The less sick she felt, the more of her personality came out. I learned, for example, that she liked to hook rag rugs out of old clothing. She was a lightning-fast reader and could finish an entire book in a day. And apparently, last summer, she’d ripped something in her knee when she’d gotten overenthusiastic listening to music while doing housework and had started doing the cancan. She now referred to it as her “cancan injury,” and it still acted up sometimes.
Connie also had four hundred pairs of reading glasses. They were everywhere. In the cupboards, between sofa pillows, in bowls on the screen porch, on the kitchen table. She kept one pair on a chain around her neck and had at least two on her head at any given time.
“This is who I am now,” she explained. “There are worse fates.”
She also had an astonishing hobby. She refurbished old dolls and gave them to the local women’s shelter. She had a whole collection of creepy ones she’d rescued from thrift shops—dolls that looked almost like Barbie had undergone extreme plastic surgery: overly made-up cat eyes, and giant, swollen lips. They were supposed to be “teenagers,” and they were marketed toward little girls, but they really looked more like mutant porn stars.
But guess what Connie did with them? She took their faces off.
She wiped the faces with acetone until they were completely blank and then started from scratch repainting them to look, this time, like normal kids. Big eyes. Sweet smiles. Freckles. She braided their hair and sewed little play clothes for them. She gave them a second chance at a new life.
How could I not love her?
Doc was utterly lovable, too, by the way.
He took to sitting at the far end of the kitchen, deejaying songs for me from the Stapleton family record collection while I made dinner, and singing along to oldies with Doc Stapleton became my favorite time of day.
Add to that: Jack Stapleton knew how to dance. You saw American Rhythm, right? Where he played a ballroom dancer? That was no body double. He learned all the dances himself. So when he’d hear Sam Cooke on the turntable, or Rosemary Clooney, or Harry Belafonte, he’d show up in the kitchen, and pull me out into a spin.
Jack insisted it was essential for the fake relationship. “That’s totally what I’d do with a real girlfriend,” he promised.
The point is, I didn’t resist.
If Jack Stapleton just had to make me jitterbug with him every time he heard “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”—and spin me around and dip me and put his hands all over me?
Fine.
It was fake. It was fake. It was all fake.
But it felt so real.
It wasn’t just Jack. Hank gruffly helped me turn the compost. Doc nicknamed me Desperado and let me help him groom the horses. And Connie took to hugging me … and I didn’t stop her.
It made me miss my mom in a way I never expected. Or maybe not her, exactly—but the person she could have been. The relationship we could have had.
I’d always wondered if other people’s mothers were as good as they seemed.
In Connie’s case, I had my answer.
Yes.
It didn’t take long for me to feel a part of that family.
And, despite all its tensions and sorrows, I’d forgotten how good it felt to be surrounded by all those overlapping bonds—of affection, of memory, even of frustration. Sometimes I’d watch Connie swat at Doc for some snarky remark to Jack, and I’d positively ache with longing for more of whatever that was.
I tried really hard not to fall in love with them all, I swear.
But I failed most of the time.
With Jack most of all.
With unexpected things: The way he took every opportunity to shoot free throws at the kitchen garbage can—and missed every time. The way he was trying to make friends with a crow by setting popcorn out on the fence. The way he’d decided that the most sanitary way for everyone to sneeze was to put their face inside their shirt at the moment of impact.
“See?” he said one night, after sneezing into his shirt at dinner. “It totally contains the spray.”
We all stared at him. “But you just sneezed on yourself,” Hank pointed out.
Jack shrugged. “The shirt dries it off.”
“But now you’re walking around with snot on your stomach.”
“You’re missing the point. It reins in the germs.”
“But it’s gross.”
“I’d rather sneeze on myself than sneeze on someone else.”
“Are those the only options?”
Then Jack would look at me like we were the only sane people in the room. “Yeah. Actually. They are.”