Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson Read Free Book Online

pretty—yellow and red and white with green leaves bunched around them.
    Hey, big brother, what kind are these. I held the flowers toward him.
    Lily. He finger-spelled the word for me. And roses. The red and white ones are roses. You know that! he signed. Must be pay-day. Flowers cost a lot in the wintertime.
    When I have a daughter, I signed, her name will be LilyRose.
    Sean made a face and headed back into the kitchen. I followed him.
    Your rice is boiling.
    I turned the fire down underneath the pot and covered it.
    Sean got the jar that Mama used for flowers down from the shelf. I filled it with water and put the flowers in slowly. Sean pulled down plates and took forks out of the drawer. He put four glasses on the kitchen table—we didn’t have a dining room but our kitchen was big enough for four people to move around in.
    Then, without saying anything, he put the burgers on, washed his hands, put some oil in another pan and started cooking the carrots.
    What about the onions and broccoli, I said. And cheese?
    Sean took a deep breath. Carrots take the longest. So you have to cook them first. Then onions. Then broccoli. Then a tiny bit of salt. Not a whole lot like you think everything needs. He stirred the carrots, then covered them. The only sound was the sound of things frying.
    Sean watched me take a red rose and move it closer to a white one, then I thought for a moment and put a lily and some of the green leaves between the two.
    He turned back to the stove, flipped the burgers, then tore a paper bag in half and put a big piece of it on a plate. Then he added the onions to the carrots, stirred and covered the pan again. He went back over to the refrigerator and opened it. Then just stood there, staring inside. He had ears like Mama, small and perfect shaped. When he was born, the doctors had wanted to do some new kind of operation to fix the inside of them, but Mama and Daddy said no.
    Nobody’s experimenting on my child, Mama said. If that’s the way he came into the world, that’s the way he’s staying. It’s us we need to change. And she and Daddy started learning sign language. By the time I was born, Sean was two and a half years old. I grew up learning how to speak and sign. Sometimes, when he walked past her, Mama just grabbed him and kissed his ears. Sean always laughed but he pushed her away at the same time. I wondered if he was standing staring into the refrigerator thinking about that.
    Years later, when I asked Mama why they didn’t just get the operation, she said because it was dangerous and not guaranteed. And most of all, she said, signing at the same time, there’s nothing wrong about being deaf. It’s just another language. So now you’re bilingual, Mama said. That’s a gift.
    That was the first and last time anybody said anything about me being gifted.
    I waved my hand at Sean to get his attention. He liked that more than somebody coming up and touching him.
    The ocean, I signed.
    Sean shrugged.
    Water, he signed, water and air. It sounds the way air feels on your face on a windy day.
    He took some ketchup out of the refrigerator and one slice of cheese.
    Here, he signed, putting the cheese down on one of the plates. That’s where you sit.
    Yellow, he signed.
    That’s a hard one, Sean! Yellow doesn’t have a SOUND.
    Nothing has a sound to me! That’s how this game got started. Yellow!
    We’d been playing this game since we were real little. One person gave the word and the other person had to describe it, to make the person feel it someplace inside of themselves. To make the person hear it. Sean was better at the game than me, but I still loved playing.
    Like something soft, I signed. A pillow. Or yellow sounds like bubbles feel—lots of them in a bathtub.
    Sean nodded. Then he turned the fire off beneath the burgers and put each of them on the plate with the paper bag. I watched the bag get dark from the oil.
    He stirred the onions again, added some spices, a little bit of