The Wednesday Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

her rounded shoulders in her muslin blouse still as death. All the mothers were packing up to take their children home for lunch, but Ally didn’t move. And when I looked again, all the mothers were gone except Ally, who sat there alone, one hand absently fingering a lock of long, wavy, dark hair. She got up and left, finally, with only the empty pitcher, the five empty cups. She hurried off with her head bowed, her legs striding the width of her long skirt, and she went into the house with the green shutters, with the cluster of pine trees in the front. You might think I’d have gone running out my door, calling, “Ally, honey, you’re forgetting your little one!” But I didn’t. There was no child left in the park.

T HERE WAS A FAINT LIGHT in one of the mansion windows that night as I settled onto my front-porch steps to wait for Danny. I’d heard the place was haunted, that when the wind was blowing just right you could hear the ghost of the old woman who’d built it playing melancholy organ music, or weeping in the attic, or calling for her dead child. But there were always stories about places being haunted, especially old mansions like this one, with tragic tales behind them. And though I believed in the Holy Spirit and Jesus rising from the dead and visiting the apostles, Doubting Thomas putting his hand through Jesus’ wounded side, I dismissed people who believed in ghosts as overly dramatic and absurd. I figured the light was the street lamp behind the house coming through the window, the reflection of car lights off a pane, the night watchman or the cleaning staff. Or maybe I was imagining the light, imagining a ghost to go with the faint strains of melancholy piano music coming from somewhere in that direction.
    Someone checking on the place, I decided. A policeman’s flashlight, one of Palo Alto’s finest making sure everything was okay (which was reassuring, given the way hippies and radicals had begun gathering in downtown Lytton Plaza).
    Except that this looked more like . . . well, it looked warmer, more flickering.
    The light went out entirely then, just like that, leaving me staring into the glass-window darkness.
    A few minutes later, a car came to a stop at the corner. Danny? But it continued straight on Channing and pulled into Ally’s drive. A slender, dark-skinned man got out and slipped in through Ally’s front door without knocking or ringing the bell that I could tell. I glanced at my watch—
eleven o’clock already?
But I forgot all about Ally then, because Danny came home talking about quitting Fairchild, leaving his nice, stable job at his nice, stable company with its nice, stable salary to join a new company that wasn’t even a company yet, just a handful of scientists and engineers putting their heads together at someone’s house, with no certain future at all. “NM Electronics, it’s going to be called,” he said.
    And not a month later, my steady, one-job-one-wife-for-life Danny up and gave notice at work.
    “You quit?” I said. “Danny! But you just started!” And the job he was talking about now didn’t even seem to be the NM Enterprises job he’d been talking about—though it turned out it
was
the same job; the company had just settled on a different name.
    “Andy is tired of watching our work languish between development and production at Fairchild,” Danny said, “and I’m jumping ship with him. These guys, Frankie, they have a plan to make larger-scale integrated circuits mass-producible!” Words hard enough for me to understand in isolation, much less strung together like that, though Brett, of course, would understand it all. “They’re trying to develop a new way for computers to store and access data, something faster and more powerful than ferrite core,” she said when I told her the next day, and I said, “Oh, sure, to replace ferrite core,” as if that cleared it right up.
    Yes, the business was riskier than Fairchild, Danny admitted. They