Little Black Dress with Bonus Material Read Online Free Page B

albeit reluctantly.
    After directing my six-year-old self to “Watch your baby sister,” Daddy would go off to check the fermenting casks in the cellar while I tried to keep track of then three-year-old Anna. Even if Mother had dressed us in ironed pinafores with white socks and polished Mary Janes, Anna would take off through the dirt paths and run amok, disappearing among the thick vines and hiding so that neither I nor Daddy could find her when he was ready to leave for the day. Sometimes, in calmer moments when Anna felt inclined to behave, we would find a grassy spot and lie on our backs, staring up at clouds scuttling through the sky and calling out whatever animal shapes we saw in them.
    â€œThat’s a bunny,” I’d say, or, “That one’s a bear!”
    Anna would shake her head, squinting fiercely. “No, Evie, it’s a boa constrictor,” she’d assure me. “And that’s a Burmese tiger over there.”
    We never saw things the same way. Never.
    How could two sisters be so different? I had wondered so many times, only to convince myself it was just a matter of growing up. But even after we’d stumbled through puberty and entered our teens, we had little common ground but our roots.
    For me, flaunting authority meant reading gothic romances by flashlight beneath my blankets after bedtime or feeding tidbits from dinner underneath the table to my grandmother’s decrepit cocker spaniel, Elsie (who ended up outlasting Charlotte by a year). To Anna, rules were for breaking, and she ignored them entirely when it suited her. She had no patience for curfews, slipping out well after dark to meet God knows who—although I surmised it was some boy or another, since Anna had enough of them slobbering after her—only to return past midnight, often with twigs in her hair and mud on her heels. Frequently, she’d sneak into my room and slip into the covers beside me, as if desiring a witness to her crime.
    â€œWhere were you?” I’d whisper, unable to see her face as she yawned before answering, “Finding out who I am.”
    I didn’t understand what she’d meant.
    â€œWhy don’t you just look in the mirror?” I had suggested, since it seemed a logical enough suggestion. But nothing Anna did was ever about logic so much as the intangible and amorphous.
    â€œOh, Evie, there’s so much more to life than what we see on the surface,” she’d murmur and sigh, as if she knew everything and I was the baby. Then she’d close her eyes and doze until Mother came to wake us for school.
    When Daddy caught her creeping up the elm and onto the second-floor porch before dawn the next weekend, he threatened to ground her for the rest of the school year and the summer as well. But Grandma Charlotte intervened—as she so often would—suggesting he give Anna more leeway.
    â€œAt least one of them has spunk,” she’d said with a sniff, and I could tell by my father’s face that he didn’t find that a good thing.
    â€œI’ll wager it was spunk that got Helen von Hagen in trouble when she was fifteen,” he’d replied, and my mother had looked suitably horrified.
    Ultimately, Daddy had capitulated, and Anna had gotten off lightly: kitchen duty for a week, namely, peeling potatoes and scouring pots. Although within two days of her punishment, I noticed that Mother had taken over her tasks without a word to anyone. I wasn’t sure my father knew (but I was sure that Grandma Charlotte did).
    I had been tempted to rat on her but I didn’t, torn as I was between loyalty to my father and to my only sibling. Still, I worried about Anna’s inability to play by the rules and figured it never hurt anyone to learn that misbehavior had consequences. In the end, I kept quiet, sure that Anna would get her comeuppance someday without any help from me. Indeed, I didn’t have long to wait.
    After