Sisters of Misery Read Online Free PDF Page A

underneath her, holding a frame on her lap. Her hair, long and red as a stage curtain, shielded her face as tears dropped onto the glass of the frame. She rocked back and forth, crying softly.
    “Are you okay?” Maddie whispered hesitantly.
    Cordelia jumped slightly, her body stiffening, and wiped her cheek with the sleeve of her peasant blouse. She stood up, dusted herself off. Her lashes were beaded with tears, but her blank stare lacked emotion.
    “Fine,” she said, shifting her gaze away from Maddie, unwilling to make even the slightest eye contact.
    “Who’s that?” Maddie asked, motioning to the frame.
    “My dad. He’s dead,” she said quickly, definitively.
    “I know. I’m so sorry.”
    “Why are you sorry? You didn’t even know him or anything,” she said and quickly turned away and busied herself with unpacking a box.
    “Is that why you moved back to Hawthorne?” Maddie asked to make conversation.
    Cordelia looked at her dead-on, reluctant to let her guard down.
    “My mom couldn’t live in that house after he died. Plus, we couldn’t even afford to stay there. All the money went into treatments.”
    “Treatments?” Maddie asked. “How did he, um…pass away?”
    “The Big C.”
    “Cancer?”
    Cordelia continued unpacking the box in front of her as if the question was rhetorical.
    “So that’s why you’re here?”
    “Bingo.”
    A long silence stretched between them. Cordelia was obviously not going to elaborate. Maddie had been dismissed. But she wasn’t going to let Cordelia off that easily. If they had to live together, at least they would be friends. She settled onto the floor next to her cousin and started unpacking another box.
    “I lost my dad to the Big M-S,” Maddie offered.
    Cordelia waited for a moment and then looked at her quizzically.
    “Multiple Sclerosis?”
    “No, Mindy Sherman, the cocktail waitress he ran off with,” Maddie deadpanned.
    A smile slowly spread across Cordelia’s face. She nodded at a box, and they both went to work unpacking. They weren’t exactly best friends by the end of that particular day, but it was definitely a start.
     
     
    Later that evening, after Rebecca had passed out from sheer exhaustion from all of the work they had done on the shop and Abigail retired to her room for her nightly reading, Maddie heard a soft knock on her door. Cordelia was standing there in a long, white nightgown.
    “Tess wants to talk to us,” she said hesitantly. Despite their bonding earlier that day, Cordelia didn’t seem like she was one hundred percent sold on their new friendship. The two had barely spoken at dinnertime, and Cordelia had promptly buried herself in a book the minute she was excused from the table. It was as if the hours of telling stories and laughter in the store that afternoon never happened. She was, as Tess was fond of saying, a tough nut to crack.
    Maddie hopped off the bed and silently followed Cordelia. Her grandmother’s room overlooked the ocean, and Tess often spent her evenings gazing wistfully out to sea. Maddie imagined that was how Tess had looked on the night so many years ago that she discovered her husband, Jack Martin, was lost at sea.
    Tess beamed at her granddaughters and patted the bed, motioning for them to join her. Maddie allowed herself to be enveloped in the cozy darkness of the room, relishing the comfort of the old mattress piled high with quilts. She listened to the sounds of the summer night blow in through the open window. Kids were heading down to the beach. Maddie couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their voices bounced and echoed through the room. Every now and then, a girl would yelp and then start laughing—carefree, yet haunting in the darkness.
    “You know that you girls are special, don’t you?” Tess asked once the girls were settled. Cordelia and Maddie looked at each other, trying not to giggle at Tess’s serious tone as their grandmother continued. “The women in our family possess a