Free Bittersweet by Susan Wittig Albert

murder, at a time when most girls are playing with My Little Ponies. She isn’t nearly as withdrawn as she was when she first joined our family, and her aptitude for the violin has given her a new and delightful confidence in herself. Last week, for her intermediate recital, she played Bohm’s Sarabande in G Minor. I’m nomusic aficionado, but I was moved to tears by what seemed to me to be an extraordinary performance. She didn’t just get the notes right, she
felt
the music, and in feeling it herself, made her audience feel it, too. Even Sandra Trevor, her teacher, was impressed. And that takes some doing.
    Caitie is a good passenger, but her cat, Mr. P, is not. Heaven only knows how many miles that scruffy old orange tomcat traveled to get to our house, where he showed up one evening, sore-pawed and starved, and purred his way into Caitie’s compassionate heart. At the time, I tried to convince her that a cuddly kitten would be a more appropriate pet for a little girl, but no dice. “He’s just like me when I first came to live here,” she’d said, defiantly clutching the crafty, battle-scarred reprobate in her arms. “He doesn’t have any family. He needs somebody to adopt him. He needs
me
.”
    And that was that. Mr. P (his full name is Mr. Pumpkin) yowled from his crate behind our seats for nearly an hour before he gave it up as a bad job and went sulkily to sleep. After that, I kept Caitie entertained by pointing out the sights along the way and—as we drove down into Uvalde County—telling her some of the history of the area. “Travel is educational” is my motto.
    â€œAll this land,” I said, pointing to the hills that thrust abruptly against the horizon to the west and south, “was once hunted by Indians—Comanche, Tonkawa, and Apache.”
    â€œReally?” Caitie sat up straight and looked out the window as if she expected to see a hunting party picking its way through the shrubby cedars and shinnery oak, on the trail of a deer for dinner.
    â€œYes, really,” I said. “The Spanish got here first, in the 1600s, but the Indians chased them out. When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, more settlers began to move in, which seriously annoyed theIndians and led to raids and killings and such. Meanwhile, a little farther that way”—I pointed to the east—“in San Antonio, the Mexican army under a general named Santa Anna was taking the garrison at—”
    â€œI know!” Caitie exclaimed eagerly. “At the Alamo! The Texans lost and everybody was afraid of Santa Anna, because he gave no quarter. That means,” she added in an explanatory tone, “that he killed everybody, whether they were waving a white flag or not.”
    â€œBloodthirsty,” I remarked.
    â€œYes,” she said seriously. “Soldiers aren’t supposed to do that. But Sam Houston had the Twin Sisters, so he beat Santa Anna at San Jacinto. That was in 1836. We learned about it in fourth grade,” she added, “but I still remember.”
    â€œGood for you,” I said admiringly, slowing to pilot Mama around a pair of tractors mowing the roadsides. “But who are the Twin Sisters? I don’t think I know about them.”
    â€œThey’re two big cannons that were made in Ohio and shipped down the Mississippi to help the Texans,” Caitie replied. “But the Texas soldiers didn’t have any cannonballs, so they loaded them with handfuls of musket balls and broken glass and horseshoes.”
    â€œNo kidding?” I said, widening my eyes. “Horseshoes? That’s amazing!”
    Caitie nodded. “But the thing is, nobody knows what happened to the Sisters. They totally disappeared. Poof.” She waved her hand to illustrate a cannon vanishing. “It’s a mystery, where they went.”
    â€œSounds like.” I shifted down so Mama could climb the hill up ahead