Free The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter by Susan Hahn

much she gets frustrated with her passivity, her dowdiness. She thinks, “At least I take the time to listen to her and go with her to places, when she asks.” Celine believes Cecilia is usually too sadly sunk into herself to bring much to anyone else and is perplexed and a bit jealous by how much Celie adores her.
    Although Celine, too, cares for Cecilia, she cannot stand how mixed up she is. Celine tells a miscellaneous friend, “You only have to read her poems to know this, and
now,
with whatever is going on with this ‘creature’—real or imagined—she refers to as ‘Herr M’ in more than one of her poems.
Well,
what’s a person to think? However, Cecily is
the one
who is just downright crazy. Totally obsessed with trying, always trying, to top Cecilia’s demitasse spoonful of success.”
    Though Celine does find Cecily easy to talk to—an awfully good listener—so she tells her things she does not tell the others. Things that she probably should not tell her. Celine knows this, but cannot resist sharing them with someone, and she sees how much Cecily enjoys hearing what she says. She does believe they make Cecily’s life a little richer, distract her from her Cecilia fixation.
    On the surface, at least, telling Cecily private things does make some sense for Celine used to be really close with her—both thirteen, they would sit in her Uncle Emmanuel’s gold Chrysler Imperial in the driveway of Celine’s house and talk and talk. Mostly about boys—Celine’s boys. Cecily was shy and not dating, yet. They would laugh a lot, while Uncle Emmanuel would often peer out the window. One day when Celine went inside, he told her he thought Cecily might be a homosexual. He talked about homosexuals a lot, especially after his business trips to Las Vegas. He would tell Celine and Aunt Sonya about the shows he had seen and who
was
and was
not
a “homo.” At first when he used the word Celine did not know what it meant and paid little attention to it. But after he said it about Cecily, she asked her mother. When Aunt Sonya told her, Celine just could not agree with her father. Itseemed silly, and at the same time startling. It made her feel upset—confused—but she kept it to herself.
    However, soon after Uncle Emmanuel said this, Aunt Lillian got a phone call from another mother saying she did not want her daughter to have any more contact with Cecily. When he heard this from Sonya, Manny just laughed. He and his brother Abraham, Cecily’s father, were in business together. Carpets. They had had a terrible fight, which led him to create the rumor. Manny Slaughter could become very scary when he got angry.
    Sometimes when I would see Cecily, I could not help but worry that this gossip had completely overwhelmed her. It was soon after that she began to wear thick eye shadow on her eyelids to give herself a deliberately tormented look. What was said clearly got permanently lodged in her mind all of the time. Celine’s too—but not all of the time, just some of the time.
All
of the time for Celine was reserved for Celeste. Sometimes she would even wonder if Celeste had been accidentally dropped into the wrong house and got a second chance at life with a more peaceful family. She also thought at lot about how nice it would have been to have her little sister back—have someone with whom she could have shared her thoughts, someone she could truly trust, someone who could have made her feel less alone—help her deal with all the chaos between her mother and father. Whenever she meets a person who has a sister with the name Celeste, she glues a smile onto her too bright lipstick. She knows how to cover the tormented look with cheery color.
    Celine was six when Celeste died. Manny Slaughter wept for hours at the funeral parlor over her stilled body, where he had taken Celine, Sonya too broken apart to go. Then,suddenly, he picked