Riding the Flume Read Online Free

mirror she remembered. It was why she’d cut her front hair in bangs and wore her back hair loose. It would have been so muchmore convenient to put it up in a bun like Carrie had worn her hair. But she couldn’t stand the startled glances of her neighbors or the pain that crossed her father’s face when he looked at her. She wiped away her tears with a corner of her napkin. Would she be forever in Carrie’s shadow? In death as well as in life?
    Her mother touched her cheek. “You would have been quite a pair, you know,” she said. The words hung in the air for a long moment. Then Francie’s mother pushed back her chair and stood up. “Josie?” she called to the young woman they’d hired to help around the house and the hotel. “Is the water hot?” She began collecting plates and cups and stacking them on the tray.
    â€œYes, ma’am,” said Josie, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a towel in her hand. Francie’s mother handed her the tray, and the two of them went into the kitchen.
    It was Francie’s job to put the rest of the tableware back on the sideboard and fold the napkins into their rings for the next meal. She did it absently, thinking about her mother’s words. “Quite a pair,” she’d said. Somehow Francie had never imagined herself and her sister as a “pair.” How could they have ever been a pair, she thought. Carrie had been so much older—fifteen when she died, and Francie only nine. If Carrie had lived she’d be . . . Francie figured it out. Carrie would have been twenty-one. A woman grown. And Francie herself was only just fifteen now. How could she ever have caught up?
    She threw the napkins into the basket with the others on the sideboard. She arranged the everyday salt and pepper shakers on the shelf with the ones for formal occasions and banged the cupboard door shut with more force than was necessary. “No,” she said aloud. “I’ll always be running behind her. Even now when she’s dead.”
    She stomped up the stairs and plopped down in the chair by her vanity, carefully avoiding the oval mirror on the wall beside her. Her eyes fell instead on the framed photograph of the family, taken perhaps a year before the landslide. Father, sitting in the leather armchair in the parlor with the women gathered around him. Mother, in a dark dress with white buttons down the front and with an unfamiliar formal look on her face, her hand on her husband’s shoulder. Francie, leaning against her father’s knee. And Carrie, her long chestnut hair wound about her head in a complicated twist, was standing on Father’s other side looking as if she wanted to laugh out loud.
    Francie stared at the photograph, realizing again that anyone who didn’t know the family might have taken Carrie for Francie. There was her sister, caught forever inside the little frame. And quietly, without thinking about it, the scrawny eight-year-old who had been leaning against her father’s leg was, indeed, catching up. “In fact,” she said aloud, finally looking at herself in the mirror, “I have caught up. I’m fifteen now, older than Carrie was then. She gathered her hair, twisted it, and wound itaround her head, but immediately let it go. It was uncanny how much she looked like her sister.
    â€œI wonder what it would have been like,” she asked aloud, “if we’d been the same age.” She picked up the deep blue cologne bottle on her vanity that used to be Carrie’s and ran her fingers over the bumpy surface. She pulled the glass stopper out of the top and sniffed—the bottle had been empty for years. Carrie had given it to her long before the landslide. But the spicy smell of the cologne still lingered. “Would you have been my friend, Carrie?” she asked the picture. Carrie seemed to be looking out of the frame right into Francie’s eyes. Her