The Bird Sisters (19 page)

“So did Mr. Stewart,” Milly said, patting her pocket to make sure the fossil was still there. It occurred to her then what she should have said to Mr. Stewart, what he probably needed to hear more than anything else.
You’re a good teacher
.

Milly and Twiss walked until they found their mother, who was helping Mrs. Bettle carry a sack of birdseed to the car. After Twiss told her about Dr. Greene (the oldest of the old town doctors), Mrs. Collier, and Mr. Stewart, their mother said, “We need to raise money.”

Mrs. Bettle wiped the sweat from her forehead with a handkerchief. Before she put her hat back on, she stroked the green feather pinned to it.

“Henry can sing ‘Ave Maria’ in Latin. People might pay to see that.”

“At your
house
?” Twiss said, imagining a recital of sorts.

“At the town fair,” Mrs. Bettle said.

The town fair, which took place over the last weekend of August each year, was just over a month away. If their family agreed about anything, it was the town fair. Twiss loved the Wild West game and the spun sugar; their father loved the putting game and the caramel apples; their mother loved the bean counting game—last year she’d guessed 1,245 beans and won a forty-pound sack of kidney beans—and the Ferris wheel; and Milly loved what everyone else loved, except the livestock show and the amateur rodeo, where boys from the 4-H club wrestled calves to the ground for giant gold belt buckles.

Milly also loved how the fair transformed the abandoned field behind the high school from twenty-five dandelion-inhabited acres that went unnoticed most of the year into a kind of fairy-tale place, where people sucked on cherry-flavored ice chips and honey-roasted peanuts, and the Ferris wheel went round and round, and the firecrackers reached higher and higher. Milly was always sorry to see the field revert to weeds again.

“That’s perfect!” their mother said to Mrs. Bettle, with more enthusiasm than she’d said anything in a long time. Since she’d taken Father Rice’s letter out of the Sewing Society’s vault, she’d been cheerfully embittered instead of just embittered; thievery became her. “Henry will be like the man who puts nails through his tongue. We’ve all paid to see that.”

“It’s a religious song,” Mrs. Bettle reminded them.

“I only meant he might be as popular,” their mother said.

“Well then,
carpe diem!
” Mrs. Bettle said.

The four of them got into the car, Mrs. Bettle and their mother up front, and Milly and Twiss in the back, the sack of birdseed between them. After they’d driven out of and beyond the Saturday market, their mother turned left instead of right; she said she didn’t feel like going over the County C bridge again. She was in too good a mood to see the skid marks that had changed their lives twice in one day.

“Do we have to talk about him right now?” Twiss said. “The girls in my class do the same thing. They’ll spend the whole lunch period trying to figure out what some boy meant when he said, ‘Will you throw me the kickball?’ ”

“Henry’s
very
straightforward,” Mrs. Bettle said.

“That’s our nature,” their mother said.

“To analyze what someone probably doesn’t even feel to death?” Twiss said.

“Exactly,” their mother said.

They drove along the road out of town and into the country, past the cornfields and the Clydesdale farm, the petting zoo and the underground house with grass for a roof, where a goat was grazing on the blue fescues that sprouted from the trestles.

Milly slipped her hand into her pocket. She thought about showing the fossil to her mother the same way she’d thought about showing it to Twiss, but didn’t. Neither of them understood how she could like Mr. Stewart after what he’d done to the uniformity—A, A, A, A, F—of her report card. She’d even gotten an A in leadership, though she’d never led anything.

“There’s such a thing as leading by example,” her teacher had said, when she asked about her grade. “You’re the only one who does what people tell you to do.”

Milly didn’t know if that merited an A or not; doing what she was told seemed a lot easier than not doing it. But it wasn’t just that; along with saying no to Bett the day that Asa had arrived to mow their property, it didn’t occur to Milly not to do her homework or dutifully recite an answer when her teacher called on her.

A: Mine
.

“The Sewing Society offered me a free piece of pie,” Milly said to her mother.

“You didn’t accept one, did you? Tell me you didn’t.”

“I know better than that,” Milly said.

Her mother looked in the rearview mirror and smiled. “Maybe you won’t end up old and alone after all.”

Milly smiled too. She wasn’t quite where Twiss was yet—Twiss said the word “spinster” with a kind of affection most people reserved for the loves of their lives.

“I’m going to be the world’s most interesting spinster,” Twiss said again now.

“You’ll need a house,” their mother said.

“Not if Milly lets me pitch a tent in her backyard!”

“You’ll have to ask her husband.”

“I don’t have a husband,” Milly said before Twiss could interrupt with her thoughts on why women shouldn’t have to ask permission for anything, particularly from their husbands. After all, she might say, sisters have a stronger bond than spouses.

“But you will,” her mother said.

Milly was looking forward to the town fair for the usual reasons, in addition to whatever they were going to do there to raise money for Father Rice and the cake-baking contest, but there was another reason too: she wanted to visit the woman who read tea leaves again to see if her fortune had changed. She wanted the woman to tell her what everyone else had been telling her all along: you will be loved.

Milly didn’t know if being loved by someone outside of her family had become important to her before or after she’d met Asa; she only knew that he amplified the desire so much that she’d felt envious when she saw a young family at the market this morning.

The parents were carrying their two children on their shoulders, stopping from time to time to reach into a bag of kettle corn. The children had hair the color of corn silk, the color of hair Milly imagined her own children having. As they bounced along on their parents’ shoulders, they leaned back and forward, left and right, playing a version of Simon Says. The mother and father gave the impression they weren’t paying attention, but the moment either of the children wobbled, the parents’ hands tightened around their children’s ankles.

Milly could only remember herself and Twiss playing that kind of game once. Twiss had just learned to climb and took great pleasure displaying her new talents by climbing up people who allowed her to. Their father had taken them to the golf course that day, and their mother had come along, which wasn’t rare at that time.

Milly was five and Twiss was three.

Their father lifted Milly onto his shoulders first, after he’d gotten a hole in one and they were walking on the course to the next hole. “You’re light as a feather,” he said, spinning her around like the helicopters that fell from the trees in the spring.

Their mother was waving to the members who passed, doing her best to be charming, which Milly remembered she was. Her mother was wearing a dress the color of vanilla frosting that day. In the sunlight, Milly could see the outline of her slim, sun-freckled legs.

After her father put Milly down, he picked up Twiss.

“You’re heavy as a stone,” he said to her, which made her giggle. Everything made Twiss giggle when she was a toddler. You could hand her a pinecone, and she’d act like you’d handed her the funniest thing in the world.

“I’m not a stone!” Twiss said, thumping the back of their father’s head with her thumb, which she sucked despite the bitters their mother put under her fingernails. “I’m a baby!”

“You’re the future female golfing champion of the world, that’s what you are,” their father said. “What do you want to achieve more than anything else?”

“Wwwweeerrrlllddd,” Twiss said, still giggling.

“Holes in one!” their father corrected.

“She’ll probably want to be a ballerina, Joe,” their mother said, smiling.

Their father covered his ears, but he was also smiling. “Don’t say that, Maisie. You’re the only one I want to plié for me.”

“Tendu,”
their mother said.

Twiss was thrashing around on their father’s shoulders.

“I’m a bird!” she said. “Watch me fly!”

When Twiss started to lose her balance at the same time that her father leaned over to kiss her mother’s cheek, Milly started running. Halfway to them, Twiss tumbled down her father’s back and landed headfirst on the grass, where she lay looking up at the sky, deciding whether or not she wanted to go through the trouble of being hurt.

That day, she did.

“I’m still a bird,” she said, and began to cry.

“Of course you are,” their mother said. “You just had an accident.”

“You can still be a champion,” their father said. “You can still get a hole in one.”

Twiss squirmed past their parents on the ground. She rolled across the grass until she got to Milly’s feet, which she hugged close to her chest.

“Milly saw me fly,” she said.

And Milly did.

Though sometimes, she wished her parents had been the ones to lift Twiss onto their hips and ask her where she flew that day, to smile when Twiss said she’d been to the moon and eaten a piece of lacy white moon cheese before the moon king made her come back down.

Milly stared out the window as her mother drove the four of them farther and farther into the country. The corn was rising along the river; the river was falling. When Milly was certain Twiss wasn’t looking, she pulled out the yellow flyer. Aside from all of the practical things that twenty-five dollars could buy—flour, sugar, butter, meat—Milly thought of the handsome silver lapels shaped like tractors she’d seen in the general store. She couldn’t think of anything more pleasing than being able to give them to Asa after the fair.

“You could win,” Milly heard the man say, but she didn’t yet believe it.

She folded the flyer and slipped it back into her pocket.

When her mother turned onto Mrs. Bettle’s road, the watermelon she’d bought at the market, unbeknownst to either Milly or Twiss, rolled out from under the seat. Twiss took out her pocket-knife and cut into the rind of the watermelon, exposing the bright red flesh, the hard black seeds. She lifted one of the seeds out of the watermelon and positioned the seed on the tip of her tongue. Then she sucked in her cheeks, stuck her head out the window, and spit the seed as far as the air in her lungs would allow her to; the seed landed first on the window and then bounced onto the road, where it quickly disappeared into the gravel.

Twiss stuck her knife into the watermelon again and scooped out another seed. This time when she tried to spit it out the window, the seed landed on the front of her shirt. She laughed, plucked it off, and began the process again. After they’d dropped Mrs. Bettle off and were turning into their own driveway, she handed Milly a seed.

“I was thinking a guest room might be nicer than a tent,” she said. “Tents let in rain.”

Milly placed the seed on her tongue.

“What rain?” she said, and spit the seed out of her mouth and out of the open window. The tiny black seed sailed away from the car on a wave of hot white air, where it rose and fell like the prow of a ship, gaining momentum and then losing it, rising and falling, skipping and spinning, before it finally lost all its forward energy and landed in the meadow of bluestems and prairie onions beyond the car.

he day had become what the
Gazette
had predicted: hot and humid, without a cloud in the sky or a cooling patch of shade to stand in. When Twiss finished cleaning out the coop, she walked to the barn. She lingered outside the utility door, deciding whether or not to enter. All these years she’d been walking into that barn trying to make things right and all these years that barn had neither resisted nor yielded to her. Twiss picked a black-eyed Susan and tucked it behind her ear. Though the sun dangled like an ornament high up in the sky, the heat was above and below her, radiating from all directions. She walked over to the water pump and the white lilac bush. She didn’t feel like playing golf just yet.