The Almost Archer Sisters Read Free

four and six in the morning, when occupants, if they were home, would be too deeply asleep to notice any commotion. But the boys were five and eight now, so it had been years since I’d been up before daybreak, years since I’d breast-fed my sons while watching the sun come up over the Rosarios’ farm across the way.
    But now the morning sky was becoming so bright it hurt my eyes to look up, partly because I was slightly hungover for the first time in months, partly because tears were pooling in the corners of my eyes, which was partly due to the smoke from my first cigarette in eight years. But mostly it was due to the crying. Still, you could tell that it was going to be a beautiful day. Made me less afraid to leave.
    We had arrived at the park a couple of hours earlier, I’d say about four-thirty in the morning. I had thrown the car blanketover Jake, who fell easily back to sleep in the grass. Sam had stayed up with me for a while, slightly confused and beyond exhausted. Then he too dropped at my feet at the foot of the slide. I watched him get hit by his invisible lightning. You could tell the difference between sleep and a seizure by the way his feet would whip back and forth like tiny windshield wipers gone awry. I’d grown so blithe about his epilepsy by then, I actually petted his hair with my toes while he seized.
    The dawn finally stirred Jake awake. He jumped up to tug on my pajamas like a teething lion cub.
    “Mom, we have to go home now,” he said, knuckling the sleep from his eyes.
    Why wouldn’t joggers stare? I’d gape too if I saw me sitting in the dark on the edge of the slide, looking as battered as a blow-up doll with a slow leak. I had a wad of balled-up Kleenex shoved in a nostril to stop the blood, and one hand down my eight-year-old’s pants patting around his little penis to see if he’d wet himself again. Jake began circling me in an orbital blur of impatience and confusion. It occurred to me that it was the first time he’d ever seen me smoke.
    “Nasty sagrits!” he said, expelling big fake coughs.
    “That’s right, baby, cigarettes are nasty,” I said, blowing the smoke skyward, watching Sam start to stir in the grass.
    “I wanna go home!” Jake yelped. “Why do we gotta not go home.”
    Watching his adorable anger, I suddenly wished I’d had a camera. If not for Beth, who flew in from New York six times a year to get her hair expertly touched up by Lou and to take me out on the town, I’d probably have no pictures of my boys. At the end of every visit, she’d pose us on the porch of the house in which she also grew up, sometimes on the wooden swing, sometimes on the paint-peeled stairs, sometimes by the mailbox, BEECHER scratchedout and replaced by ARCHER , which was scratched out and replaced by CHEZ LOU which had been professionally stenciled beneath LALIBERTÉ FARMS , the name I took when I married Beau.
    Whenever the farmhouse felt like it would collapse under the weight of another new repair or addition, or another argument over how to pay for it, Beau would threaten to move us into town, into one of these bland model homes, on an even blander street. When he entertained these tangents, I’d feign deafness. Though nothing farmy remained about the farm, with 325 acres long sold to put Beth through college, another 80 leased to the bachelor brothers’ organic tomato concern, which now paid for Sam’s treatments in Detroit, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I never thought much about how a town becomes a city, but I suppose it had something to do with the evolution of our farm, how its outer acres were quickly sprouting subdivisions, its breeding inhabitants flourishing on the fringes of our remaining 20.
    “For godsakes, smile, Peachy,” Beth would yell over the top of an impossibly small digital contraption, which no doubt cost more than Beau made as a mechanic in a week. “Be hap-hap-happy like me!”
    But there’d be no commemorating this visit. Hours