The Good Sister by Wendy Corsi Staub Read Free Book Online Page A

uneventful day wore on without yielding a shred of amusing material—nature-related, or otherwise—Jen resorted to scouring the Web for a good joke or a comedic video clip suitable for her fifteen-year-old.
    She’s never spent much time on the Internet. Not compared to the rest of the world, anyway. Maybe she’d be more tech-savvy if she were still in the workforce, or a teenager, but she prefers to do most of her communicating and shopping and reading the old-fashioned way.
    Aghast at what popped up via the search engine today, she’s more worried than ever about what her girls are being exposed to online.
    “Whatever happened to good old-fashioned clean comedy?” she asked Thad during his regular lunchtime phone call, after she’d explained Mission: Cheer Up Carley.
    “You mean like Charlie Chaplin?”
    “Not that old-fashioned.”
    “The Three Stooges? Abbott and Costello?”
    “You know what I mean. Everything is so raunchy, and I—I don’t know. I just want her to laugh again.”
    “She will, eventually. But it’s going to take a lot more than a laugh to get her past this thing. You can’t just fix everything.”
    Sure I can , Jen thought. I’m her mom. That’s what moms do. We fix things for our kids and we worry about them and we ask about their day when they walk in the door . . .
    Dammit. Why, just when Jen felt like she was starting to get the hang of this motherhood thing, sisterly squabbles and all, did the rules have to go and change?
    To make matters worse, the local bus Carley takes to and from school, so often running late, had to go and show up five minutes early today, catching her off guard. And so, rather than greeting Carley with an amusing anecdote or even a raunchy YouTube clip to take her mind off her troubles, Jen simply blurted the first thing that came to mind.
    How was your day?
    Carley was never forthcoming with details about her life even before the whole school nightmare started.
    But Jen wouldn’t hesitate to ask Emma that same question on any given afternoon. She’s not necessarily less prickly than her older sister—if anything, she’s far pricklier—but she’s not nearly as private.
    Never in a million years would Emma merely tell Jen that school was “fine.” She’d pronounce it “horrifying” or “amazing,” then launch into a superlative-heavy account of something that had happened during recess or lunch. The spectacular incident typically would feature at least half a dozen of the gaggle of girls Emma refers to as her BFFs—a term that used to amuse, but now only aggravates, her big sister.
    “You can’t have twenty people you call best friends forever,” she often tells Emma. “If there are twenty of them, then they aren’t BFFs. They’re just friends. A person can only have one BFF.”
    “Maybe you only have one,” Emma shoots back, “but I have twenty. Actually, twenty-three.”
    Yes, and poor Carley no longer has even one. Not since Nicki Olivera switched to public school after their eighth-grade graduation from Saint Paul’s Parochial.
    Inseparable from Nicki since preschool, Carley had asked if she, too, could go to Woodsbridge High, rather than commute to Sacred Sisters, the all-girls Catholic high school in the working-class Buffalo neighborhood where Jen had grown up.
    “Try Sisters first,” Jen told her. “If you don’t like it, you can change to Woodsbridge sophomore year.”
    Once Carley got to Sisters, she wouldn’t want to leave, Jen was certain. After all, she herself had gone there, along with all four of her siblings, and her mother and aunts a generation before them.
    So had Debbie Quattrone Olivera, Nicki’s mother and one of Jen’s closest friends back at Sisters. They drifted apart when they went off to college, but rekindled the friendship about a decade ago as married young moms living in adjacent developments here in Buffalo’s South Towns suburbs.
    “If I ever have a daughter,” Debbie used to say back when