Free A Thread Unbroken by Kay Bratt

you the chance to do it yourself. Wait here and I’ll heat a pan of water to add to the bucket and bring you some soap. You can take it in your room and undress and wash. When you’re through, if I think you didn’t do a good enough job, you’ll have to do it again in front of me. And throw those dresses out the door when you get them off—I’m getting rid of them. You won’t need those kinds of clothes here.” She picked up the empty bucket and headed for the house.
    That was fine with the girls, since the dresses were the beginning of their troubles, anyway. The woman had given them boys’ clothes the night before, and both Chai and Josi didn’t care eitherway. They were a bit upset about their shoes being taken, but the woman had said they couldn’t be trusted with shoes and had replaced them with cheap plastic slippers.
    Chai shivered. “You could have heated water for our hair, too, you know,” she called out to the woman’s disappearing figure.
    “Chai,
shhh
! You’re going to make her angry. Who knows what she’ll do?”
    Chai stood up, wringing her hair out with both hands, and winked at Josi. “Oh, she won’t do a thing. Her husband’s the tyrant, not her. Don’t be so afraid, Josi.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    W
hat a long, exhausting day.
In only three months of living with the family, Chai had learned how to clean fish, cook it, and complement it with many different side dishes of spicy vegetables.
    She dried her hands on the ragged towel and arched her back to work out the kinks. She had come a long way and was no longer the carefree child she had been before their fateful day of abduction. She had learned to carry her part of the load because Josi was a good teacher. Each night they worked side by side to feed the family of six, and they had even learned to sneak in extra portions to ensure there’d be enough left to have a fair share for themselves. Chai had never imagined that she’d miss eating pork, but in her new household, meals were fish, fish, fish, and the memories of her mother’s stir-fried pork dishes were constant daydreams in her head.
    During the day, Josi took care of the toddlers most of the time, leaving Chai to clean the dwelling and mend clothing and fishnets—and that was just the mornings. In the afternoons, they scrubbed the decks and did all the other menial jobs around the floating house. Josi joked that other than missing her littlebrothers, her life wasn’t much different than it had been at home. There, she had been the oldest child and had always done the most housework and caring for the little ones, which was obvious from the way the new little boys gravitated to her. She said that at least here she didn’t have to care for the family pigs—a chore she had always hated.
    Chai liked the little boys, too, and helped out when she could, but they had quickly attached themselves to the quiet, calm ways of Josi and followed her around everywhere she went. They even seemed to prefer her over their own mother, a fact that didn’t appear to bother the woman. A half dozen times a day, they could find Josi holding one of boys over the water to urinate or worse, making Chai wrinkle her nose in disgust. On the cleaner side of being their nanny, it was touching to see them snuggled up on Josi’s lap at every chance they could find. They loved for her to tell them stories, and it wasn’t unusual to see them listening raptly while tangling their fingers through her long hair.
    Chai wasn’t sure, but she thought her birthday had possibly been a day or so ago. If the crude marks she carved into the floor of their room were correct, she was now fourteen. She didn’t mention it to Josi; instead she silently wondered what her parents did to celebrate her day, and if Luci even remembered her
jie jie
.
    She was surprised that despite their meager meals, she was growing. Mother had fussed about it but given her a few more of Tao’s outgrown clothes to wear, with a rope to tie