A Theory of Relativity by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page A

slipped up, especially after the baby was born, calling both of them
    “Keefie.” Gordon put one of his hands over his eyes and jammed Ray’s day calendar into his back pocket.
    This place. You couldn’t breathe. The air was greenhouse quality.
    That morning, awakening fully dressed on top of his comforter, Gordon had written in his spiral notebook, “Party girl, rowdy girl, dutiful daughter, rebellious daughter, perfect sister, sister tormentor, best friend, generous, and idealistic,” and “Georgia took no prisoners. It took the magic of Raymond Nye, Junior, to accomplish the transforma-tion. But if Ray was here, and I wish he were here, he’d tell you that he knew just who was boss.” It sounded like some awful roast at the Elks Club.
    He should be making Georgia sound like Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa, but how could he pretend his sister had meant very much to the world in general? She hadn’t. She’d had no time to redeem her life. All she’d done was love Ray and reproduce and help her brother out and make their folks happy . . . the only loss Gordon could truly feel was his own.
    They would never again stand behind Dad’s back and mimic the way he stuck his knees up like a heron when he walked. Georgia would never again send Gordon his Christmas present two weeks early, because she just couldn’t wait, and then call him and make him open it while she was still on the phone. They would never again get stoned and have to wait so long for a table at Fast Eddie’s that they’d start eating from the bus trays. Georgia would never again hear her baby say
    “Keefer.”
    He could not say these things—people were already impossibly Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 55
    A Theory of Relativity
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    sad. This whole ceremonial attempt was a physical effort, like hauling up a lobster pot, hand over hand, and just as deceptive. Water was so much heavier than anything you could swallow and see through had a right to be. Carl Jurgen used to complain about it, the summer that he and Ray and Gordon spent living alone in the Evans Scholars house, running the pots for the tiny old man who owned Leo’s Sea Subs.
    The thought that came to him, as he stood poised between staying longer and getting the hell out of there, would have sounded overblown if not suspicious to anyone else, but Georgia would have understood it.
    And maybe Ray would have, too. Georgia had probably been the real reason that his bond with his two dozen dearly and temporarily beloved girlfriends had never deepened beyond the well-rehearsed routine of date at the symphony, Italian dinner, first sex, regular sex, camping trip, denouement. Georgia had taken up more room in his life than a sister should have taken. Even good old loyal Lindsay Snow had rounded on him once and said, angrily, “You dote on every word she says!”
    He hadn’t doted on every word Georgia had said. But her phone number in Florida was the only number besides his parents’ he’d ever committed to memory. He and Georgia had, of course, gone through that teenage stage when the esteem of peers had been paramount; but she, and a few others, were most of what Gordon required in the way of intimacies. Tim Upchurch and Pat Chaptman were as close to him as cousins, closer than his own cousins were. Then there was Jurgen, and of course, Ray. But there had never seemed to be any good reason to try to explain himself to a woman, or to discuss intellectual puzzles with anyone but his father, or emotional puzzles with anyone but Georgia.
    There had never been a need to discuss anything with his mother.
    She read his mind.
    All his time had been consumed by taking care of Georgia or Keefer.
    Those nights he stole for Lindsay, he’d had to all but literally bite his tongue to keep from asking whether they could skip the preliminaries and go to bed. It was true that Gordon had begun investigating a tempting offer from Tortoise Tours, a new outfit that took families on tours to places