The Winters in Bloom Read Free

and Kyra Callahan grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have a fast-food restaurant; still, the townspeople often forgot Kyra’s name. They’d call her Mira or Lila or Kim or even Lima (as if she were a bean!), while Amy was always just Amy. Adorable Amy, with the easy-to-remember name, was the pretty sister and the smart sister, while Kyra was striking only for her ordinariness. She had an unusual sense of humor, true, but few people came close enough to hear the under-her-breath jokes that Amy swore would make Kyra immensely popular one day. Amy tried to help, for she was also the nice sister, always thinking of others, always trying to include Kyra when she went anywhere with her ever-expanding circle of friends.
    In eighth grade, the effect of all this on Kyra was just what you would imagine. In fact, her resentment of Amy was the major theme whenever she went to confession. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. I wished my sister wouldn’t make the cheerleading squad. I wished my sister would get an F—or even a B—in Algebra. I wished my sister would have acne, and I wiped my face on her towel once or twice, trying to make her catch it from me.
    None of Kyra’s wishes came true, which most of her was glad about, because she did care about Amy. Their mother was gone; their stepmother disliked teenagers in general and Amy and Kyra in particular; and their father was a computer programmer with no real interest in raising children because he considered them mystifyingly irrational. Kyra and Amy had each other, period. If their relationship wasn’t perfect, or even close to perfect, it was all they had. Sometimes after their stepmother had gotten mad at them for one thing or other, Amy and Kyra would retreat to their room and turn up the one song they knew their stepmother hated: “We are family. I got all my sisters with me.”
    The grown-up Kyra sometimes wondered if she and Amy had really given their stepmother a chance. Yes, the woman seemed selfish and irritable and really, really uncool—her most damning flaw, from the teenage point of view—but she’d been placed in a very difficult position. She was a thirty-seven-year-old, shy, never-married billing clerk when she met their father and found herself taking care of two girls who’d been without a mother so long they saw no use for her. Indeed, by the time they were fourteen and thirteen, respectively, Amy and Kyra thought they were far more skilled at child care than their stepmother ever could be.
    They knew to use baking soda to get baby spit-up stains out of their clothes. They’d taught themselves how to diaper infant boys without getting peed on by using the old diaper as a shield. They could do a good job distracting screaming toddlers, winning the trust of suspicious seven-year-olds, and entertaining any child from babies to preteens little younger than themselves. They were the only two members of the Callahan Child Care Company. Amy had insisted on the name; she thought it would make their babysitting business sound professional. They even advertised on handwritten flyers stuffed in mailboxes. If people smiled at the girls’ pretensions, they still used their services because everybody knew that those Callahan girls (Amy and what’s-her-name) were good with kids.
    Not that the girls liked children especially, but they liked money and they needed money for their college fund. Amy had planned it out perfectly, and the amount they required was pretty staggering, even for the state school where they planned to go: University of Missouri, Kansas City, where their mother had spent three years studying botany before she got pregnant. Amy remembered their mother talking about UMKC, and how happy she was then. Kyra didn’t care where they went, as long as it was away from here.
    Of all the dreaming teenagers in their little town, few would make it out and even fewer would stay out. Years later, Kyra would admit that she probably would have been one