Page 16 of Hot Lumberjack

“So anyway, after that absolute mindfuck, now I’m over here wondering if I should be seeing a therapist that isn’t dad to find out what bizarre thing happened to make me the way I am,” Abi said, only half joking. It wasn’t that she truly believed there was something wrong with her, it was the creeping sense of doubt that maybe something actually was missing from her life. She knew not everyone was as regimented about routine as she was. She wondered sometimes what it would be like to be spontaneous, to say screw this and toss her planner into the garbage. But then, panic would grip her stomach at the tens of thousands of details she would immediately forget if that happened.

She was never going to hear the end of this now. Leah would tell Shoshana, and Shoshana would tell David, and David was too much of a professional and a good friend to make a big deal out of it, but he probably would ask a few pointed questions, and this was why Abi absolutely, positively hated talking about her feelings. Not everything had to be a group discussion.

“Sho would tell you that therapy is great, everyone should try it,” Leah pointed out, settling into one of the chairs. She reached for a pill bottle in the fruit bowl in the center of the table and shook out a few, taking them with a swallow of the soda her sister placed in front of her. Abi mentally checked that off the to-do list: remind Leah to take her pills.

“Dad would say the same thing. He’d probably also offer to refer me to five different people. I don’t think I need to see a shrink just because mom has it in her head that there’s something wrong with me. I’m fine.”

Everybody randomly decided to go to a bar a town over, pick a fight with a guy you know from Hebrew School back in the day, and then have sex with the same guy in the passenger seat of your car. Everybody made out with that same guy in the neighborhood grocery store. Every single person in this town probably had at least one person they did that with. It was completely normal.

“It might be interesting to talk to someone about your need for control,” Leah said, opening her napkin and placing it primly in her lap. “You could probably do some work on why that’s so important to you.”

“Leah,” Abi said, glaring at her because there was no way to really put into words exactly how frustrating she was being.

“I’m just saying it’s a little exhausting. You keep track of every single thing. We don’t even live together, I’m a grown adult, and you still remind me to take my pills.” She lifted her sandwich and took an overly large bite for emphasis.

“If I didn’t remind you, you’d forget,” Abi said automatically.

Leah stared at her sister for a long, long moment, her face absent of any expression save a tell-tale twitch at the corner of her mouth. She put her sandwich back on her plate and wiped her hands on her napkin. Abi’s stomach curdled, and she knew it was a step too far. She knew she shouldn’t have said it, but it was a thought she had three times a day.

“I just worry, okay?” Abi said, picking a piece of mushroom that had fallen from her sandwich off her plate with her fingers and putting it back between the slices. She wasn’t hungry anymore. Talking to Leah directly about her health never ended well.

“I don’t know how I have survived without my sister there to make sure I knew how to live,” Leah said, her tone brittle.

“Look, I know,” Abi said, reminding herself to unclench her jaw. “It’s just—"

“It’s just you think I’ll explode if you don’t take care of me every second of every day,” Leah said, nodding sagely. “That’s a really great example of a healthy boundary, Abs.”

“You don’t remember what it was like,” Abi stated flatly. She reached for her untouched sandwich, lifted it to take a bite and then immediately put it back down again. She remembered she had been hungry when they decided to make dinner, but now food was the farthest thing from her mind.

“I don’t remember,” Leah’s face remained perfectly neutral. “Why don’t you remind me?”

“I hate it when you do this,” Abi said, taking a sip of her soda to hide her embarrassment. She knew she was in the wrong here, but there was no way to change the conversation without making it worse. “You always do this.”

“You’re right, I’m such an inconvenience,” Leah said.

“I never said that,” Abi said, this time forcing herself to take a bite of the sandwich because she hated wasting food and because it had been a while since lunch, so it was entirely likely she was hangry right now and that’s why she was being such a cow.

“Oh great, so I’m inconvenient in addition to being delusional, that tracks,” Leah shot back, her face saying she did in fact know exactly what Abi was talking about, but this was the cost of being siblings, and her sister was being the absolute worst by pretending it was something new. “If I remember correctly, then when we were deciding who was the boss of me, nobody ever offered to interview you for the position, Abigail.”

“You’re right,” Abi said, wondering how the conversation had turned this way. “It’s a nasty habit, and I’ve been working really hard to stop doing it.”

“So if I opened your day planner right now, there wouldn’t be a whole section on Things to Do So Leah Won’t Die?”

“That’s not what it’s called, and that’s just patronizing as hell,” Abi said, feeling as though the words were being forced out of her, even though that wasn’t the case at all. She didn’t know how to explain to Leah what it felt like—one day they were just existing, the next day they hit puberty and Leah’s body decided to rebel and because Abi, her twin sister, didn’t have the same problem, Abi’s entire life purpose became doing everything she could to make sure Leah was comfortable.

“Well that’s a relief, here I was thinking that would be a pain in the ass to hand letter,” Leah said as though she hadn’t spent the past ten minutes making her sister feel like absolute shit. “Listen, since you haven’t been getting as much sleep lately, what with the god-awful noise behind your house, how about I do you a favor and take all the Leah Business off your list entirely? Would that be too much to ask?”

“Leah, for fuck’s sake, it’s not a thing I do on purpose, okay? You’re my fucking sister, and I worry,” Abi said, her sandwich plopping onto her plate, immediately falling apart as the insides decided to skew in different directions. “Now look at what you did.”

“What I did,” Leah said, wiping her fingers because she’d managed to finish eating her own dinner during all of this without making an absolute mess of it. “I’m getting dessert. Do you want anything?”

“I want a do-over on this whole conversation,” Abi said, poking at the mess on her plate.

Leah snorted as she got up from the table. “I can’t imagine it going any differently if we tried again. Just accept it was shit and move on. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Hag.”

“Witch.”

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