Tomorrow River Read Online Free

bare feet. Once she’s sure I’m not bleeding all over her kitchen floor, she shoves me clear back to the table. “That’s what a body gets when it’s up late peepin’ on folks with those big glasses of yours from up in that stupid fort. I know ya was watchin’ me Wednesday night, Shenny.” She waves the spatula an inch from our noses. “And you, Jane Woodrow, if ya don’t quit messin’ with your hair, I’ll get my shears out right quick.”
    If it was just her and me sitting in the kitchen, Louise wouldn’t dare go uppity like she is. She knows all about my temper. And how I’ll do whatever’s necessary to keep my sister steady. Arguments of any sort bother Woody. She’s started rocking.
    “Hey, now,” I say, getting her fingers laced between mine.
    Stupid Lou. I’m not saying that I don’t sometimes, but it wasn’t on purpose that I spied her climbing out of her cottage window that particular evening. (She’s been meeting up with a man after midnight for quite some time, but I’m going to keep that to myself for now.) No. The reason my sister and I finished the night up in the fort had nothing to do with our horrible housekeeper extraordinaire. Last Wednesday was Mama’s thirty-fourth birthday.
    We’d normally have a party for her with presents and white lanterns hanging from the trees near the garden and a yellow sheet cake with chocolate butter frosting, but Mama is in absentia, so there was none of that and no singing neither. Only the sound of Papa’s weeping coming down the upstairs hall and straight into Woody’s and my ears no matter how many pillows we piled atop our heads. His sad can turn to mad so fast that we won’t know what hit us. That’s why we slipped out from between our sheets and ran out to the fort that night. Not to spy on big-headed Lou.
    “I’m warnin’ ya, better watch where ya step when you’re in town,” she says, stabbing the bacon out of the fry pan and onto the white plates. “One of them ’zilary ladies sees ya runnin’ around, ya know how they is. They’ll snitch ya out.”
    “Oh, yeah? Well, those auxiliary ladies better watch their mouths.” I do not have warm feelings for those prissy women who prance through town like they own the place and neither did my mother.
    “In the legal field, their back-fence talk is called slander and it’s punishable,” I say, even though I know for once in her miserable life she’s right.
    Only a few folks know that Papa’s keeping us locked up at Lilyfield. I heard from Vera Ledbetter, who works at the drugstore, that he’s telling everybody who dares to wonder why the Carmody twins are not attending choir practice or skimming rocks down at the reservoir or fishing at the lake with the other kids the way we do every other summer. “The girls are not feeling up to socializing just yet. They need time to recover from the loss of their mother.”
    That’s why Woody and I have to be careful. If somebody should notice us flitting here and there, that nosy parker could blab to our father at his weekly Gentlemen’s Club meeting, “Golly, it sure was nice to see the twins running around again, Your Honor.”
    (Believe me . . . that could happen. You live in this town, you got all the privacy of a stampede.)
    Lou drops our breakfast plates down in front of us and props her spindly arms on the table. I get busy cutting the flapjacks into baby bites for Woody, which is the only way she’ll eat them.
    “If’n she was here,” Lou says, “what do you s’pose your mama’d have to say about all this spookin’ about?”
    I could snap back at her, “Well, if Mama was here, we wouldn’t have to be spooking about looking for her, would we, you big ignoramus?” but Woody is about rocking off her chair, so I breathe in deep and answer in my most tempered tone, “‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.’”
    “Knock it off,” Lou says, cuffing me on the side of my head. “I ain’t in no mood for