The Sister Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

good with his hands. Could fix anything, but also had a gentle touch, almost like an artist’s. It was one of the things that had attracted her to him. In her mind’s eye, she could still see the cowlicked young man standing sheepishly before her, holding out an oiled jewelry box.
    Beautiful box for the beautifullest girl in school,
he’d said.
    “Beautifullest” isn’t a word,
she’d replied with a giggle, pressing her toes into the ground to make the wooden swing she was sitting on stop moving.
    They oughta invent it, though,
he’d said.
Just for you
.
    He’d hand-carved that box. Etched an intricate little hummingbird right into the top of it, surrounded by vines and roses and tiny hearts. It looked as if it had taken hours. Hours that he could have spent working on his father’s farm or on his forward pass or on his car. But he’d used that time making a box for her. That was probably the moment that Elise first realized that he really did love her. It was the moment she realized it would be safe to marry Robert Yancey.
    The memory nearly buckled her legs right in the middle of the old pasture, and she had to stop and put down the bucket of seed, lean over with her hands on her knees.
    “Dear God,” she moaned, puffs of steam circling her face with each ragged breath. “Dear God, he’s really gone.” And this time her knees did buckle, as the image of his face filled her mind. The cute boy with the dimples; the red-faced, hard man who called her useless and berated her and never once remembered a Mother’s Day; the betrayed man, dead in his recliner at age sixty-seven. It seemed as if they could not possibly all be the same person. Who had he really been? And how did she not know?
    She slumped back onto her bottom in the cold grass and gulped as much air as she could squeeze into her lungs. Still, it felt like only teaspoonfuls. The sky swam, gray and burdened with coming snow, and she was sure she saw a birdhouse nailed to a tree just about ten feet in front of her, but damned if she could take a single step toward it . . . or even push herself back up onto her feet.
    Maybe it would be better to just freeze here. Maybe that would be easier. After all these years of stoically withstanding that which was so hard, maybe she could just, for once, go with the path of least resistance. Die in the fields, as her own daddy had done.
    “Mom?” she heard distantly, but she was still too busy trying to steady her breathing to process exactly where it was coming from. She thought there were maybe some footsteps approaching along with the voice, but in her mind she wasn’t sure if they were human footsteps or maybe the footsteps of Lucifer, Uncle Ed’s nasty old bull that had scared her so as a child. Wait, no. It couldn’t be Lucifer. They’d butchered him decades ago. They’d eaten him, Elise feeling halfway afraid to ingest his meat, for fear it would make her mean, too.
Think, Elise, think. You’re really losing it now.
    Then she heard the voice again. “Mom?” And this time it made sense to her—the voice of her middle child, Maya.
    With great effort, Elise pushed herself back up to standing. Still the world spun, but at least she could give the impression of having things under control.
    Maya caught up to her, running clunkily through the pasture in her high-heeled boots.
    “Mom! You okay? Did you fall?”
    Elise nodded wearily. “Fine. I was just . . .” She trailed off, unsure how to finish the sentence. Distantly, she felt cold, and she wasn’t sure if the words would form even if she willed them to. She took a deep breath, squeezed her eyes shut. “Just feeding the birds,” she finally managed.
    Maya squinted at the seed bucket at Elise’s feet. “At night? On the ground?”
    And the question was so ridiculous that things began to snap back into place for Elise. Come back to reality. The sky slowed and then stopped tilting, her lungs opened, her thoughts cleared. She waved her hand