The Hurricane Sisters by Dorothea Benton Frank Read Free Book Online Page B

was dressing on my wedding day, Maisie attaching that veil to my hair. I remember it like it was yesterday. Like every other girl I knew, I thought I’d fall in love, marry, and conceive, and somehow I expected to deliver a better version of Clayton and me. Brother, was I naive!
    Let me tell you, my friend, the gene pool is a mighty big place and like they say, there’s literally no lifeguard. I hardly recognize myself in either one of my children except that Maisie insists my dead sister, Juliet, seems to have been reincarnated in my daughter. I know. What a creepy thought. How creepy? I’ve never told Maisie or anyone but when Ashley was very young she used to tell me to call her Juliet. How do you like them apples? But who knows about all that stuff?
    I don’t have the first clue what or who is in Ivy’s DNA. It doesn’t matter really. You take the children the good Lord sends you, love them with all your heart, and give them your best efforts to help them prepare themselves for life. I know Clayton and I made some mistakes with ours, Ivy in particular, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t love them. The biggest problem I’ve ever had or continue to have raising our children, believe it or not, is Maisie.
    Maisie was raised by parents whose circumstances had been dramatically reduced by the Great Depression. The aftershocks of that terrible catastrophe were good and bad. On the positive side, she learned to be self-sufficient, when she’s so inclined. She keeps herself and her home immaculate. And she manages money well. My father used to say she could squeeze the balls off a buffalo nickel . There are other idiomatic expressions I much prefer, such as she can stretch a dollar so thin you can read the newspaper through it. Or she’s tighter than a mole’s ear, not that I’ve ever examined a mole’s ear or ever would.
    When Juliet and I were really little, our mother kept chickens for their eggs and their eventual commitment to our dinner table. My sister and I loved to play with the chicks and gave them all names. Whenever we realized that Maisie was about to send a chicken to its great reward, we’d cry and howl and beg her not to wring its neck. She’d tell us to go watch television and sure enough, we’d have fried chicken for dinner. And we ate it with a smile on our face because there was no point in being emotional. Maisie wouldn’t stand for it.
    Maisie would catch some creek shrimp or fiddlers, bait her own hooks, drop that hook in the water, and pull in fish by the bucketful. She would clean them outside on an old wooden table while my sister watched, completely entranced. I gagged.
    For as far back as I can remember, Maisie has grown delicious vegetables and gorgeous flowers. Needless to say, she made pickles from cucumbers and string beans, and chutney from Jerusalem artichokes. I guess the only groceries she ever bought were flour, sugar, other meats, and milk. She would’ve kept a goat for milk but our neck of the woods on the Wappoo Creek wasn’t zoned for any farm animals bigger than poultry. When Juliet and I were teenagers, we’d collapse in horror when she’d bring up the subject of getting a goat. We would’ve been made social outcasts forever if some cute guy came to pick us up for a date and there was a goat in the yard. Never mind goat droppings.
    After Juliet died, Maisie gave up her chickens, grew fewer vegetables, and rarely fished, giving in like most of us have to filling up a cart at the Piggly Wiggly, which apparently is going to take another name. But she never gave up her flowers, saying flowers were her therapy. Somewhere along the line she learned to hybridize her hydrangeas and rhododendrons into amazing, vibrant colors and combinations only found in her yard that baffled garden club members from all over the South. It was not unusual for Maisie to find total strangers in her yard taking pictures of her flowers.
    The point is she learned all this from her