Free The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen Page A

couldn’t find a polite way to explain what she’d seen: a person so untouched by fear she was certain something terrible had happened to Cousin Bettie, or would. What Milly didn’t know then was that whatever happened to Bettie would, in its own way, happen to her, too.
    Milly looked at her mother, who was folding linens on the porch, and then at the front door of the barn, which her father had shut up despite the weather vane not spinning and the sky being perfectly clear. She hadn’t seen her father since he took Rust-O-Lonia and the can of nails from its resting place beneath the oak tree that morning.
    Cousin Bettie rolled down her sleeves, waving away the last bee and encouraging it to fly back to the sandpile. Out of the hundreds, not a single one had stung her.
    “I guess I win,” she said, moving closer to Milly to see what she was staring at now instead of staring at her. “By default, I mean. Since I was the only one playing.”
    Milly kept her eyes on the barn, trying to discern from the slivers of light between the wood slats what the woman at the town fair had discerned from a cup of tea leaves last summer. After Milly paid her nickel, she’d expected the woman to see a butterfly or a daisy, good fortune or love. But when it was her turn, the woman saw a raised finger: a warning.
    “You’ll fall in love like the rest of us,” her mother had said, after the woman explained Milly’s future. “It’s what happens after that you have to worry about.”
    “Listen to your mother,” the woman with the tea leaves said.
    Milly’s mother opened her change purse. “I’ll pay you a nickel to say that to my other daughter. She’s the one who deserves a warning.”
    Milly turned away from the barn, wondering what it would be like to be able to see into the future, wondering if she already could. Normally, she’d have asked Twiss her opinion, but Twiss didn’t look like she could be deterred from her courtship efforts. It didn’t take a woman with a cup of tea leaves to see that her sister was enamored.
    “You’re my hero,” Twiss said to Cousin Bettie. She handed over their cousin’s shoes as if they were made of glass. “How did you do that?”
    Cousin Bettie— Bett she liked to be called—simply handed them back.
     
    7
     
     
    wiss had paused in the meadow long enough that she couldn’t remember where she’d intended to go. That happened often these days, remembering and forgetting. She’d get stuck somewhere old and have to wander around to find her mental footing again. The synapses weren’t firing the way they used to. At first, she’d put a pitcher of milk into a cupboard or a clean plate into the refrigerator and remember a few minutes later. Now when she walked into a room looking for something and forgot what it was, instead of minutes later, hours later she’d lurch up from a chair and say My reading glasses! or The photo album! and then she’d be fooled into thinking her mind was intact until the next bout of chair lurching.
    If Milly had noticed, she’d had the kindness not to say anything. Twiss had always been able to count on her sister for that. You better be using that walker , she thought, when Milly passed by the front windows, but she knew Milly wasn’t. However gracefully her sister had aged—Milly’s beauty hadn’t been chiseled down to jutting cheekbones and withered lips, gizzards, fur—a part of her refused to admit she was old. We’re old , she’d say, but her voice was caught between statement and question. What Milly didn’t realize was that the bariatric walker wouldn’t indict her any more than the floral print scarf she wore when they went driving or the housedresses with the removable lace collars, which she never removed.
    “Guess what I am?” she’d said to Twiss, modeling a new scarf one day.
    “Modern?” Twiss said.
    When Twiss was feeling particularly obnoxious, she’d lumber around the living room with the walker, which was too wide to