Purebred Read Free Page B

you?” he said. “But you’ve grown—you’re grown-up! It’s been too long since I’ve seen you. Now, here, meet your cousin Louise.”
    Uncle John stepped back and Carole stood face-to-face with the one member of her mother’s family that she’d never met. Louise was smaller than Carole and just a bit younger, but the family resemblance showed: She had the same high cheekbones Carole had, and the same sort of mouth. Carole opened her arms to give her cousin a hug.
    Louise took a small step backward. “Nice to meet you,” she said, with a polite smile and a little wave that prevented Carole from even shaking her hand. Carole was a little put off. Here was Uncle John, friendlier and more welcoming than she’d expected, and yet his daughter, whom Carole had been sure she’d like, hardly seemed glad to meet her.
    She didn’t have time to dwell on her thoughts, however. Her father arrived with their luggage, and after greeting him with a backslapping hug, Uncle John said that they had better get going. They had a long drive to Nyberg.
    Outside the airport, the cold hit Carole even more strongly than before. The airport’s electronic sign told her why: TEMPERATURE : − 5 .
    “Is that a negative?” Carole asked, pointing.
    “Sure, negative five,” Uncle John agreed. “But you haveto take off another twenty degrees for the wind chill When the sun goes down, it’ll get pretty cold.” Carole shivered harder at the thought. Colder than twenty-five degrees below zero? Stevie and Lisa should be here to feel this! she thought. She was glad that her father had insisted on her packing and wearing her warmest clothes. He had even found an old Marine Corps–issue cold-weather-gear parka for her. It was too big for her, but it was warm. Carole tightened the drawstring on the parka’s hood.
    Once inside Uncle John’s four-wheel-drive vehicle and en route to the Foley farm—“the family compound,” Uncle John called it—Carole began to ask questions. “Tell me about the family,” she said.
    “Well.” Uncle John looked over his shoulder to give her a quick smile. “You’ve met me, and now Louise. Your aunt Lily, my devoted wife, is more of the same. You’ll like her. And your aunt Jessie is my baby sister—she’s thirty-four.”
    “She’s the greatest!” Louise interrupted. “She takes pictures—photographs—and she sells them to magazines … oh, everywhere. All over the country. She’s very talented, you know.”
    Carole was surprised by the way Louise seemed to come alive when talking about Aunt Jessie. “I remember hearing Mom talk about Aunt Jessie,” she said. “Didn’t she used to live in New York?”
    There was a long pause.
    “Well—” Uncle John began, but Louise jumped infiercely. “Don’t talk to Aunt Jessie about New York. Carole, don’t you ever talk to Aunt Jessie about New York.”
    Carole frowned. What could be so bad about New York? Carole had been there, and enjoyed the city. But she didn’t say anything to Louise.
    “The person you’ll learn the most from is Grand Alice,” Uncle John said, returning to the subject of family history. “Seems like she remembers all the stories for us. My father—that’s your grandfather, Carole, and Grand Alice’s son—he can tell a good tale too. But he and your grandmother go to Arizona for the winters now.”
    Carole nodded. She remembered her grandparents, though she hadn’t seen them since her mother’s funeral either. “If you need to talk to your grandpa, you can call him from Minnesota,” Colonel Hanson added.
    Carole looked out her window. The sun was lower in the sky by now, and the road was covered with hard-packed snow. Plowed snow was banked higher than Carole’s head along the edges of the road. The wind blew gusts of frozen snow off the tops of the drifts, and shook the sides of the car. The land seemed dead. Even the trees looked cold.
    “Maybe
we
should have gone to Arizona,” Carole said. Everyone laughed,