Free The Sisters Montclair by Cathy Holton Page A

down a box of saltines and set it on the table.
    “You know I like cornbread with my chili.”
    She thought,
I mopped the fucking floor. I didn’t have time to make cornbread.
She said, “Sorry.” She didn’t have time to fight with him, a fight that, once begun, might go on for days. She had too much work to catch up on. She slid back into her chair.
    He stared at her a minute and then went back to eating.
    “We’re going out,” he said. “Macklin’s having a bonfire.”
    “I don’t feel like a party tonight.”
    “You never feel like a party.”
    “I’m tired.”
    “It’s Friday night.”
    “I need to study. I’m behind in most of my classes.”
    “Go on. Get showered and change your clothes.” He didn’t look at her again but there was no mistaking his tone. His jaw jutted obstinately over his bowl; a stubborn expression settled on his face.
    She sighed and stubbed out her cigarette.
    “I told Macklin we’d bring the beer,” he said.
    Macklin and Jessica lived a few miles from them in a neighborhood of small Victorian cottages fallen on hard times. The house needed a fresh coat of paint but it sat on a large lot with a wide patchy lawn surrounded by a picket fence. A huge oak spread its branches protectively over the house. At the top of its tall crown, a rude tree house had been built using scrap lumber and a series of climbing ropes and ladders, so that the entire structure looked like something built by the Lost Boys in Neverland. The house was haunted by the spirit of an old man who had hung himself from the tree, the neighbors told Macklin and Jessica on the day they moved in and began the tree house, and Stella did not like going over there. It was always dirty and it smelled of dog, and there was an air of sadness and loss about the place that affected her deeply.
    But Macklin and Jessica were two of Josh’s oldest friends, they had all three gone to high school together, and so there was nothing for it. The bonfire was in full swing by the time they arrived. A ring of lawn chairs had been drawn up around the fire pit in the side yard and the night sky was cold and bright with stars and a thin sliver of moon.
    “All right! The beer’s here!” Macklin shouted when he saw them coming across the lawn dragging the cooler behind them. There were perhaps a dozen people gathered around the fire smoking weed and passing a bottle of Jack Daniels between them. Someone played an acoustic guitar. Stella greeted those she knew and then grabbed a can of PBR from the cooler and walked over to the far side of the fire. She sat down with her back against the ancient oak, watching the others. The firelight cast fantastic shadows in the branches of the old tree.
    She put her head back and closed her eyes. An image of Alice Whittington came stubbornly into view. An image of Alice as a girl, attractive and well-dressed, climbing on the train and heading for New York, unaware that she would soon have lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt. Why did some peoples’ lives turn out like that, magical and unexpected, almost as if their fate was nothing more than some marvelous movie script? While others struggled to escape their destiny, feeling it always at their backs like a cold wind.
    She opened her eyes. Sparks drifted like fire flies on the cool night air.
    Karma.
What a joke. There was no rhyme or reason to anything that happened, no order to the universe, only chaos. The sooner she accepted this and moved on with her life, the better off she’d be.
    When she first left home, she had fallen in with a group of Birmingham street kids down on Third Avenue. On cold winter nights they would stand around a burn barrel trying to keep warm and telling their stories. It had seemed romantic to her, at first, the nomadic life, huddling like gypsies around fires at night, bellies empty, stories waiting to be told. But the romance had quickly paled. She found she had no stomach for panhandling, for running from the cops, for