Don't Blame the Music Read Online Free

struck me that she had nothing with her.
    Nothing.
    No suitcase. No purse. Not even pockets.
    Ashley had gone out to conquer the world. She had come home with literally nothing. We, with our eight rooms, our closets, attics, drawers, and boxes. Our three sheds, our garage, our two acres.
    My very own sister did not even have a toothbrush.
    Dad held the screen door for Mom and me. A queer thing happened. We three did not look at one another. It was as if we were afraid to see what the others were thinking. We were waiting. Waiting to see who, and what, this year’s Ashley Elizabeth Hall might be.

Three
    I FOLLOWED ASHLEY INTO the kitchen. You’re not really home until you get to the kitchen. A front hall is just a corridor, but a kitchen is home. Even Ashley knew it. She walked slowly around the old pine table, its finish long gone from generations of scrubbing, and squeezed into the narrow place where the fourth chair was jammed.
    We were a three-person family using a table that, naturally, had four sides, and therefore four chairs. But the fourth chair was just a place to set groceries on, or library books. Ashley went to that fourth chair like an animal seeking its lair, and when she sat down she sagged, as if all energy had left her forever. The chair was not merely an awkwardly placed shelf. It was hers.
    This burned-out woman was not the buoyant happy girl who cuddled me when I was little. Nor the crazed violent girl with the shaved skull. This was a third person entirely.
    The memory of her own chair was all she had for her twenty-fifth birthday.
    â€œI’m glad you’re back, Ashley,” I said to her.
    No reaction.
    I sat down in my chair, next to hers, and leaned forward, putting my hand on her bony knee. “I’ve missed you.”
    Now she looked up. Her eyes were dark in an impossibly white face and the circles beneath them were not from makeup. “You didn’t miss me,” she said. Her voice was brittle and sharp. It went well with her body. “Any more than I missed you. Don’t offer me charity. I won’t take it. I’ll just hate you for it.”
    I jerked back as if she had scalded me, which satisfied her. What a first sentence for her to utter! I put my hand awkwardly on my own knee and looked nervously at my parents, who were standing in the kitchen door. They exchanged sick looks.
    But I too hated charity. I had not liked it one bit when the trig class offered to help dear stupid Susan. How strange, I thought. Ashley and I have that in common, then. Sisterhood is in there somewhere. We just have to locate it.
    Because this was no rock star dropping in between engagements. This was no victorious career woman spending a night between New York and Boston.
    This was defeat.
    My parents sat down with us and I knew in a moment my mother was going to do poorly. Joy combined with nerves made her dithery. It was the kind of thing I could overlook, but Ashley never overlooked anything. “How nice you look!” piped my mother to the daughter who looked dreadful. “I’ve always liked pearls. I’m so glad to see you wearing pearls.” She actually clapped her hands a little, to demonstrate how glad she was.
    Ashley was utterly contemptuous. “The pearls are fake,” she said in a voice that dripped sarcasm, just as the pearls themselves dripped in ugly tangles from her throat. “They explode when I touch them. Shower the fans with acid.”
    My mother gasped, too horrified to see the exaggeration.
    â€œThat’s nothing,” I said to Ashley. “I have rubies that throw knives.”
    My father grinned. My mother stared at me in confused anxiety. Ashley’s face merely quivered. I did not know what that meant, but it was preferable to the sagging emptiness.
    The timer on the stove rang gently. All the sounds in my mother’s house are gentle, from the doorbell to the clothes dryer timer. I thought, she’s the one we have