The Christmas Sisters

©2001 as
The
Snowbirds by Annie Jones

Published by
PoutyGirl
Productions

Originally published 2001 by Multnomah Books

Cover design by Annie Jones

Interior layout:
http://www.formatting4U.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author at [email protected]. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or
dead,
is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

For more information on the author and her works, please see www.facebook.com/anniejones.author

For Natalie –

My wonderful daughter who can be anything she wants but will always be my baby.

One

Persuasion, Alabama,
ain't
even a town anymore, Sam Moss.” The old black man drew his antler-handled knife along a thick stick. Bark curled and fell onto the cracked leather of his spit-shined wingtips. “It's just scraps and bones.”

“It's not the same place I saw in my rearview mirror twenty years ago, Mr. Freeman. I'll give you that.” Sam leaned one shoulder against the
Dewi's
Market daily special sign. The porch's gap- toothed floorboards groaned under his feet. “Still and all, I'm not sorry I came back.”

“Just scraps and bones.”
Big Hyde Freeman's blade scraped across the soft cedar in his hand.
“And the occasional predator looking for what he can finagle for himself out of the rubble.”

Sam felt that time-sharpened gaze slide over him. He did not rise to the bait. “I reckon that gets old pretty fast.”

Big Hyde snorted. “Live to be my age, you learn everything gets old pretty fast. Dang sight faster than you ever figured on it happening, that's for sure.”

“I hear that.” Sam rubbed his stiff neck. He'd driven straight through from Albuquerque and paid the price in aches and pains a younger man would not have suffered. Even so, his words remained true. He was not sorry to have come here.

He crossed his arms.
A staunch, late October gust swept down Persuasion Road, the main street through town.
Rust-colored leaves plastered themselves against empty buildings and settled among the old newspapers and cobwebs that collected in the recessed doorways.

“What all is left here besides the—what's the last count?
A couple hundred or so families?”

“Thereabouts, if you figure in the farms and count the cottages.”

No one in town counted the people who lived in “the cottages.” Sam had grown up there. He stretched out far enough to look down the dirt road that wound out and away from the all- purpose market, bait shop, and social center of the tiny community. He could just see the first of the row of ten squatty, boxlike bungalows built during the Depression. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

“Around two hundred
families,
give or take, that's right.” Big Hyde said it like he was talking to himself.

“And obviously that's enough to keep the market in business here. What else?
Cafes?”

“Just them booths in the side room of
Dewi's
.”

“Barber shops?
Beauty salons?”

“King Cuts. End of the road there. They do men's hair, women's,
children
. Think they'd even clip your dog, you brought it in on a slow Tuesday afternoon.”

Sam shook his head. “Guess I need to start thinking of this place in more singular terms, huh?”

“How's that?”

“You know,
the
market,
the
hair cutting place,
the
gas station.”

“The gun shop.”

“The elementary school.”

“The sheriff.”

Sam narrowed his eyes on Big Hyde.
“The bus driver.”

“That no-account, never-amount-to-nothing Moss boy.”

Sam raised his chin.
“The church.”

“What church?” Big Hyde tapped his foot to shake off the pungent cedar shavings. He did not look at Sam. “
Ain't
no church what
ain't
got no preacher. Had laymen and evangelizers
comin
in for nigh onto a year now, but that
ain't
the same.”

Sam straightened and tucked his hands in his jeans pockets. His leather jacket bunched up around his shoulders and chest. If he squinted, he could just make out the steeple thrusting up into the cool, gray sky. He let out a long breath.
“The church in the lurch.”

“For a fact.”

“The sanctuary floor still slant down toward the altar?”

“Maybe you should go in and find out for yourself.”

“Last time I went in I do recall being asked never to darken its doors again.”

Wind rattled the tarnished gray screens on the market's front windows and set a loose shingle flapping on the overhang.

Big Hyde held up the bare stick and studied it with one eye closed. “How many marbles did you set rolling to the pulpit from the back pew that day?”

“Only as many as my pockets would hold.”

Teeth white as his long-sleeved cotton shirt flashed in Big Hyde's dark face. “
Ain't
gonna
be easy for you back here, you know.”

Sam stepped off the porch onto the wide, low stairs. “It never was.”

A humph
and a mutter answered him.

Sam glanced over his shoulder. Light glowing from the markets windows gave off a sense of warmth and welcome. The aroma of long-brewing coffee and snippets of conversation punctuated by laughter completed the idyllic picture of the place.

He wanted to go inside but knew this wasn't the time for it. Still, he could not leave. He'd just been driving through today, getting a feel for the area again, when he'd spotted Big Hyde Freeman
hunkering
his bantamweight body into the least broken down of the chairs on
Dewi's
porch. Sam pulled his truck up and cut the engine then and there. If anyone had the answers to the questions that had plagued Sam since the day he'd committed himself to return, it was the man sitting before him now.

Big Hyde had driven the single bus that connected Persuasion to the Bode County school district for forty years. Every person who lived in the county knew the man—and he knew them.
Knew more about them, maybe, than most people liked to think about.
Kids talk. He heard the secret truths of many a family spilled in innocence from small mouths. He saw, in too many children's eyes and attitudes, the silent reality that no amount of brave words could conceal.

Big Hyde could help Sam like no one else, if he wanted to help.

Sam put one foot on the porch proper and leaned in over his raised thigh. “Whatever happened to the Dorsey sisters?”

Big Hyde chuckled. “Now there's a name that takes me back!
The Dorsey sisters.”

“Do you know what happened to them?”

The old man scratched his nose.
“Gone.”

“Gone?”

“Moved away.
Up North.”

“All three of them?”

“That's right. Youngest left ten or so years back, right after their daddy passed.
Moved to New York City.”

“Little Collier is in New York City?”

“That's what they tell me.”

“And
Petie
?”

“That Patricia?”

Sam had forgotten that Big Hyde tended to think of people the way their names appeared on his bus roster.
“Yeah, Patricia, the oldest one.”

“Chicago. Her and her husband—”

“Parker,” Sam filled in.

“The
Sipes
boy.”
Big Hyde rubbed his thumb over a wormhole on his whittling stick.
“Moved up that way when the factory closed.”

“That long ago?”

“Uh-huh.”

Sam slowly shook his head. “Seems to me like only a handful of years ago that Parker
Sipes
played quarterback for the Bode County Pirates with
Petie
on the sidelines leading the cheers.”

“Don't tell me. I remember all of ya'll the day each one of you come to the bus stop bawling like babies on your first day of school.”

“Not me.”

“No, I'll give you that, Sam Moss. Never did see you turn loose of
so
much as a sniffle.
Not even when your mama run off, nor when your daddy
throwed
you out.”

Sam clenched his jaw.

“From that first day you come tromping up to my bus, shoes two sizes too big, torn jeans, and hair stuck out every which way the color of dirty straw, you looked a hard case.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

“Never believed you
was
as hard as you let on.”

“Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't. Does it really matter now?”

“Heard you done jail time.”

“Don't believe everything you hear, do you?” Sam met the old man's gaze.

He sucked his teeth then went back to his work. “That all you got to say about it?”

“Pretty much.”
He hadn't come round today to talk about himself. He'd come to see what he could find out about the town, the people, and one person in particular. He exhaled to help force out some of the tension welling up inside him,
then
dipped his gaze to the red dirt parking lot. When he raised his head again, he cleared his throat. “So the youngest Dorsey girl is in New York, the oldest in Chicago, you say.”

“I did.” Big Hyde leaned back in his seat. “Their widowed mama went up there visiting one summer, too, and that was it for her.”

“Oh, really?”
It surprised Sam how badly the news made him feel, considering... “Then
Dodie
Dorsey is no longer with us?”

“Nope.”

“That's a shame.” And he meant it.

“Yes sir.” Big Hyde turned the stick around and began peeling away the bark from the other end. “Fool woman went up to that big city for a vacation and stayed on and married a Yankee.”

“A...?” Sam winced. He'd walked right into that one. “I guess for some folks that
is
worse than being dead.” He'd have tried harder to hide his grin if Big Hyde had been looking.

“Some round here took it as a regular slap in the face to the memory of Collier Jack Dorsey. Maybe that's why the fool woman stays as far away from these parts as she can.”

“Did they sell off the house?”

“Girls wouldn't hear of it. They bought it from their mama a while back, and they've managed to hang on to it all this time.”

Sam turned in the direction of Fifth and Persuasion. Trees obscured the view of the two-story frame house, but he didn't have to see the place for it to stir something inside him.
“That so?”

“For a fact.
All their people are still here, you know. All
them
cousins and The Duets.”