The Bird Sisters Read Online Free PDF

eighty-four.
    “I bumped you,” Milly said, and Asa turned.
    “I don’t mind,” he said, smiling crookedly for the briefest moment before his cheeks grew pink and his wheat-colored bangs fell across his eyes and he looked down at the floor.
    “I don’t mind either,” Milly said, smiling and looking down too.
    She didn’t know what their encounter meant, if anything, but the feeling of it—like swinging higher and higher, up, up, and up—stayed with her that day, the next, and the next, which was how Milly’s mother had described meeting Milly’s father.

    Rollie drove the tractor over the river and the County C bridge. He drove past the ice-cream stand and the underground house with grass for a roof, the Clydesdale farm, cornfields, and the petting zoo. When they arrived at the hospital, Twiss uprooted everyone in her path until she found their father. The nurses chased after her with bottles of peroxide and rolls of gauze. They thought the dirt on her feet was dried blood, but they couldn’t make sense of the cake batter plastered to her face and hair. “Vomit?” they called after her as if that was her name.
    Milly found her mother in the waiting room and the two followed the trail of footprints until they found Twiss curled up next to their father in a windowless room. He was stroking her sticky hair, telling her the story of how he came to reside in a hospital bed.
    “I’d just helped Alyce Sweeney shave off two strokes on the moguls between the seventeenth and eighteenth,” he said to Twiss with the kind of wide smile you wouldn’t expect from someone who’d gone off a bridge. “Just so you have a sense of the mood I was in.”
    “I thought she was away at that fancy women’s college,” their mother said.
    “Bryn Mawr,” their father said. “She’s just gotten back from a semester in France. When her ball landed in the woods and we had to go searching for it, she said, ‘ C’est la vie. ’ ”
    “Oh,” their mother said, a little sadly.
    “You never give lessons on Sundays,” Milly said.
    “After Alyce and I finished playing, I was on my way home,” their father said.
    He said he was so pleased with his teaching that when he saw the ice-cream stand he decided to stop off for sundaes. He picked butterscotch for their mother, strawberry for Milly and Twiss, and chocolate for himself. He never got the flavors right. Milly and Twiss liked butterscotch and their mother liked chocolate. Their father didn’t even like ice cream.
    “What happened next?” Twiss said.
    Their father said he was halfway across the County C bridge when he couldn’t help but look at the sundaes on the passenger seat, at the whipped cream and chopped nuts, the gleaming maraschino cherries. Before he realized what was happening, the car went plunging off the bridge and into the river. The last thing he saw before he hit the water and everything went black was the sundaes flying in formation out the window.
    All he knew was that the current carried him a mile down the river, past the new docks and the old boat launch, all the way to the bait shop, before a fisherman pulled him out of the water. He bruised his hip and his shoulder, and sprained the pinky finger on his right hand, but was otherwise unharmed, or so all of them thought at the time.
    “They would have melted before you got home,” their mother said.
    “We could have drunk them like frappés,” Twiss said.
    “When have you had a frappé?” their mother asked.
    Twiss moved closer to their father. “At the course restaurant.”
    Milly stood an equal distance from each parent. “They’re French, aren’t they?”
    “Since when are you a diplomat?” their mother said to Milly.
    “Diplomats do quite well, Margaret,” their father said. “If Milly keeps this up, you’ll have all the china in China.”
    “And you’ll have all the debts in Wisconsin,” their mother said.
    She opened her purse to look for loose change. She hadn’t eaten since