The Shortest Distance Between Two Women by Kris Radish

the side of her face. Too late to watch the first steps, hear the first word,scream over the first tumble down the stairs, cry after the first word is spoken. Too late for the first day of school, for sobbing teenagers, for that last wave when her very own child would round the first real corner of his or her own life.
    His or her own life.
    “Talk to me, baby, I’m awake now. What is happening?”
    Stephie tells Emma that her family is going yet again to the beach for spring break and that she’s sick of always going to the same place and simply doesn’t want to go.
    “No one around here feels or does anything unless my mother approves, and I’m not like them. I feel. I am me . I am not them . I want to fly, Auntie, I just want to fly.”
    Sixteen , Emma thinks. Sweet Jesus. Was I this brazen and brave and wise when I was sixteen? When I was sixteen my mother was just coming out of the desperate, depressing stage of grief that had her manically throwing out anything remotely connected to her now deceased husband. Sixteen, when I jealously guarded my few free moments when my mother was not calling me just so she could hear my voice and know I was alive. Sixteen, when I wished I could be anyone but myself. When for the first, but not last, time I coveted the life of the sister closest to me, Debra—her flippant responses to everyone and everything, the men who seemed to appear out of nowhere and throw themselves at Debra Gilford’s feet, the way Debra always seemed to fit in, to be popular, to be the one no matter what I said or did or how hard I tried.
    “If it helps, I hated my family too when I was sixteen,” Emma realizes and confesses.
    “What family?” her niece moans back.
    “Your aunt Debra. My mother. Your mother, for sure. Aunt Erika for a little while, too. It’s not easy being sixteen, honey, but neither was fifteen and neither will be seventeen. And just wait till you hit forty.”
    “Careful, you are starting to sound like my mother and I so wish you were my mother.”
    “Me too,” Emma whispers so softly that she wonders if Stephie can hear her.
    “Well, that would ruin what we have,” Stephie says firmly. “You know that, Auntie, don’t you? Because the way the world works I’d have to hate you too until I was, what, twenty-eight? Thirty? Eighty-something? You don’t still hate Grandma now, do you?”
    Emma rolls forward so her head almost touches her knees when Stephie asks her this question. She feels a cramp just the long side of a menstrual pain seize the edge of her stomach like a claw hammer. Stephie and her questions are going to kill her.
    “Oh, Stephie, of course I love her! But truth be told, sometimes I want to grab her and shake her until she shuts up and leaves me alone. I suppose a part of me wishes I’d been taken someplace I wanted to go when I was sixteen, too.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. Really.”
    Emma drops her head into her hands and thinks what it must be like to be around Joy, Stephie’s mother, and her manic and obsessive ways all of the time. Joy, who for as long as Emma can remember has acted more like the reigning queen than a nice older sister. Joy, who probably keeps detailed records on everything from her children’s and husband’s eating habits to what she does for the family reunion—which is mostly order people around. Emma has been absolutely biting a hole in her lips for thirty years to keep from telling Joy that her nickname, even among her so-called friends, is “Her Bitchiness.”
    Her Bitchiness when Joy always dumped her laundry off at their mother’s house and Emma had to do it.
    Her Bitchiness when Joy stood up her best friend and left withthe rest of the gang for a road trip just before she finished college and Emma had to tell the best friend.
    Her Bitchiness when Stephie and her brothers were babies and Joy simply assumed Emma would babysit without pay.
    Her Bitchiness twenty years ago when she handed off almost all of the reunion