The Moon Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

about the funeral home. She knew I didn’t like it, and that was too bad. And if I thought she wanted to sleep in this friggin’ antique when it was so hot and unventilated, I had another thing coming.
    Thursday tasted like disappointment, like dry Cheerios without the sugar.
    She swore then with more conviction, and I could tell it wasn’t at me. The bus buzzed, and my ears filled with the sound of tired brakes straining to slow, to stop, of tires riding over the rumble strips on the highway. I thought I saw a green sign to my right, the kind that tells you the name of the town off an exit ramp, but then it was gone and I couldn’t have read it anyhow.
    “Hang on!” Jazz said, too late.
    The bus lurched, and somehow I landed on my belly, the floor heaving beneath me.
    “Are you all right?” I felt her beside me, her hand on my back. “Move something.”
    I lifted my head. “I’m all right.”
    “Good,” she said, her voice thready with adrenaline. “I’ve got to check the bus. You stay put.”
    “What happened?” I asked, but then I heard the door open in a shimmer of amber starbursts, and knew she was already gone.
    I flipped over and opened my eyes. Decade-old flour motes floated all around me, shook up like the rattled specks inside a snow globe. It was beautiful, the way they coated my inner calendar of numbers, days of the week, months of the year. There was a veritable blizzard of motes over July. July, which was now, this month.
    Catch them, Olivia , I imagined my mother saying, as I lifted my palm and smiled.

August 13, 1990
Dear Dad ,
What can I say? That I miss you? Because I do. So much. That I’m sorry? I am. I’m sorry for getting into trouble out of wedlock. But I would never have quit college. I would never have chosen one over the other: you or Branik, college or motherhood. Those things were your doing. It’s not too late to undo them. We can raise this baby between the three of us, can’t we? We can raise him or her to appreciate music and dance and literature and fine food. Under your influence, this child will strive for greatness .
I will do better with your grandchild, Dad, than I did with myself. I promise. I promise I’ll be a good daughter from now on, the perfect daughter. Just take me back into your life. Let me have another chance, and you’ll see. I’ll prove to you that I can do this, do it all! If only you’ll open your heart and let me try!
Who will water the bamboo? You always forget. Who will pet Fat Lizzy when she cries, wandering the halls and looking for attention? You will never dust—you know you won’t—and your eyes will turn pink and watery because of it. And what will you eat? You will have to hire a cook if you’re ever to eat anything but canned soup again. You need me. You may not want to admit it, but you need me, and this has to hurt you as much as it is killing me .
Did you hear that, Daddy? I am dying. I will die here in this town, without my life, without you, without college and my future! You have no idea what it’s like in Tramp. I am crying again, so hard that I am ruining this letter! I will have to fetch a clean piece and start over!
     
     
     

CHAPTER THREE
    Square Pegs
       JAZZ   
    T he quirks in my family weren’t easily swept under the rug, and not just because of Olivia and her synesthesia or her burning her eyes out. Our father liked to play his fiddle on the roof—or did before my mother died. Yeah, like the Broadway show and the movie. He’d stand out there, on the flat part above the garage, and fiddle around sunset. His name is Branik. His nickname among my peers at school was Breakneck, for obvious reasons. He had a passion for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and considered the grilled version one of his specialties. (I’d never understood my mother’s pledge to work a mention of a PB and J into the end of her book. Was it a bizarre sort of dedication? I didn’t bother to point out that the characters in her