearly out the door when Mom called out to me, still dressed in a zippered housecoat and leaning against an Electrolux power nozzle.  She’d been vacuuming the shag carpet that morning, starting and stopping in the den, but now she shoved the nozzle aside like a discarded dance partner. I was hoping she hadn’t given up, that she wasn’t going to ask me to vacuum, because John Harry and I had started on the best part of our military base yesterday – the soldier’s hospital. The patients weren’t plastic soldiers but black carpenter ants. 

            John Harry had a magnifying glass and when he found an ant large enough, he’d hold the glass over it and together we’d watch it sizzle. Some I’d put in the morgue, but some he stopped short of killing and these I’d put in the infirmary. They were my patients, ants with fried-off legs, exposed abdomens, surprised mandibles. I loved each one. If I were late, I knew John Harry would fry all of them.

            “Denise, sit down.” 

            Mother’s words stopped me in my tracks. A declarative sentence. Exclamatory, maybe. We’d learned about the four kinds of sentences before school let out, but I’d known Mom’s tone all my life. She was jocular, light-spoken. Normally, she’d have said, “Hold your horses.” Or “Not so fast, kiddo.”

            She repeated herself.  

            I sat down in the floral chair to the left of the table and dug my big toes into the carpet. This was about Deborah Anne, I knew it was, and I'd never hated her more than I did then. It was her fault my mother was using this tone. Nothing but Deborah Anne was ever this serious. 

            “What is it?”

            Mom could have sat in the chair across from me, but she didn’t. She plopped down on the couch, flinging out one arm and cradling a brush attachment with the other. 

            “I’m going to have a baby,” she said. 

            Declarative statement. 

            My toes, buried in the carpet, bent, and when I tried to stand up, I fell flat on my face. I picked myself up as if I were doing a push-up and asked, “Why?”

            But I knew the reason. Earlier in the spring, Aunt Doris had brought Deborah Anne to Grandma’s and positioned her on the sun porch. It was a good place to watch the Easter Egg hunt. Before it started, Ava, youngest of the aunts, whispered, “Deborah Anne is on the sun porch. Why don’t you say hello?”

            I walked the long hall of Grandma’s house to the new addition, intending to be as nice as I knew how. I’d find a way avoid her adult eyes and skirt the impending presence in the room that I couldn’t see or comprehend. But when I’d stepped down into the sunroom, it took a while find her. In fact, I’d just separated her head from a pyramid of pillows when Aunt Doris had screamed, “Denise, what are you doing?”

            “Ava told me—”

            “Oh, God, why you?” She wrung her hands. “You’ve got dirt under your nails! Get out before my daughter catches something.”

            I fled the way I’d come, slamming the back door.  Ava noticed but didn’t stop me. By the time I’d wiped the tears from my eyes, I’d set aside Aunt Doris’s venom. I’d seen it many times, and often got more than my share. My good health was an affront to her every unanswered prayer.

         That evening, she called my mother to tell her that not only was I dirty, but I had a certain odor. “Ellen,” she said, “it’s high time you talked to that girl. She’s developing feminine smells.”  Later, Mom mimicked the conversation to Dad, and I expected laughter. Instead, he groaned, “Denise is too young for that business.”

            “That’s Doris,” Mom answered. “Maybe when this thing with Deborah Anne is over, she’ll be herself again.”

            Dad said he couldn’t remember her being any other way, and Mom told him to hush. 

            Now, with my newly pregnant mom spraddled in front of me, I remembered that day and the hate inside me shifted.

            “I wish she’d die!”  I screamed.

            Mother sat forward and plucked at the skin on her throat. “You want the baby to die?” 

            “I want Aunt Doris to die!” I shouted. “She put you up to this.”

            “Put me up to—” she stopped.  “Denise, what are you talking about?”

            “She said I smelled. That I had an odor and dirty fingernails. I heard you tell Dad. Is that why you’re having a baby? Because you want a better girl?”

            Mother sank back in relief. Her shoulders shook and then I realized she was laughing.

            “Denise, this baby has nothing to do with Doris. And I couldn’t ask for a more perfect daughter than the one I’ve got.” I was far from perfect, but we both needed the lie she was telling. “Look, your father and I didn’t plan for another baby but sometimes things just happen. Besides, this baby might be a boy,” she tried to look serious, “if it is, he’ll play in the dirt and have dirty fingernails. You can’t pay attention to Doris.”

            “But Deborah Anne—”

            “—is going to die soon. No doubt about it this time. Just play with John Harry. Keep him out of trouble. Oh, and” she pulled a pink booklet out of the end table drawer. “it’s probably time I gave you the talk but I’m too tired. Give this to Grandma and she’ll explain it to you.”

            I took the booklet. Bouquets of daisies tied with a dark pink ribbon were scattered on a light pink background. The title was “Growing Up and Liking It” by someone named Kimberly Clark Corp.  I just stared. I didn’t have much time for reading, but when I did, I read Nancy Drew.

            “Go on.” Mom rose with the help of the hard-plastic end of the attachment and shooed me out the door, “And Denise, only you and Grandma. Make sure John Harry isn’t around.” Then she muttered something about him probably knowing everything already, but I ignored it in my haste to get out the door. 

            My ants were sizzling. I knew it. I rolled up the booklet, shoved it in the back pocket of my cut-offs, and ran all the way to Grandma’s, and stopped halfway up the hill when I saw John Harry.  He paced with his head bent, hands in his pockets. His head shot up when he saw me, and he pulled his hands from his pockets and put them on his hips. Then, with the tip of his toe, he rolled an empty pickle jar down the hill. 

            “Get more!” he shouted. It was pay-back. I’d collected the ants yesterday, but today I was late. 

     The ants resided in a dead tree stump.  An enormous maple had been cut and the stump left in the ground until it sprouted suckers. Among those stems, now mixed poison oak, was a colony of black ants.       

         It didn’t bother me to pick them up. I liked to see them race then fall, halfway up the jar. Their bites were harmless, and now that the swarmers were gone and no longer in my face, it was like playing hide and seek. I’d move a piece of wood and find nothing, move another and expose a rivulet of ants, running in all directions.  

            We’d been heavily warned to stay away from that stump because of the poison oak surrounding it. Every year, a man clad in an orange jumpsuit and wearing gloves would strip the stump, and every year the poison would grow back. This summer, it had grown quickly, already forming a bushy hedge around the circle.

Aunt Ava had had a horrible experience with poison oak when she was young, a story that still floated around Harshbarger Mills, because it involved the town’s favorite couple and a broken engagement. Though John Harry and I had heard the story often enough, neither one of us had really listened.

         Especially me.

I liked picking the ants from the tree stump and had repeated the act many times, never once touching the shiny leaves.

Today was to be an exception.

To be con’t.