The Sister Season Read Online Free

daughter’s face. “Life of a professor. It’s not a big deal, really. He never knew Dad, and it’s just a couple of days.”
    Elise felt a knot form in her throat and she had to turn away. She had thought everyone would come. She hadn’t planned for families to be apart during the holidays.
    She walked over to the sink and stretched up on her toes to peer out the window. There, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, staring out at the pasture, was Julia’s only son, Eli. “Goodness, he’s grown so much just since I saw him last,” Elise said.
    “Tell me about it,” Julia answered, deadpan. “More than you know.”
    Elise took in the boy’s mop of dark hair with the cowlick sticking up in back, his long, knock-kneed legs. “He looks like a little man out there. Just almost exactly like . . .”
    Robert.
    Elise had fallen for Robert Yancey when he was not much older than her grandson was now.
    Quarterback. Glee Club. Youth minister at the little Baptist church on the south side of town—the one Elise’s father had always called “the Jesus-save-me hand-raisers.” He had dimples. He smelled like fresh-cut mint. He drove a slick car and listened to country music and spit tobacco into paper cups.
    He had a hard side, one that was reminiscent of her grandpa Mick, and as the son of a hog farmer himself, he knew farming. Elise found him irresistible, and one year after they met, they were married in that Jesus-save-me-hand-raisers church, Elise in a plain white satin gown feeling queasy and frightened and excited and breathless and in love.
    “Like what?” Julia asked, snapping Elise back into reality.
    “What?”
    “You said he looks almost exactly like . . .”
    “Oh,” Elise said in a small, faraway voice, touching her collarbone with her fingers lightly, not noticing the concern etching itself on her daughter’s face. “Like your father.” She offered Julia a feeble smile.
    Julia looked out the back door again. “I suppose I can see a resemblance,” she said. “I never really thought about it. People always say he looks like me.”
    “Of course. I’m probably just imagining things,” Elise said. “I’m sure I’m seeing the resemblance to you. That makes sense.”
    But the boy did look like his grandfather. As Eli shifted his weight, dropping his messenger bag on the grass next to his feet and then sinking, cross-legged, onto the ground beside it, Elise was sure she’d sped back in time fifty years and was seeing her Robert going through those same motions.
    But Robert was gone, and Elise knew that. She tore her eyes away from Eli, and stared instead over his head at the derelict chicken coop, so long out of use that one wall looked like it might cave in if so much as a leaf fell on it. She’d often thought about fixing it up, having chickens again, seeing if a tidy coop would bring back some of the magic she’d felt as a child on McClure Farm, but looking at that wall made her feel so tired inside, as if she hadn’t slept in decades. Maybe she hadn’t.
    McClure Farm had been in Elise’s family for three generations, and had always been an extended-family affair. Every Midwest McClure lived there at one time or another, and it was once a writhing, buzzing hub of auntie and uncle business, cousin encounters, and backbreaking chores, with Elise’s grandmother McClure overseeing it all with her tough stare and hard, calloused hands. There was always enough bacon for everyone, always fresh-baked biscuits on the stove, always babies squalling and crawling after grasshoppers through elbow-high patches of clover. But make no mistake—there was also always work to be done.
    And, God, that farm—that vibrant, living farm that she’d grown up on—had been gone for so long. Robert had retired, had let everything go to weed, and as with everything else that he’d ruined over the years, she’d simply let it happen, no matter how much it meant to her. How many years had she been