Practice to Deceive

Jimmie’s girls learned how to bake, although they barely knew the rudiments of cooking, and she didn’t care if they couldn’t cook plain food.
    Jimmie’s three oldest daughters had to clean house so thoroughly that even a hard-boiled army sergeant would approve. They had to scrub the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush until they were clean enough to suit their stepmother.
    If Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda sometimes “forgot” to come home and clean on Tuesdays after school, there was hell to pay, just as there was when Doris disapproved of their decorum.
    “One time,” Rhonda remembers, “I fought back and sassed my half sister, Sue. Doris beat me with the vacuum cleaner cord. She also used a paddle with holes in it when she spanked us. I always wet my pants even before she started to hit me because I was so scared!”
    Although they weren’t exactly “Cinderellas,” the older girls did not have a truly happy childhood. Her sisters remembered Mary Ellen, but Brenda still completely blocked the memory of the night in June when their mother was murdered. Mute for a long time, Brenda had finally begun to speak after many months on Whidbey Island.
    But she didn’t talk about her dead mother. And none of the children really knew what had happened to Mary Ellen. They recalled the blood and being wakened early by Tom and Mike, being lifted over a woman who didn’t look like their mother, and the older ones recalled men with cameras and strobe lights.
    As they grew older, they knew that Mary Ellen had been murdered, but they didn’t dare ask about it for fear it would upset Jimmie.
    Christmas was a time when Jimmie’s children felt more left out than ever. “Sue, Amy, and Peggy Sue got tons of presents, and our stepmother never seemed to notice how unequal it all was—or maybe she did,” Rhonda says. “I don’t know what she was thinking.”
    Jimmie and Mary Ellen’s six children got “one big gift” for all of them, a present from one of Jimmie’s aunts.
    Even then, Doris would give the present to Sue to “monitor” to be sure her stepchildren weren’t too hard on whatever it was.
    Jimmie’s children got along fairly well with Doris’s two daughters; Sue, sometimes called “Sweet Sue” with affection, was a nice girl. So was Amy, although she was shy and tended to fade into the background.
    For a blended family, they may have fared better than many such relationships. Of them all, Peggy Sue was the one who was most indulged—the baby of the family.
    Peggy was a chubby child, and Doris watched her closely, fearful that her beautiful baby girl might truly become fat. Peggy was allergic to eggs and chocolate, and she had to be on a special diet. Instead of milk, she drank Strawberry Quik. Peggy had sugar-free candy because she was allergic to chocolate. This wasn’t really Peggy Sue’s fault; she couldn’t help having allergies—but Doris coddled her excessively.
    “If I hurt myself,” Rhonda said, “I didn’t go to anyone for help—I just found a Band-Aid. It was the same for all of us. We knew she wasn’t our real mother.”
    But Doris watched over Peggy Sue all the time.
    “Once, Rob was spinning Peggy on his feet,” Rhonda remembered. “They were laughing and having fun until she got launched into the air and broke her arm. My stepmother was livid.”
    Doris bragged about Sue and Amy when they earned good grades, but whenever Jimmie’s kids got a D or an F, she told him, “That’s your child—not mine.”
    Jimmie noticed that her own children got preferential treatment, and although he was seldom angry, he complained to Doris: “You draw a line down this family!”
    Doris was a good manager of her household money and in handing out chores. Jimmie appreciated the comfortable home she kept. She liked the new house that Jimmie had built, but she had her eye on another house next to the one her new husband had provided. It was also on Edgecliff Drive. It was smaller, just an old—but quaint— farmhouse, and it wasn’t big enough to hold their large family. Doris wanted Jimmie to buy it for her and their children. But it was something that Jimmie simply would not give her.
    A long time in the future, Doris would have that farmhouse, although she wouldn’t live in it with Jimmie Stackhouse.
    Even though Tom, Mike, Lana, Brenda, Rhonda, and Robby were fond of Sue, Amy, and Peggy Sue, Jimmie’s first children were all afraid of losing each other. They had already lost so much, as