The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen Read Free Book Online

bears.
    One night, when the northern lights were swirling across the horizon like pink cotton, and he hadn’t spoken to another person in three months, Hux found what he was looking for in a tundra meadow situated between a moonlit crevasse and snow dune. That night, he got out of his tundra buggy and walked over to the bears, who neither accepted nor rejected him, which Hux said was all anyone could really hope for in human company.
    Together, he and the bears watched the northern lights.
    “I believe that’s called happiness,” Hux said. “I only wish it had lasted longer.”
    “Amen,” Twiss’s mother said when the music swelled and the program ended, but she didn’t say it in her usual religious way.
    “I don’t get it,” Twiss said. “Why didn’t they eat him?”
    Her mother laughed. “Maybe you should have been a boy after all.”
    She put her hand on the back of Twiss’s neck. When Twiss didn’t pull away or lurch forward, her mother drew her into her arms the way she used to do when Twiss scraped her knee or fell down on the driveway. “You should stay home more. We had fun, didn’t we?”
    Which reminded Twiss of what she’d missed by being sick. By now, Milly and her father would have finished playing the back nine. They’d be walking back to the clubhouse. If her father had played especially well, he’d linger at each hole, retracing his steps so that he could repeat them the next time. Twiss wondered if Rollie had given Milly a nickel for a cream soda, even though she didn’t know about the mushrooms and probably wouldn’t have whacked at one if she did. Twiss imagined her father bursting through the front door with the same gleaming expression he usually reserved for her.
    Who’s the real champion? Twiss could almost hear him ask.
    Me! Me! Me! She could almost hear Milly answer.
    “Can I go lie down now?” Twiss said, slinking out of her mother’s embrace.
    She ran to the bottom of the staircase before her mother had a chance to respond. Before she climbed the first stair, she looked back at her mother, whose arms were wrapped around an empty space. I did have fun , she almost said, but that would have been the girl thing to do. She darted up the stairs instead, thumping each step extra hard with her heels and yelping like the cowboys in her books did.

    The next Sunday was her mother’s birthday, and to celebrate, Milly and Twiss hung a paper banner over the doorway in the kitchen that said CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’RE 32 IN ’42! When their mother saw it, she frowned, but not as much as when she opened their father’s gift.
    Although their mother didn’t golf, that year Twiss’s father bought her a No. 1 Persimmon driver. The head was made from finely grained American persimmon wood, the hardest of its kind and, in her father’s opinion, the most beautiful. The wood matched the jar of honey sitting on the counter, which her father dipped his fingers into even though he was supposed to use a spoon. Every time Twiss went golfing with her father, he’d tell her to wait outside the pro shop for him. When he came out, he’d wobble like a drunk.
    “I thought you might want to start playing,” her father said after Twiss’s mother tore the brown wrapping paper off the driver.
    “I don’t want to know how much this cost,” her mother said, placing the driver back on his lap. “What I know is, none of us will be happy until you try it out.
    “Go,” she said, neither kindly nor unkindly. “And take Trouble with you.”
    Twiss’s father looked at Twiss and then at the dark patch of sky beyond the windows. “I’ll bet a nickel the thunderclouds don’t even thunder, Maisie.”
    “I’ll bet a nickel they do, Joe,” her mother said.
    On their way out the door, Twiss took another swipe of coconut frosting from the cake Milly had baked for the occasion. Milly had decorated the top of it with four-leaf clovers, which she’d crawled through an entire field on her hands and knees