Between, Georgia Read Online Free PDF

were based on Mama’s work, and craft stores all over the country sold reproductions of her molds so hobbyists could cast their own dolls. At this point, there was no financial reason to sell any more of Mama’s original dolls, and every doll she gave up seemed to take a bite out of Mama. But Bernese couldn’t bear to pull her thumb out of any Frett pie, and stopping would sever her tenuous connection to Mama and Genny’s work.
    “It’s for a museum,” Bernese said sanctimoniously. “And anyway, did you see how much they offered? But Genny can’t take this. She’ll pick and then she’ll chew and weave and bang until she knocks herself unconscious. And by the way, Fisher’s mad at you, too. She sulked her way through her egg this morning.”
    “Fisher’s naturally sulky. Tell her I’ll be there on Saturday, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, and don’t you call me again today unless you are personally on fire,” I said.
    Before I could hang up, Bernese was talking again. “Wait one second. Fisher was hoping you’d show yesterday, so you better talk to her if you really aren’t coming.”
    Jonno lay quietly beside me with his hand still trapped beneath my back. I asked, “And who told Fisher I was coming home early?” But I already knew the answer.
    “Let me get her,” said Bernese, and thunked the phone down hard enough to make me pull the receiver away from my ear. I hammered my heels into the mattress in frustration; I would happily have hung up on Bernese, but never Fisher. My earth revolved around that child’s sun. Fisher’s mama was Lori-Anne, Bernese’s tagalong girl-child. Lori-Anne had Fisher at sixteen and almost immediately crapped out on motherhood. Bernese and Lou were raising Fisher, but I felt like she was at least a third mine.
    As a baby, Fisher was colicky, and Bernese had needed a break from the daily four-hour screaming sessions. Mama was immune to screaming, but Genny couldn’t bear it, so Mama would take Genny to their studio while Bernese and Lou were off working at their store. For six months, I spent every Saturday and Sunday afternoon walking Fisher back and forth at Mama’s house. The doctor recommended swaddling, so I would wrap her tightly in blankets until she was a roly-poly tube with a round, angry face on one end. She reminded me of one of Bernese’s caterpillars, wailing and squirming, a limbless bundle of rage trying to flip itself out of my arms.
    Mama’s house was built in a circle around the central staircase.
    The foyer flowed into the living room and then the big eat-in kitchen. An archway in the kitchen led to the dining room, and the dining room opened back onto the foyer, closing the loop. I would walk baby Fisher around and around, as if the downstairs were a racetrack, while she screamed magic screams that seemed to require no pause for inhalation. After a few hours, she’d switch to bleating, breathless screams that sounded like an enraged goat.
    Toward the end, she did a series of short, coughlike screams, one after another, and the pause in between made me think every time maybe she was finished, and then another would come, and another, until I was ready to throw her off an overpass.
    But I fell in love with her every afternoon when she at last wound down and dropped into a boneless sleep. I would stand swaying to the music of silence, Fisher a solid string of limp weight in my arms. I would loosen her swaddling clothes and then lie down beside her and curl inward, becoming her protective shell. I was mesmerized by the grassy smell of her baby sweat and the way her fingers would clutch my shirtfront or my finger as she slept. I couldn’t stop rubbing my cheek against the skin of her fuzzy head.
    By the time she’d outgrown the colic, I was addicted to her. I doubled my twice-monthly visits home and brought over a third of my clothes from Athens. I hung them in my childhood closet beside a goodly portion of Fisher’s pink and yellow