The Sisters by Nancy Jensen Read Free Book Online Page B

button from her daughter. “A rose is a kind of flower.” She handed Alma a tortoiseshell button and pointed out the different colors, then lifted Alma into another chair and stood up. “Find me two more like that,” she said, and while Alma sorted, Bertie slipped the rose button into her pocket. She ought not to have kept them, and she really ought to go through the button tin to find the other one and just throw them out—but then, it seemed wrong to waste them. They’d look pretty on a dress for Alma when she got a little older. Besides, no one in Newman, not even Hans, knew anything about that pink dress except that she’d worn it when they married in the judge’s office.
    Not too long ago, out of the blue, Hans had asked about the dress. “You never wear it,” he said.
    “Nothing to wear it to.” She shoved her fist deep into the bread dough she was working on the counter. “It’s too fancy for church.”
    “We got an anniversary coming up. You could wear it then.”
    “Can’t,” she said. “I gave it away in a church drive a while back. It never did fit right.” She was afraid to turn to look at his face, so she lifted the dough with both hands and flipped it over. It sounded like a slap, coming down. She wouldn’t have thought Hans would remember that dress. Every now and again he would shake her up with some tenderhearted feeling she didn’t think he had. She sure couldn’t tell him the truth—that she’d cut that dress to pieces the day after they were married.
    The wedding hadn’t been anything like what she used to dream of, though life before Hans had been so long ago, she was finding it harder all the time remembering what her dreams had been. More than anything before or since, she’d wanted to marry Wallace. That much she knew. There wouldn’t have been the money for a grand wedding, of course, but they would have been married in the Emmanuel Baptist Church in front of everybody they knew, and when they kissed, everyone would have teared up, seeing such love.
    And afterwards? What was it she had wanted afterwards? They’d talked of children, lots of children, and Bertie had seen herself wiping small faces, had seen Wallace laughing beneath a tumble of little bodies on snowy mornings, had imagined year after year cupping a new tiny hand in hers to show just how far to poke a bean seed into the ground.
    Storybook notions of a foolish girl, those were. Even so, she would have liked to be able to say she loved Hans, that in six years she had come to love him, but she didn’t think that was true, not unless the warm, solid feeling she had for him was love. It was respect, she thought. And appreciation. But love? She’d loved Wallace, had felt a tingling and leaping inside her, and even now when she thought about him for more than a minute or two, that feeling came back.
    Of course she wasn’t sure Hans loved her either. He’d never said he did. He hadn’t even courted her, really. He was already one of the customers at the restaurant when she was hired on to wait tables, and at first she steered clear because she thought he was one of those men who played with girls’ feelings. He was always laughing and teasing with the waitresses and asking young women who came in by themselves or in pairs to sit down and let him buy them pie and coffee, but then Bertie started noticing how, when those same girls came in later and Hans was there, they’d nod or wave at him real quick, then look away. If he’d treated them badly, they would have pretended not to see him or they would have walked out. None of it made any sense—not until she saw him get up one day to pay his ticket. Not a minute before, Bertie had heard the girl who had sat down at his table agree to go to the pictures with him, but as soon as he stood up, she was falling all over herself to make up some excuse about just remembering a promise to help her mother. Hans had nodded, offered her his hand to shake, and then waited for