The Orphan Sister Read Online Free

really mind what Mom did with her hours when he wasn’t there, unless he was asking in an obscured sort of language of love.
    Sure, he had a beeper, but we knew better than to call pretending we were related to work. She had a busy life—and now that I’d seen it up close, I knew it rivaled a professional life, but it wasn’t one—and she deserved one. Or maybe I just wanted her to want one. Odette and Olivia thought she was fine, that she had enough; neither of them had the same flood of fear when Dad was late. I imagined she still smelled the collars of his shirts when he came home for dinner, breathing him in like a woman in love.
    The Accounts showed a lot of expenditures this month. Two parties, one a joint baby shower for my sisters—just over, virginmint juleps and all—and one an anniversary party for my parents, to be held in three weeks. It would be catered, of course, with tents in the backyard and a dance floor. A jazz band that also played standards. My mother had given me a CD and asked me whether they were good. The New Black Eagles. They were fabulous, I told her, wondering whether I could bring myself to wear something formal. Whether I was willing to wear heels to humor her. Whether I could bring my friend Eli, now that Feet was history and I was tired of dating unsuitable men. Odette said she’d set me up with a sweet, young intern, but I said no without needing any words.
    “Nothing here,” I called to my mother from the kitchen door.
    “I’m sure he’ll turn up,” she said, as the phone rang. She made an entrance with an armload of roses, clippers, and thick leather garden gloves. She smelled green. I answered the phone, as requested: “Lord residence, Clementine speaking.”
    It was Olivia. Her voice was strangely nasal, as if she’d been crying. Since she was pregnant, she’d been more visibly different from Odette, in a way even those who were not part of our trinity might observe. Olivia’s belly grew up against her ribs in a firm half-sphere like an embedded balloon. Odette had a pillow, the bottom curved like a teardrop. Odette’s azure blue eyes looked tired; Olivia’s were vivid and wary. Odette was working with a midwife-doctor team, but Olivia was having none of that nonsense. She told me she wouldn’t mind a C-section. Odette was shocked.
    “Clem,” said Olivia. She sighed.
    “Is it about Dad?” Knowing it was.
    “Is Mom okay?” she hedged.
    “She doesn’t seem to care that Dad’s AWOL.”
    Olivia was quiet. I tried to read the quiet.
    “What? What?” I asked. “Do you know what happened? Is he okay? Why are you suddenly unreadable?” She knew what I meant—I couldn’t know what she knew.
    “No. I mean he’s okay. I mean, I don’t know exactly what happened.”
    I was the only one skilled at holding a secret for long. I knew her need to tell was almost physical, almost autonomic. She was suppressing a tell-sneeze.
    “Still,” I said. “You can’t fool your sister.”
    I’d felt this need myself, but I was good at resisting. I imagined it was squared with my sisters; an exponential urge.
    “Clem, I know why Dad’s gone.”
    My heart started anticipating fight or flight.
    “Okay—so where is he?” I asked, thinking, again, that he could accidentally have stepped in front of a bus; that he went to his parents’ former house, wherever that was. That he was at their graves right now, communing with the dead.
    He could have fallen in a manhole in Manhattan. He could be having an affair with a prostitute in Red Hook. It happened all the time, respectable men, afraid of growing old. I thought it, but I didn’t believe it. Heart attack, I thought again. If he had a heart attack, if he died, I’d never have a chance to be his favorite, even for a moment.
    “I don’t know where he is,” she said. “Just why he’s gone.”
    I was speechless.
    “He did something,” she said, and now I could tell this wasn’t pregnancy congestion; she’d been