The Bird Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

I have river fungus!”
    “The river doesn’t have fungus,” Milly said.
    “Why do you think the water’s brown?”
    “Sediment,” Milly said.
    Twiss stopped mashing her toes in the earth when Rollie, the groundskeeper of the golf course, started up the driveway on the red Farmall, the tractor he used to mow the course.
    “Father!” Rollie yelled, when he got close enough for them to hear. “Accident!”
    Bad news provoked responses in Twiss more quickly than in Milly, who stayed on the porch, knowing she should run after Twiss but standing still instead, the way she did when storm clouds gathered on the horizon. The thing about clouds was that you never knew what would come out of them. You could end up in the cellar for rain or in the house for a tornado.
    “Run!” Twiss said, and Milly let herself go.
    But not entirely. Before she followed Twiss to the tractor, she took the cake out of the oven and turned the oven off. As she ran out of the house, across the porch, and down the driveway, her white apron flapped like a flag in the wind.
    After Rollie explained their father was in the hospital, but was going to be all right, Milly and Twiss slumped onto the wells of the front wheels while Rollie drove the Farmall down Lilly Road, up County C, and around Back Bend, a stretch of land beside the river where families poorer than them lived in shacks made out of cardboard. People said Back Benders ate worms the way regular people ate spaghetti.
    A little girl with long black hair and pretty white skin waved to Milly, and Milly waved back. Without thinking, she unclasped the oval locket she was wearing and tossed it in the girl’s direction. The girl ran after the flash of silver and caught the locket before it fell to the ground. The girl made it all the way to her front door before Milly realized that food would have been the more useful thing to have thrown.
    Milly also realized she’d given away something that could be replaced and something that couldn’t. The locket contained a photograph of Milly’s mother and father before they were married, a week after they’d been introduced on the golf course in Butterfield, the town where both of them had grown up. The day they met, Milly’s father carried her mother’s golf clubs the length of the course before he had the courage to ask her out. He carried them the length of it back before her mother had the courage to say yes.
    Her mother had just turned sixteen, her father seventeen.
    In the photograph, they were on their first date: a Friday night at the county fair. Midway through the evening, an old man convinced them to stop and have their photograph taken. “What’s a nickel in the face of love?” he said.
    The old man positioned them in front of a paper moon, a sky filled with cardboard stars. He didn’t tell them to smile because it wasn’t the style at the time; hard-faced expressions were. Milly’s mother and father had just eaten watermelon slices at the stand across the way, and one of the seeds was stuck to her father’s collar. Her mother leaned forward to pluck it off. Either because he was quite skilled or quite unskilled, the old man snapped the photograph after her mother had retrieved it, when they were looking at each other, laughing as if a watermelon seed were the funniest thing in the world.
    Milly wondered what her story would be.
    There was a boy at school named Asa, whom she’d brushed shoulders with in the hallway between math and art before the quarter ended and summer recess began. Instead of embarrassment, Milly had felt a surge of inexplicable panic when, at first, he’d continued along without noticing. Plenty of boys had written notes to her or stuck their gum to her locker or pretended to drop pencils in an attempt to look up the skirts of her dresses, but Asa was different from all of them. He was quiet and shy, like her. Tall. Thin. He knew how to rope a calf and he also knew the square root of four hundred