The Sisters by Nancy Jensen Read Free Book Online

you’re able to have the house good and warm.”
    Nothing to do but shut the door and go on over to the table. She wouldn’t sit down, though. Standing beside Alice, Bertie could see what she had in her hand. An envelope. The same pale yellow, the same blue ink. It had gone to Alice’s box by mistake and now here was Alice, come to pry.
    “What’s that you’ve got there?” Bertie asked.
    “Well, I swear,” said Alice. “I think I must have left my head right behind me on the pillow this morning.” She laughed at her own joke, and Bertie did her best to force a smile. “This came to my house. It looks like it might be for you.” She held it up before her face, as if to read it for the first time. “But really I don’t see how it can be. Those people at the post office have got you mixed up with somebody named Alberta Fischer.”
    Bertie didn’t have to see the address on the envelope to know how it was written: Miss Alberta Fischer, General Delivery, Juniper, Kentucky . The return address was someplace in Chicago. Mabel never put her name on it, just a single M, but even without that, Bertie would have known who it was from. She could always pick out Mabel’s handwriting, as delicate and pretty as she was. Up above the original address, somebody at the Juniper post office would have printed Mrs. Imogene Jorgensen, 738 Clark Street, Newman, Indiana. She wished she could take back the note she had scribbled to the Juniper postmaster right after she was married, telling him how to send on any mail that might come to her. He must have thought it an odd thing for her to do, since she’d never had a letter in her life, but right away he sent out an envelope that had been sitting with the dead letters for four or five months, paying extra out of his own pocket for the postman to bring it straight out to the house. She’d even had to sign for it.
    “I was Fischer before I was married,” she said to Alice. “And there’s some who’ve always called me Alberta.” She held out her hand for the letter.
    “This one’s come a long way,” Alice said, pretending again like she hadn’t spent a long while studying the envelope’s details before she ever stepped out of her house. “Postmark says Chicago, Illinois. You got family in Chicago?”
    “Now I think of it, Alice, I believe I did save back a little flour. You said you needed a cup?”
    “Two cups would be better.”
    Getting up from the table, Alice scraped her chair across the floor, and Bertie pointed at Alma sleeping in the rocker. She opened the cabinet door just enough to reach in and get the flour canister. No reason to let Alice see what else was inside. She could have put the flour into a sack, but instead she scooped it up in two coffee cups, so Alice would have to put the letter down.
    “I thank you for bringing the mail by,” Bertie said, leading Alice back to the door. “Hope your cake turns out.”
    Alice turned to look at her over the cups of flour. “I’ll be anxious to hear all about your letter.”
    “Bye,” Bertie said, closing the door just a little too fast so Alice had to quick-step out of the way.
    Back in the kitchen, she closed off the hall door to keep the heat in, then sat down at the table and picked up the envelope. Most folks looked forward to letters, but like all the ones that had found her before in Newman, this wasn’t the one she wanted.
    Hans had stood up and looked solemn when that first letter came, like it was some important telegram, and she’d made up a story quick, showing him how it had been forwarded. She told him it was nothing but a letter from her grandmother’s sister, who didn’t write too often, then she folded it into her apron pocket so he’d forget about it. When she and Hans were getting to know each other, she had told him that because she shared her mother’s name, Imogene, the family had all called her by her middle name, Alberta—Bertie for short. It had surprised her how easily the lie