The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read Online Free PDF

was her only source of electricity.
    With the summer so hot, Lily spent only nights on the mattress in the bus, mosquito netting delicately draped above her.
    Lily hadn’t spoken much to Mabel since the evening a few nights before at The Red Opera House, though she knew shewas wrong to be angry. It shouldn’t matter that she and Mabel didn’t share every interest. Lily should love that Mabel and Jordan were close and could appreciate together the dirty dark recesses of collapsing rooms and the studied appraisal of the worthless. It was sweet, after all, to see them stumble up from that basement window, happy with the precious junk they’d discovered. Lily used to love the antique shop, but after living there for several years, she had become tired of all the topsy-turvy: the old incomplete sets of encyclopedias in the kitchen cabinets; the dishes and saucers on the bookshelves; the chairs and rugs stuffed into the rafters of the ceiling; stamped tin from ceilings rusting in a pile on the floor.
    Lily longed to be more peaceable, to remain aloof and serene in the face of her frustrations. She longed to be calm and wise and forgiving. People love you more when you’re quiet, Lily imagined, when you can simply accept. When again she saw her mother, Lily would be the sweet, understanding girl that she had never been before, and she and her mother could enjoy an uneventful afternoon of simple questions and simple answers. Aside from some kisses and some hugging when they first saw each other, their reunion would lack all drama. It would lack all punishment. Lily relaxed, imagining the few hours she would spend drinking tea within the mud walls of her mother’s cool, blue house. Her mother had written of the papery sound of scorpions on the floor, a sound she said would be soothing if it weren’t for the fear of the sting.
    Lily had found a traveling cocktail set on a back shelf ofthe shop, the worn leather strap of the case having turned as fragile as cardboard. As she assembled the martini glasses, screwing the glass cups into the red metal stems, she decided it would be a perfect evening. Just the night before, as she and Jordan sat naked in the heat of the bus, too hot to touch, Jordan had suggested they go find Lily’s mother, that they drive down to the border town where her mother wrote lovely letters to her daughters.
    Their mother had called from time to time when Lily and Mabel were still girls. Her voice buzzed and popped with distant noise and tickled Lily’s ear. Lily always asked, “What have you been doing?” and her mother always said, “Oh, keeping the wolves at bay.” Lily hadn’t known what that meant, but she had liked the idea of her mother keeping wolves. She could imagine her in a bungalow along the coast of Mexico, the walls reflecting waves of blue as she licked an oyster from a shell. Near the window overlooking the bay, dirty wolves wrestled. “Can we come to Mexico?” Lily once asked. “Oh, you wouldn’t like it here,” her mother said. “There are bandits to steal your purse. Black widows build webs above your bed. In the cafés, you can’t even get a glass of ice with your pop.” At the time, Lily longed for this terrible place as her mother described it. There, she and Mabel and their mother could live in fear and disgust, never answering the knocks at their door because, in a foreign land, no one could be trusted.
    Lily put on a dark-blue sleeveless velveteen dress that was too hot for summer but too cool for winter, and she curled theends of her hair with a disposable butane curling iron she bought at the Everything for a Buck. She and Mabel always dressed up on their birthdays, and they always gave each other gifts. They didn’t allow each other to spend a dime, however; they were to find something appropriate in the shop and wrap it up. Lily cheated a bit this year, having gone through a trunk of her father’s things in one of the spare rooms. She selected for Mabel a Joan