How We Fall by Kate Brauning Read Free Book Online

the henhouse.
    Wooden boxes circled the inside at waist height, and thirty chickens clucked and scuffled sleepily on the beams that stretched ladder-like from the floor to the ceiling.
    Pulling eggs out of the nests made me nervous. Some old hen was always sitting on her eggs. Invariably, she’d stretch out her tiny head on her long neck, her eyes would widen, and she’d let loose the shriek of an unoiled door hinge. For two seconds, I’d be convinced I was going to die.
    I let Marcus get the eggs and pretended to check on the duck. She was already paddling around the kiddie swimming pool we’d bought for her, happily picking bugs out of the water.
    Duck eggs were too oily for me, but the duck herself was much more fun than the chickens.
    Marcus left the door open to let the hens outside. They always returned to roost for the night, and they wouldn’t wander far enough to reach the end of our ten acres.
    “Sorry about yesterday,” he said.
    I shrugged. “I shouldn’t have freaked out like that.” I ven-tured into the henhouse long enough to open up the steel trash can of chicken feed and pour two scoops into the feeder.
    Across the yard, Chris and Angie headed out to feed the calves, giant bottles of milk replacer formula under their arms.
    Heidi, our German shepherd, trotted behind them. Angie insisted on having her own chores even though she was only seven, and since it saved me from bottle-feeding, I let her do it.
    Marcus and I headed back to the garden and I turned off the water. Weeding was easier when the ground was damp.
    I knelt on the mulch by the green onions and yanked out clovers and grass blades. Marcus headed to the other end of the row so he could work his way toward the middle. A few times 38
    Kate Brauning
    I caught him looking at me, but then he’d smile hesitantly and go back to weeding.
    Before my family moved to Missouri, Marcus and I had only seen each other a handful of times—every other Christmas.
    Even though we barely knew each other, we’d gotten along because we were the same age. Photos of our moms holding us as infants hung in the hall, side by side, his dated three weeks after mine.
    When we moved here my freshman year, I’d sulked in my room for three months, missing California and hating the Missouri winter. But Marcus lay on my bed after school every day, poking fun at Rear Window and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Our evenings were ones like last night, where all of us cousins played games until late and Chris asked my sister and me a hundred questions about California.
    By spring, I’d decided Missouri wasn’t so bad.
    I uprooted a vining weed and cut myself on its rope-like root. “Crap.” Blood seeped from the cut. “We need to go on strike.”
    “Can you keep going, soldier, or should I carry you back?”
    He always mocked my whining. “No. Man overboard. This hurts.” I kept weeding, but it pulled on the cut.
    He lowered his voice. “Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
    I halfheartedly chucked the uprooted weed at him and let him see my grin. Quoting Casablanca to mock me wasn’t fair.
    When we met in the middle of the row, we switched to the carrots. The chill had left the air, so I unzipped my jacket and tossed it to the side. Marcus reached for his water bottle. “We need to tell the parents that Chris has to start helping. He gets away with doing a lot less than we do.”
    “I thought our problems didn’t amount to a hill of beans.”
    39
    How we Fall
    Aunt Shelly worked in the garden every morning, trimming and thinning and plucking, and every once in a while we’d have a mandatory “garden day” where everyone had to help, but for the most part, Marcus and I did the weeding and took care of the animals.
    “I don’t mind that much.” He stopped weeding and watched me. “It’s nice to hang out like this with you.”
    A