Girl Runner Read Online Free

none of that.” It’s Mother who puts me to rights; Father is slow to punishment, slow to tune in to the turnings around him. With Robbie dead, Father moves even more like a man living inside a dream. Only one subject captures his interest: a machine of his own invention, powered by a windmill, that he is building in the barn, even now.
    “Off you go, and muck the chicken pen as you were meant to do this afternoon.”
    “But—!”
    “Not a word. Go.”
    But Mother’s punishment is gentle: she sets aside a plate of food for me. She won’t let any of us go without a meal. She went hungry as a child, she has told us, and we are never to know that particular pain.
    Mother is not one for stories, and does not tell more, even if I’d like to know, even if I ask: how hungry, and why, and when, and what did it feel like? She speaks rarely of her family, though her father and brothers are alive, and their homestead lies in the county west of ours. They might as well live in another country for all we see of them.
    The kitten purrs against my neck.
    Father is working nearby, somewhere overhead. I can hear him. It’s likely that he’s heard me too, clambering into the mow all in a scramble. He won’t think anything of it. It is a broiling hot July afternoon, and Father should be busy with the haying, but he’s hired men for the summer work now that Robbie is gone. Last summer and the summer before it seemed like Robbie would come home, eventually, if not quite soon. Edith’s husband, Carson, helped, and Fannie too, and Mother, and even George was called on to drive the team of horses, while Olive and Cora and I made sandwiches and iced tea and carried them out to the field, three little girls in dusty dresses, our hair pulled off our faces under bonnets.
    We managed without Robbie.
    But not this summer.
    Last summer and the summer before, we knew Robbie would be back soon enough. And now we know he won’t be. There is absence, and there is vanishing, and these are not the same thing at all.
    The kitten pricks my thumb with one sharp claw, like a pin piercing the skin. “Ow!” It’s small as pain goes, but I return the kitten to its mother, and stick my thumb into my mouth. I feel oddly recovered, and stride with wide leaps down to the swept barn floor.
    “Hallo!” I call up to my father.
    Father nods his head in acknowledgement. He is erecting a staircase that circles to the top of the barn. When he has built the stairs, he will cut a hole in the roof and make a small house above, like a steeple, to shelter the windmill’s gears. The stairs will climb right inside the little house, so he can mind the mechanics within.
    Outside, on top, the blades of the mill will turn, powering Father’s machine.
    At mealtimes, Father drifts away from the ends of sentences. He goes on ahead in his thoughts and leaves us behind. But here in the barn, his purpose is visible. I am comforted by it, even though his plan lies in pieces—stacks of board—around which I carefully step.
    “Can I help?” I call up.
    “Don’t try the steps,” he warns, even as he climbs down them to the skeletal platform standing twelve feet above me. This is where his invention will rest: a machine powered by the wind that can be used as a lathe, or a spinning saw, or a grain grinder. The platform will double as a ceiling for a grain storage bin. I am quite sure that my father has thought of everything.
    I’ve examined his plans, sketched in pencil onto the backs of flyers that come advertising cures for bloat or canker or colic. His measurements are mysterious and meticulous. I am sure of my father.
    I watch him step silently up the circular staircase carrying an armload of roughly cut boards.
    I love the smell of cut wood. I’ve forgotten about Fannie, here, amidst the ragged ends and sawdust and debris. I don’t think of her at all. Working atop a table made out of two sawhorses and an old door, I hammer bent nails straight, the one job Father