Free The Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper

pick up the mail that had arrived in the past few weeks. No more would be delivered to her at this address.
    The weed had evidently won the war with Jared, for it was still there, ten feet tall now, anchored to the front wall with tiny sucker tendrils, its lacy foliage completely covering half the front wall of the house.
    “Good-bye, weed,” she said, as she relocked the door.
    All the leaflets turned in her direction.
    “I’m moving over to Madera Street,” she said. “Ten thirty-two and a half Madera.” The leaflets trembled. Or maybe she only thought they did.
    Crossing the bridge on the way back to her new home, she started to toss the spare key into the river, but then stopped. She wouldn’t be needing it again, but still…she hadn’t remembered the painting stuff. Maybe she’d forgotten something else as well. When she parked the car, she put the key to Jared’s place in the little magnetic box where she kept her spare car key, up behind the steering column. No one was likely to find it who didn’t know it was there.
    That evening she served herself supper at her own table, laid with her own china. Later she sat in her own leather chair, looking out the window toward the sunset, watching the sun sink past all that lovely emptiness, no buildings in the way at all, the feathery clouds flushing pink and fading to violet. Then she went to bed in her own bed, with the windows open so the night air could come in.
    The next morning she went out to get the paper, andwhen she came back through the gate, she saw the weed thrusting up between the brick of the stoop and the wall of her house, tiny and green and indomitable.
    “Hello, weed,” she whispered.

4
Opalears: Beginning the Journey
    M y father, Halfnose Nazir (so called because the sultan’s nose was the proper length for a nose, and anything less could be called only a half nose) owned our house near the palace. It stood on Peacock Alley, a twisting line of cobble too narrow for more than slender persons and very small beasts, a corridor that wound its way among houses and shops to the intersection with the wider avenue. The only part of our house that was visible was the grilled balcony that hung over the alley and the high wall set with a gate, its tiny window covered by a grill. Inside was a flowery courtyard, with a fountain and chicken coops and the kitchen and a flight of stairs leading up to the grilled balcony and the living rooms and then on up to the roof, which was hidden from other rooftops by vine-covered trellises. I was born there, and I lived there in considerable freedom, often accompanying my father to the marketplace when he went to procure produce for the sultan, or for the regent, Great-tooth the Mighty.
    My mother, so my father said, liked to think of herself as highly bred. In Tavor, this meant that females did not risk encounters with lesser peoples by leaving their homes. My father was amused by it, I was usually irritated, because people had to do all the shopping for her and no matter what father and I bought at the market, she complained. Except for an occasional trip to grandfather’s farm, mother stayed in the house, in the courtyard beside the fountain, or in the grilled balcony that overlooked the modest traffic of the alley, or on the roof sometimes, with the caged birds and the vines, where she had a view of the more crowded avenue. She slept a lot. Sometimes I thought she was just lazy.
    I was not always angry with Mother, however, for she was very pretty and she told lovely stories. It was she who taught me to read, with me curled on her bed holding the book and she at her dressing table, taking the jewels from her ears and fingers, dropping them into a china dish with a soft clinking sound before beginning to brush her hair. The sound of that clinking and the soft wisp of the hairbrush brings her back to me, even now.
    I remember her stories. I remember her voice. She told me once that words were mysteries, that each