The Sparrow Sisters Read Online Free Page B

flowers and herbs that spilled over pea gravel paths and dwarf boxwood hedges in the nearly half acre behind the house. The week after Honor died, Thaddeus Sparrow swept through the land in a rage, pulling up every plant and crushing them underfoot as he swore and wept over the loss of his wife. In moments it seemed the garden was gone and four years later, so was their father. For a full year after Thaddeus’s death, the Sisters turned their heads as they walked past the screendoor off the kitchen. They pretended that the weeds that had crawled in so fast once Thaddeus wrecked the garden were just wildflowers finding their way home. Nettie longed to salvage the cosmos that struggled up through the rampant nutsedge and sow thistle, but she just clasped her hands and looked away.
    It was Marigold who took the first step when she gave in and picked some foxtail for the kitchen table. The housekeeper who had moved into the big bedroom at the end of the hall frowned and tossed the spikelets back out the door. “Why don’t you grow something pretty,” she said. “That garden is nothing but a hazard with all those weeds.” The sisters blinked owlishly and considered her idea.They didn’t often listen to Mrs. Bartlet (who Patience called Mrs. Batlett as soon as she could talk) but it has to be said that she was often right, as she was this time.
    Mrs. Bartlet stayed with the girls until the twins were eighteen. Then she came each weekday and took care that they ate sensible, stodgy food, and that Patience dressed in something other than bedsheet togas and didn’t wear her slicker into the shower. She never did understand the murmured language the sisters made up to tell their secrets or the way Marigold could convince her to leave early on summer nights. But she loved them all the same and if any of the girls became mothers, they would remember how Mrs. Bartlet sent them back to the garden and made them safe after all.
    In the end, it took the Sisters three seasons to tame the back garden, and when they saw how beautiful it was, they realized that they were indeed their mother’s daughters and that theirhands thrummed with the same gift. Still, as they looked after Patience and worked at the jobs each had chosen after going to Granite Point College (Marigold at the library, Nettie at the small catering company one town over, and Sorrel in charge of the family finances) the girls felt thwarted. So, when the four acres just off Calumet Landing came up for sale at the start of Patience’s freshman year at the very same college, the Sisters needed barely ten minutes of talk before they put an offer on the land. There was money in a trust from their father (the Sparrows had been clever with their cash over some three centuries), and more from their mother’s family, and it seemed right and proper that it go into a garden. The flowers, herbs, fruit trees, and vegetables that now lived in orderly plots at the Nursery were Honor’s real legacy.
    Patience was only seventeen when her sisters started their business, and Marigold had only three years, hands buried deep in the sandy soil, before she failed. Sorrel, who cared for her twin with an almost single-minded devotion in Marigold’s last year, left most of the day-to-day work to Nettie and Patience. After classes and on weekends the youngest Sparrow grumped around the Nursery, unwittingly absorbing the knowledge that would eventually define her. Together, the Sparrow Sisters became, if not quite legend in the town of Granite Point, certainly a good story to tell: three sisters, the last of the Sparrows, still living in their childhood home, fingernails rimmed in the now rich soil of the Nursery. Nettie and Sorrel were firmly settled into a life alone, although they would never callthemselves anything so dry and hopeless as lonely. Patience was considered young enough to avoid her sisters’ fate. After all, Granite Point was hardly a