The Orphan Sister Read Online Free Page A

full-on sobbing. “A long time ago, actually. And I’m not going to be the one to tell Mom.”
    “Olivia?” I pushed away all my odd fantasies. This sounded real.
    She didn’t answer.
    “What did he do? Embezzle? Have an affair? Fake his medical license? Murder someone?”
    “It isn’t funny, Clem. He left me a message,” she sighed dramatically. I couldn’t read her sigh. I hated that.
    “Okay, okay, so what did he say? Where the hell is he?” Why you? I wondered. But Olivia had always been the tiniest hair ahead. Loved more by a fraction of a nose. I’d suspected it, and now I knew it. She got the first heavy-as-a-fist hug hello. She’d been born first by a minute. I was last, though the family joke was that I was still a middle child. Olivia’s birthday phone call was first. Dad trusted her just the smallest bit more—no one else would ever notice, but I read it as well as the secret language of my sisters’ faces.
    I remembered, swimming in my own little lake of self-sympathy, that one year when we were kids, he brought us gifts from a conference—I’d gotten a pen that contained a floating, plastic, small intestine with a sandwich that moved through if you tilted the barrel. I thought it was the best thing ever, making throw-up jokes with abandon. Odette received her very own reflex hammer (with a drug-company name etched into the handle), and tested it on us each. I hated that funny-bone sensation. Olivia’s souvenir, however, was a real stethoscope. A real one. For listening to real hearts. He gave her something functional andgrown-up and different. He trusted her more, and because I’d been eight or nine and prone to bathroom jokes, I hadn’t realized until later how unfair it had been.
    Then my sister Olivia said something akin to blasphemy, something so horrible coming from her I half expected a thunderclap.
    “I can’t tell you,” said Olivia. “But I listened to his message and then I did a little digging. And he’s an asshole. We’d be better off if he were dead.”

THREE
    H ere are some words I would use to describe my father: stubborn, loyal, handsome, secretive, important, distinguished, powerful, charismatic, bossy, charming, brilliant, unfair, prejudiced, magnanimous, uneven (with long legs and a short, bullish torso), and occasionally, in small and dangerous ways, spiteful. I’d kept a journal, my version of a confidant, since I was ten and had probably used each of those words in my rantings. Also, in the past two years, perhaps just because we’d fought so long in our quiet ways and then I came home—and saw him up close more than I had in about a decade—he was beginning to shrink, both physically and in terms of his power over me. He was getting old.
    For all my resentments, I loved the man. I loved the way his hair was slightly too long and too wild. I loved the way he clasped my hands when he greeted me, as though I were an honored guest. I loved that he actually cared what I did with my life, enough to be nearly constantly peeved with me.
    On the day I came home to live in the carriage house, Dad helped me lug my bags and pets inside. He lowered a suitcase and held open his arms inside as if to call the air in as welcome. He carried the sedated Ella into the house and set her atop the throwpillows on the couch, tucking a cashmere blanket around her. I relinquished a tiny gasp—dog on furniture.
    “She’s special,” he said, patting Ella, who panted and drooled and twitched with a desire to leave the realm of chemical sleep.
    “Like you,” he finished, turning quickly back to the door as if encumbered by the emotion.
    In the doorway he looked out and said, “Remember those neighbors who kept sheep?”
    “The Bells. They had goats, Dad. They were having a go at cheese, remember?”
    “No, it was sheep.” He stomped his foot, a recalcitrant child. “Well, that’s it then,” he finished, and trudged off, leaving me to rebalance my internal scales. It was