I lay in the crib sleeplessly, wondering about what my life was going to be like spending twenty four hours a day with my sister. Don’t get me wrong, my sister isn’t a bad woman. It’s just that she’s…different. Our parents had died when I was in graduate school and had left me to take care of her. I was twenty-six at the time and was working on my doctorate’s dissertation. Money wasn’t a problem, Dad had been a stockbroker and left an enormous estate in trust for us. I had her move up to my college so I could look after her while I worked on my Ph.D. It wasn’t as big a dislocation for her as one might think, she was sixteen at the time and only had two years of school left to get her high school diploma. Dad and I knew that my sister would never go to college, it had been an uphill struggle just to get her through high school. Frankly, my sister’s not very bright. Her intelligence is considered to be at the low end of the normal range. That’s why Dad put the money from his estate in trust. He knew that I had my own life to lead and wanted his bank to help look after her when he was gone. Dad had structured the trust so that I had to go to work after I graduated. If I had an accident or became ill, the trust would see to my care. Otherwise, I had to support myself until I retired. My sister was bound by no such limitations, she was set for life. The bank would see that she was provided for without her lifting a finger. Dad had known that the possibility of Gina getting married to a wealthy man was almost nil. Aside from being dumb, my sister had the misfortune to be cursed with plainness. This wasn’t the everyday, ordinary plainness one might see in a Supermarket, mind you. This was an industrial strength plainness that guaranteed that she would never have a date throughout her school years. Her plainness, coupled with her lack of intelligence, education and thoroughly insipid personality made her unsuitable for any marriage I could conceive.

Nonetheless, she was a good hearted soul. She spent her days crocheting blankets for various charities, working in her garden and listening to the soaps on TV. It wasn’t a life that would appeal to a great many people, but it was fulfilling for her. She had an old pickup truck of her own and a license so she could do her grocery shopping and buy seeds and needlework supplies. Clothes didn’t interest her, she dressed in the most practical thing she could find, i.e., overalls. If our mother hadn’t died in an auto accident when she was five, things might have been different. Dad hadn’t remarried, instead he relied on the nannies he hired to raise his only daughter. Once they discovered my sister’s total lack of talent they worked hard to find things that she could do. The crocheting was one of the few projects that had come to fruition. Gardening was the other.