The Bird Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

breakfast, when she’d spooned up the last few bites of Twiss’s oatmeal before church. She’d refused the ham sandwiches offered at the Sewing Society luncheon because she didn’t want to give the other members the satisfaction of watching her eat something she couldn’t afford.
    “You must be starving,” she said to Milly.
    When she emptied the contents of her purse onto the foot of the hospital bed, a comb, a case of powder, and a pincushion shaped like an apple came tumbling out. She picked up the pincushion by its green felt stem and turned it in her hands as if she were examining it for edibility. “You wouldn’t happen to have any money left over from those sundaes?” she said to their father, who held his hands up to show they were empty.
    “It’s at the bottom of the river, Maisie.”
    The result was never positive when their father addressed their mother by her nickname. Something old was buried beneath the familiarity that ended up making both of them sad. Their mother put her purse back together. She looked at their father the way she looked at the pantry when there was nothing in it.
    “Of course it is, Joe.”
    Even though they didn’t have money to buy anything, Milly walked down to the cafeteria with her mother. The kitchen had been closed an hour; the buffet was empty and the lights had been dimmed. In the far corner, a janitor was mopping the floor with a bucket of astringent, which smelled like the formaldehyde Mr. Stewart used to preserve sheep’s brains in the laboratory at school. Milly had earned an F on dissection day because she wouldn’t slice into the folds of gray matter with a scalpel. Mr. Stewart wrote in a letter to her parents to explain the poor mark on her report card:
    Your elder daughter believes she can save what’s already dead. I admire her as much as I pity her; not so long ago, I felt precisely the same way .
    Milly’s mother sat at one of the long wooden tables. She put her head down, even though the surface of the table was wet. Her hair had come out of the neatly pinned bun she usually kept it in, and the backside of her best dress, the light green one she’d picked out of the charity bin at the Catholic church two towns over to show the Sewing Society ladies she wasn’t a charity case, was stained with her monthly blood.
    “I’ll never make it to France again, will I?” she said.
    Milly thought about the partially baked cake sitting on the counter, the construction paper card she and Twiss had started but never finished:
    Happy …
    Milly untied her apron and wrapped it around her mother’s waist to cover the stain. She tucked a loose strand of hair back into her mother’s bun and secured it with one of the bobby pins from her own, letting her hand linger longer than was necessary.
    “One day,” she told her mother, “you’ll sip Château Margaux on the Seine.”
     
    3
     
     
    efore Twiss took the goldfinch up to the barn, she put on her muck boots and walked the perimeter of their property: a half-mile loop that had seemed large when she was young and large again now that she was old. She followed the tractor ruts, weaving around anthills and snake holes, breathing the first real air of the day. Twiss had never been able to stand being in the house longer than eating or sleeping required. When the end came, she hoped she’d be struck by lightning or whirled up into a tornado. Dying inside was to her a misery that couldn’t be borne; she’d made Milly agree to wheel her onto the porch if she couldn’t manage it herself.
    A windstorm had passed through the night before, breaking off oak branches and leaving impressions of the debris in the sandy soil. Still, no rain. Not a drop had fallen all summer, a cyclical happening according to the 2006 Farmers’ Almanac , a fact that eased everyone but the land, which had begun to bristle under the stress. The air contained all of the water the land needed to flourish, but wouldn’t let go of its claim