Sisters of the Road Read Online Free

center. “It’s going to be a hard day,” department store clerks complained. “Those girls in Bothell will say they were snowed in.” But others looked forward to an easier rhythm. Things would go on as usual, just more slowly.
    June was at the print shop before me and said that Carole had called to say she’d just gotten back into town after a weekend away and had found her pipes frozen. She’d be in late.
    “You could have expected it,” said June, and I agreed. In her very unreliability, Carole was predictable. Giddy, endearing and exasperating, Carole bounced from one complication to the next, chronically late and astonishingly absent-minded. Every day she lost the keys to her car; every day the thing she most needed disappeared in some mysterious way.
    She’d been working with Best Printing for six months, and kept us all in a state of confusion, as we tried to help her find things and occasionally burst out in frustration, “Carole, what are you doing ?”
    In spite of thinking she was completely hopeless, I had been attracted to her on more than one occasion. I’d never let her know. Life was complicated enough already.
    “You didn’t drive, did you?” asked June. “I thought about it, but the streets are a mess.”
    I thought about the Volvo’s back seat again and the whole story came pouring out. It sounded unreal and bizarre on this cold white morning. “And then I waited and waited and then they said Rosalie was dead.”
    “Rosalie, Rosalie. I used to know a Rosalie. I mean, she was a kid who went to our church. Skinny and braids? Probably not any more. I should call my cousin, my cousin knows everybody. What about that other girl, what was her name—Trish? What the fuck was her trip, taking off like that?”
    The muscles in June’s cocoa face tightened, like machinery parts that have gone too fast and seized up, and her brown eyes blazed. “Stupid little bitches, seventeen years old and they think they know everything and can protect themselves. They’ve undercut the whole prostitution racket and they don’t think they can learn anything from women who’ve been working the street for years. You see many women over twenty-five getting knocked off by the Green River killer? No, because they know how to protect themselves.”
    June had jumped up and taken hold of a chair as if ready to bring it down over someone’s head. I didn’t dare bring up the problem of the missing deposit right now. “And you think that goddamn Green River Task Force is out there telling the girls to be careful, telling them what they know about this guy, his little perversions and all? Thirty girls’ bodies found and maybe there’s fifty more. Yeah, if they were from Bellevue or Broadmoor or someplace you can bet they’d have found the guy and sent him up for life plus two thousand years. Little Rosalie No-Name. Poor little Black Rosalie No-Name! I’m going to call my cousin right now.”
    I went to the window and stared out. There were about two inches of snow; probably it wouldn’t stay long. One elderly guy in a long taupe coat was picking his way slowly down the street. I remembered the packed waiting room at Harborview; the homeless were everywhere these days.
    “Yeah, ask her to call me back,” June was saying. Her anger had vanished and she just sounded efficient. She and Penny were two of a kind, organized, model hard workers. “Gotta start running that poster job,” she said, out of her chair before she hung up the receiver.
    But the phone rang again. “It’s for you,” June said, and in a stage whisper, “One of your old girlfriends.”
    Old was a misnomer for this one, Devlin, who still considered herself very much in the running.
    “Hello, Pam! Isn’t the snow fantastic! I thought maybe you’d like to come on up to my house after work and we could take a walk and then have dinner and I could make a fire.”
    I remembered those little fireside chats that had quickly grown so personal.