Free Sister Mine by Tawni O’Dell Page B

that moment, my front door creaks open and a face peers out.
    I head toward her, walking at first, then I’m running.
    She meets me on the porch.
    I kiss her and touch her hair and nuzzle her neck to see if she still smells like my kin.
    I try to hold her, but it’s not easy to do since she looks to be about nine months pregnant.

Chapter Six
    I ’M COOKING DINNER. I keep glancing back and forth between the dried beef I’m sizzling in a frying pan with butter, and the extremely pregnant stranger sitting at my table who was my skinny teenaged sister the last time I saw her. Each time I look in her direction, I expect her to be gone.
    â€œI’m really sorry about this,” I say, gesturing at the frying pan with my wooden spoon. “I have no food in the house. Nothing. I really need to get to the grocery store.”
    â€œIt’s okay,” she says.
    I look over at her toying with the stem of her wineglass. She has her feet propped up and her head tilted back with her eyes closed and her hands resting calmly on the hill of her belly.
    I’ve noticed that she’s carrying low for a first baby, and she moves fairly carelessly for a first-time mother. No walking on eggshells. No lowering and raising herself in and out of chairs with infinite patience. No cradling or stroking her stomach.
    â€œI haven’t had creamed dried beef since we were kids. We practically lived on the stuff. Remember?”
    She smiles at the memory. To me it’s not a good memory. It reminds me of how poor we were and how the cooking duties in our household fell to me, a child.
    I may never have earned an anti-stress badge but by the time I was the age of Pamela Jameson’s niece, I could make a dinner for two children and a 200-pound coal miner out of a loaf of Wonder bread, a can of green beans, and some leftover gravy.
    â€œYeah, I remember,” I say.
    â€œWhat was it Lib said they called it in the army? Shit on a shingle?” she laughs.
    I laugh, too, but I’m not feeling merry. I want to remind her how much she used to hate creamed dried beef, but I don’t.
    Something’s not right with Shannon. During the hour or so she’s been here she’s chatted happily about our childhood, sugarcoating our lives and our relationship with our father in a hyper-sentimental way usually reserved for bad TV movies about country folk produced by people who’ve never set foot out of L.A. or New York City.
    She even makes the occasional comment about someone outside our family who I’m amazed she can remember, like this reference to Lib who worked with our dad in Beverly back before he became boss of his own crew in Jojo. Shannon would only have known him from company picnics and the times he dropped Dad off at the house when he was too drunk to drive.
    To hear her talk, hers was a swell life in a swell place that she remembers vividly and fondly, yet she ran away from all of it and stayed away for eighteen years.
    I add some flour to the beef mixture, then the milk.
    So far we’ve managed to completely avoid the topics of why she left, why she never came back, and why she never contacted me, but the questions sit in the room with us, taking up more space and more oxygen than either one of our physical bodies.
    She did give me a brief account of her most recent life and the circumstances that brought her to my doorstep. According to her, she’s been living in a little town in New Mexico, another one of those towns I’ve probably never heard of. She had a fairly decent job working at a car rental place until they had to cut their staff in half and she was canned. She not only lost her income but also her health insurance.
    That was four months ago. She hasn’t been able to find another job—who wants to hire a pregnant woman?—and she had to pay her bills with the little savings she had managed to put away to buy things for the baby. She lost her apartment, and