Sister Golden Hair: A Novel Read Free Page A

slowly I was able to slow time down, so the syllables of what she said were so far apart the words were unrecognizable. I imagined that I was oneof the astronauts on Apollo 15 landing the Falcon on the Apennine mountain range, taking the lunar rover for a spin on the silent surface of the moon. After trying to catch our eyes in the rearview mirror she realized neither Phillip nor I were going to respond.
    “Here we are!” my dad said as we passed the Bent Tree sign and pulled onto a street lined on either side by two-story duplexes. Twenty-five units climbed up the side of the mountain, each a boxy red-brick building with six front windows, two doors, and tin chimneys like mushrooms springing up from the roof. My dad had made the place sound like a fancy mountain-top resort, the sort of hotel in which the young heroines in the books I read spent their summers. But the duplexes in Bent Tree looked more like army barracks.
    The manager, a short man with a comb-over and a huge set of keys dangling from his belt, was waiting for us. He looked like an even smaller version of Sonny Bono, bereft without his Cher.
    Dad followed the manager into the duplex and we sat in the car waiting. Insects throbbed and a bird shrieked back in the woods. My little brother crawled over the seat and got in Mom’s lap. The top half of each duplex was covered in beige aluminum siding; strips had fallen off here and there, exposing patches of gray cement. Most of the windows were covered with blinds, but a few people had strung sheets over the glass. One showed a Confederate flag. A rusty grill lay on its side and a few motorcycles were parkedalong the street. In the yard next to our unit was a concrete birdbath.

    As we drove out of Bent Tree, my father told my mother how the woman inside our duplex wouldn’t speak to him or the manager. The manager said Bent Tree’s owner felt once you’d signed the contract, you’d committed yourself to spending at least a year in the development. Still, if an annulment was needed, if we really wanted our deposit back, he would issue us a check. My mother didn’t answer; she just ran her hand through my brother’s hair as he slept on her lap. I kept waiting for Dad to tell us about his plan B but he was quiet. I knew my father wouldn’t get his first check for another week and we were down to our last forty dollars and that the motel room cost $19.95 a night. I knew, too, that we couldn’t go back to Philadelphia; our house held a new family, a young couple with a baby. Once, when a job hadn’t worked out, we’d gone to live with Dad’s parents. Another time we’d stayed with my mother’s sister for a few weeks, but my aunt had made it clear when we left that that would be the last time.
    The sun had gone down and my dad turned on the car headlights. After a while he stopped on the side of the road and spoke to a hitchhiker waiting on the soft shoulder. The man wore a small backpack, a cheesecloth shirt, and jeans with a V cut in the bottom ofeach leg and a triangle of paisley material sewn in to make the bell swing wide. His curly brown hair fell at his collarbone and he had a mass of freckles. Most thrilling was the string of seeds—Love Beads—around his neck. The young man got into our station wagon. I was all the way in the back lying on my stomach, reading the funny pages of the newspaper with a flashlight. I peered over the seat. My mother had smeared white cream on a rash around my mouth and I was terrified an actual hippie might see my greasy face, or worse, the red dots all over my chin.
    “Hi, everybody!” he said. “My name is Guy.”
    “Where you headed, Guy?” my father asked in the nothing-to-lose voice he always used when talking to hippies.
    “Up to Floyd,” Guy said. Floyd was farther up in the mountains, the place local hippies hung out. I could tell my father was disappointed with Guy’s reply. I knew my father felt if Guy was free enough to be a real hippie, he would