The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton Read Free Book Online Page A

the top and her driver’s license showing through its plastic window, an old black leather eyeglass case monogrammed in initials that weren’t hers, a blue plastic checkbook, three keys on a whistle key chain, a tampon and diaper pins and change—pennies and dimes and quarters that rolled and scattered, falling through the cracks in the picnic table and landing in the grass at our feet. She stared at the glasses case for a moment, then extracted it from the pile and slipped it back into her empty purse.
    “Five minutes,” she said. “Just write. And don’t worry, we won’t read anything. Ready, set . . .” We all looked to the playground, where the kids were happily engaged. Linda’s J.J. and Kath’s Lacy were asleep in their strollers, and my Davy was pushing his trucks around on the blanket beside the table. “Write!”
    I looked at the long blue lines on the white sheet on the wooden table in front of me, all that emptiness. The edge of Linda’s wallet nearly touched the paper, the driver’s license upside down. I focused on that: height 5'10", weight 139, hair blond, eyes blue because she couldn’t check all the boxes for eye color, I guessed, and her eyes did look blue when she wore blue. I thought of my father teaching me to drive, his foot stomping on the brakeless passenger-seat floorboard, his voice booming, “Brake, for Christ’s sake, Frankie!” when I was nowhere near the stop sign yet.
    I set my eraserless stub of pencil to the blank page, trying to imbue that scene with a humor I hadn’t felt at the time. And somehow, the squeals of the children and the smell of airborne sand and the taste of the earthy fall air worked their way into my writing, too, and the urge to look up and make sure Maggie and Davy were okay, and my not wanting to look up, wanting to have this moment for myself.
    Linda called “Time!” after what seemed no time at all.
    No children maimed or dead out on the playground—that was reassuring. And even Ally and Kath had a little ink on the page, though Kath would admit—
years
later—that all she’d written that morning was “I swear I never met a soul half as bossy as Linda Mason.”
    “Okay, who wants to read first?” Linda said.
    After a good deal of resistance—she’d said we wouldn’t have to read! (though Kath, again years later, admitted to thinking she ought to volunteer, it would serve Linda right)—Brett said fine, she’d read first, Linda didn’t intimidate her. She read, interrupted only once by her daughter (who was dispatched back to the sandbox with a bucket and shovel). A few paragraphs about a wacky marble-rolling machine she and her brother built when they were in grade school. The rolling coins had reminded her of it.
    Kath said she liked how the passage was really about her brother even though it seemed to be about the machine, and Brett, surprisingly, looked for a moment as if she might cry.
    I volunteered to read next, saying, “But of course this isn’t really anything, I was just—”
    “Never apologize, never explain,” Linda said. “That’s what my writing teacher in college said.”
    “I don’t see you volunteering to read next,” I said.
    “Oh just shut up and read and I’ll read next, okay?”
    By the time I’d read about my driving lesson (which did get a chuckle), the natives were getting restless, so I went for the Popsicles—yes, Popsicles at 10:45 in the morning—and while the children dripped melted rocket pops on their faces, on their clothes, on the arms of those of us holding them in our laps, Linda read. Just a few paragraphs that started with the key chain, wondering what doors those keys might open, and ended with a key opening a temple, and inside the temple a thousand people filing past a casket and a little girl in the front wondering why so many people she didn’t know were claiming a loss she didn’t want to share.
    The five of us were silent for a long time afterward as the children licked their