Girl Waits with Gun Read Free

top buttons of my nightgown and slid out of it. I was hardly able to stand, but after a few attempts, I forced myself upright and struggled into the first dress I could find that didn’t require me to raise my arm above my head.
    Walking was nearly impossible. My hip felt like it had been pushed out of joint. I couldn’t quite hold myself upright, and every time I put weight on my left leg, my knee cried out in pain.
    This was not the soreness of a hard day’s work. It felt more like the aftermath of a beating. I made my way to the hall and kept one hand on the rail as I shuffled downstairs.
    I found Fleurette in the kitchen, eating a boiled egg with a spoon.
    â€œBonjour,”
she said. After Mother died last year, Fleurette took to imitating her speech mannerisms. Mother, having grown up in Vienna with a French father and an Austrian mother, spoke French and two distinct styles of German. Fleurette preferred the French for its romantic flourishes. Norma and I found the affectation tiresome, but we had conferred on it and decided to ignore it.
    â€œLet me see your foot.”
    She lifted her skirt and presented a badly bandaged ankle. The cloth was stained a rusted brown. I am sorry to admit that it was a stagnation of dried blood, and not our poorly situated pins, that held the bandage in place.
    â€œAch. We did not take very good care of you last night.”
    â€œJe pense que c’est cassé.”
    â€œSurely not. Can’t you move it? Stand up.”
    Fleurette didn’t move. She picked at her egg cup and kept her eyes down. “Norma said to tell you that Francis—” But before she could finish, there was a rattle at the kitchen door and my brother let himself in.
    â€œWhich one of you was driving?” he said. With Mother gone, Francis had taken on the proprietary air of the man of the house, even though he’d been married and living in Hawthorne for years.
    Fleurette—who looks people square in the face when she lies to them—turned to Francis and said, “Constance, of course. I’m too young to drive, and Norma was reading the paper.”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter who was driving,” I said. “That man aimed his machine directly at us. Dolley could have been killed.”
    â€œ
I
could have been killed,” Fleurette said with a dramatic roll of her eyes. She shifted around in her chair to give Francis a look at the purple bruise emerging just above her knee. He turned away, embarrassed.
    â€œShe’ll be fine, won’t she?” he asked, and I nodded. He held the door open and gestured for me to come along for a private scolding and an examination of the wreckage he’d just delivered.
    Outside was a wide and airy barn that housed Dolley, an occasional goat or pig, and a dozen or so chickens. The eaves had been extended on one side to accommodate Norma’s pigeon loft. The imbalance between the two sides of the building made it seem in constant danger of losing its footing. Next to it, facing the drive, was the entrance to our root cellar. A few summers ago, Francis had laid the stone walk that led us there.
    He spoke in a low voice so Fleurette couldn’t listen in from the kitchen door. “Who is this man, this Harry—what was it?”
    â€œHenry Kaufman,” I said, “of Kaufman Silk Dyeing Company.”
    That brought him to a stop as surely as if he’d walked into a wall. He planted his feet and looked down at them with a long and loud exhale. This was a mannerism of our father’s, one I had almost forgotten until Francis reached the age at which exasperation became an everyday emotion. Francis had our father’s light brown hair and his pale Czech features, but where our father had managed to take a high forehead and light, intelligent eyes and make himself into something of a ruffian, Francis took the same features and composed them into those of a serious gentleman, with perfectly