Free The Gilly Salt Sisters by Tiffany Baker Page A

and full that walking through it was like pushing through mud.
    But now she wanted her stone back. She stole a glance across the ponds to her sister. More, even, than throwing things into the basins, it was forbidden to step or reach into them, submerging the salt and polluting it. But Claire didn’t care. Anticipating the suck and slime of clay at her fingertips, she scooted onto her belly and inched forward until her palm was almost touching the surface. She was about to sink her hand under when she heard a shriek, which she at first took to be one of the nasty gulls and then recognized as her mother. Before Claire knew what was happening, Mama was on her. “Ungodly child!” she shrieked, and gave Claire a hard shaking.
    Across the marsh Claire saw Jo half turn in her direction, then drop her wooden rake. “Mama!” she cried. Her voice hadn’t deepened yet into the smoky rasp it would become. “Mama, stop!” Jo was running then, skipping across the delicate network of earthen levees, but she was too late. Mama had hauled Claire onto her feet and begun swatting at her, smacking her legs, shoulders, neck, and cheeks. It was like being stung by a million irate bees. Claire put her arms up over her head.
    “Mama, hush.” Jo arrived. By then she was as tall as Mama, but dark. In contrast, Claire was her mother’s mirror image: pale, redheaded, and with the same mulish jaw that some people in town said would prevent her from becoming beautiful and others called a sign of character. As quick as she started it, Mama stopped pummeling Claire. She put her fists up to her mouth, and emitted a strangled noise—a name, in fact.
Henry.
    “Claire.” Joanna squatted down until the two of them were eye level, her wide hands spread like starfish on Claire’s shoulders. “Don’t ever step into the ponds. Do you understand?”
    Claire nodded and pretended to be listening, but really she was focusing on the crash of waves in the distance. There was nothing she wanted in this marsh, she realized. Nothing at all. There was so little she wanted, in fact, that she even envied her missing father, for he had managed the greatest trick of all: escape.
    For the next thirteen years, Claire dreamed of that, too. She desired only the signs of nothingness: a vacant bed, an empty closet, a suitcase ready to go. She didn’t want the blunt points of wild irises blooming outside her window in the spring, or the food Mama scooped onto plates in front of her, or the swell of hips and breasts she started to sprout. She didn’t covet friends or parties unless she could be the star. Most of all, she didn’t desire love, at least not until it caught her by surprise, opening up a greed in her so gaping and huge that she became a thief just to fill it.

    C laire might have been estranged from Jo, but they were still family, she was forced to admit, still cut from the same piece of ragged cloth whether she liked it or not, even if Jo’s side looked a little different from hers. Which was why when Cutt Pitman opened the diner, Claire wasn’t surprised to find little dishes of salt sitting front and center on all the tables. In a way she was secretly pleased. Even when Claire wished for it, Jo could never be ignored.
    In her adult years, Claire’s distaste for the main substance ofher childhood had grown even stronger. As a youth she had been powerless in the face of the stuff, but once she was the wife of Whit, the tables had turned in her life. If she didn’t like the salt, Claire knew very well, she could persuade others to get rid of it. But hatred bears hatred and sadness more sadness, and with the salt it was no different for Claire. She started out with an aversion to the matter, but over the course of her married life, as one grief heaped itself upon another, she began to fear the salt rather than simply dislike it.
    She had never consciously planned to imply to the town that the salt was tainted. That tactic had come to her in a flash of