Pieces of My Sister's Life Read Free

happen. I’d thought once that I wanted this. I’d tried to make it happen. And up till now I’d thought it would be a release.
    August
    1993

2
    O UR DADDY ALWAYS LIVED on the edge of two worlds, between the present and the past we never talked about. It was what made life so hard for him, and in the end it was why death came so easily. I think we understood this all along, but on this day, his dying day, it was the last thing on our minds.
    It was one of those late summer days that always come way too soon, slapping you in the face with all your June plans (Let’s learn how to drive! Let’s get dreadlocks!) that never got past the planning stage. Last night the temperature had managed to touch fifty before changing its mind, and this morning had been cold enough for sweatshirts and wool socks. Sun and moon shared the sky, twin gray spheres behind the haze of clouds. It was the summer of our sixteenth year.
    We slapped down Water Street in our flip-flops, hand in hand, past the swanky hotels with their mansard roofs and attitudes, the not-so-swanky shops below them with their doors flung open to plead for end-of-season business. It was always a little weird in summer not knowing the faces we passed, all versions of the same stereotype with their sunglasses and pasty legs. The tourists made me and Eve feel lucky as we watched them cooing over flowering bushes and ocean views. They made us remember that not everyone lived this way.
    We ran down to the jetty with its week-too-old-fish smell and sat with our legs dangling above the water, listening to the boats clock against their moorings and waiting for Daddy to come back from his last charter. Sunday afternoons were our time; at four o’clock when the day-trippers were drying off and changing to hop on the five o’clock ferry, Daddy would fold his sign down early and take us for a run. It had been that way every summer for as long as I could remember.
    After a minute of sitting, Eve crossed one leg over mine and began combing her fingers through my hair. “What kind of mood’re you in?” she said.
    I shook my head. “Hunh?”
    “It’s just if you’re in the wrong mood you overreact to things.”
    “I’m not in a mood. I mean, you’re annoying me a little, but other than that I’m fine.”
    She was quiet a minute, and then she said, “Okay, I think today’s Mom’s birthday.”
    I felt an aching stretch, like my lungs had grown too big for my ribs. “How do you know?”
    “His calendar.
D B-day,
it said. Diana’s Birthday, it has to be.”
    I watched a wave lick against an algae-stained hull, dimly felt Eve pulling my hair back into a braid. “It could be anything, an appointment with Dr. Bradley or…a day to Drink Beer.”
    “Right, Kerry. He needs a reminder to drink.” She peered into the distance at a departing ferry, the people waving like they were setting off on a journey that mattered. “You know I can’t even remember her face? I remember her hair was dark and real long, past the waist. I remember she was tall and she could blow smoke rings with her cigarette, but that’s it.”
    I fingered the birthday bracelet at my wrist. Our mother had given us the bracelets soon after we were born, and we wore them always, had added links to them when they started to pinch, and gave each other tiny charms to dangle from them, a new one for each birthday. Other than our thick brown hair and ability to tan without burning, they were the only things she’d ever given us that were worth having. “I think she was a dancer,” I said.
    Of course I had no idea if she was a dancer or a plumber, but I’d always imagined her in ballet shoes and swirly skirts. Since Daddy danced like a spastic turkey, I thought that must be where I’d gotten the genes for my one talent. In my heart I was a dancer, even though we couldn’t afford real lessons. When I was eight the instructor of my Modern Movements class had told my father I was destined for greatness if he