Free The Sisters by Nancy Jensen

and then, on her own, she drew a little baby on a piece of white paper and cut it out like a paper doll. She knew where Mother saved sheets of brown paper from grocery parcels, so, while Mother was busy hanging laundry out, Alma sneaked to take a piece. She cut a big shaky circle, dotted the center with paste, and pressed it on the page beside the Indian mother. When it was dry, she folded up the bottom of the circle and the two sides, then tucked the baby in. In Mother’s sewing box, she found a threaded needle, and she punched this down into one of the side flaps, leaving a long end of thread, then punched the needle up through the other flap, cut the thread and tied a bow to keep the papoose nicely snug. She liked being able to slide the baby out to lay it in the mother’s arms for a little while, then put it back in the pouch to keep it safe.
    She also had a picture of Myrna Loy, cut from a magazine Daddy had found on a bench outside the drugstore. In the picture, Myrna Loy was wearing a frothy apron and holding out a beautiful platter with a big roasted turkey ringed with apples and roses. Underneath the picture, it said “The glamorous Miss Loy is a star in the kitchen as well as on the silver screen.”
    The best thing in her scrapbook was a card with two pictures, side by side, of a dark-haired girl on a swing. The girl was wearing a pretty dress of white lace, and though she wasn’t smiling, she was even more beautiful than Myrna Loy. Alma didn’t understand why the pictures looked just alike, and she didn’t know who the girl was, but sometimes when she looked hard, she thought it might be a picture of her mother. No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t ask Mother about it, since she’d stolen the picture from the family Bible—way in the back in the Book of Revelation that nobody ever read. If she wanted to know about it, she’d have to put it back in the Bible and pretend to find it again, but she was afraid if she did, Mother might take it away and hide it someplace Alma could never find it.
    “Are you getting those things?” Mother called. “Hurry, Alma!”
    Alma lay on the floor and reached far under the bed to pull her scrapbook out. In her dresser, she had two warm sweaters, but one of them, the green one, really belonged to Daddy. She took that one out for him and imagined herself wearing it over her own if she had to set out to rescue him. She could see herself in the rowboat, standing at the front, directing the grown-ups where to go and keeping them calm by being cheerful, like Shirley Temple always was. If in the confusion Daddy got arrested, like Shirley’s daddy in The Littlest Rebel, Alma would put on her good dress and go see the president to get him out of jail, just like Shirley did. That picture was her favorite. In most of the others Daddy had taken her to see, the children’s parents had somehow got lost. When she and Daddy left the theater, Alma was always sure to smile and tell him how she liked the picture, but later in bed, she would push her face into the pillow and cry for those poor lonely children.
    “Alma, come now!”
    Alma took a long look around her room and then stacked and carried her things back to her mother’s room. Mother was folding a dress and putting it in an open case beside a pair of shoes. Next to the case, the Bible lay on a pile of other clothes waiting to be packed. Mother held out her arms for Alma’s bundle. She didn’t notice Daddy’s green sweater, but she held up the scrapbook and said, “Are you sure this is what you want? Everything that’s left behind might get ruined.” Alma imagined the river surging into their house, filling up the gas stove, floating the kitchen table, pouring into her room, drowning her dolls, her toy monkey. A tear ran down her cheek like a tiny river.
    “Alma?”
    She nodded. “It’s for remembering.”
    Mother looked at her for a moment, her mouth turned up in just one corner, then she laid the folded