(excerpt)

Ethel and I play in the pines off the side of the house, the ones that make a wall marking where we end and Clint Thomson begins. Sometimes we climb them. Sometimes, more times, we swing on the wisteria vine looped over a high, thick bough like a lazy snake about to fall. And sometimes Clint watches us.

“I’m coming up,” he’ll say from the bottom of the tree we’re in, him not knowing which is the only branch to grab and so figuring on all the wrong ones, then getting stumped and fed up. He has this way of only looking at Ethel when he talks, and it makes my stomach grip up for hours.

“The hell you are,” says Ethel, calling down to him.

“Hell you are,” I say.

She tips back her head so I can see she’s rolling her eyes at me. Ethel is older by three years. I am eight and she’s eleven. Ma wanted us separated three years perfect, but I was preemie and plus her math was off. Ethel says I’m still squishy dough because Ma didn’t cook me long enough. Ethel calls me underdone, half-baked. I’m thick
like Daddy, who says that’s a sturdy way of living. Ethel says it’s being fat. She doesn’t know.

Last week I broke Ma’s last glass elephant. Snapped the trunk right off when picking him up and that’s how all the rest broke too so why I didn’t lift him proper I’ll never know, except that Ma’d sat me at the kitchen table all morning long with the empty paper envelope of maple and brown sugar oatmeal I’d snitched from the pantry (feeling the dry powder make goo on my tongue) and nobody, but nobody–meaning
Ethel—was allowed to talk to me ‘til I was good and sorry and had sat in front of all the candy wrappers of mine Ma fishes from my pockets when I forget it’s laundry day and she saves them for when I’m bad like this, to make her point. It was hours before she finally let me up, when it was lunch and the carrot sticks came out for her, and peanut butter and honey sandwiches for Ethel and me.

“Go on then,” said Ma, shooing me with a look real hard in the eye.

I went right for that poor old last elephant, the green one with bugged-out orange daubs for eyes. Ma heard the thwunk the body made falling to the Persian rug. I peeked around the corner back into the kitchen and saw she didn’t blink an eye, just cocked her head stop- ping chewing a second and went on with her carrot sticks. And then Ma left. She left.

So now we’re swinging on the wisteria vine and Clint’s dog Basey is down there, too. Some little mixed-up beagle thing with a coiled tail and a scruff of hair at the base of his neck for when he’s feeling ornery, which is almost all the time but especially when our dog Floey’s out playing too. Ma was making her a fairy costume for Halloween, me a pirate, Ethel was Bambi. This is only August but she was wanting an early start.

Our ma doesn’t eat. That’s her problem. She counts the numbers of what makes you fat and won’t eat it if it’s big. Truly. Not even bread and everyone eats bread. We never see her eat anything and I know that’s wrong because Daddy eats with us and takes us to Pizza Hut for butter-crust pizza and there are moms there eating breadsticks and thin crust, so she could do that, too. But no.

Anyhow, she’s not here now but she’s done this before, so she’ll come back.

Clint grabs hold of another branch and lets it take the weight of him but it’s the wrong branch and there’s nowhere to go from there, so he just sort of grips at the sticky needle tufts coming at his face and leans there. Basey’s sniffing around every inch of forsythia and brambledy blackberry bush we’ve got, peeing every step of the way. And he’s got these funny short legs, and one’ll spring up in the air. Ethel calls it pee- ing with gusto and it about tips him over lifting that leg so danged fast and high.

“He’s doing it again.” I nudge her to look down at Basey in the cur- rant bush.

“Dumb dog,” she says. We watch him move around the yard, root- ing his nose in the dirt, stopping stalk still to catch the edge of a breeze coming through.

Clint leans on that first branch of the pine and kind of pushes up and down on it, still hanging on to the trunk of the tree. But in a few minutes he hops off and Basey follows him back into his yard. “Dumb boy,” says Ethel.
“Dumb,” I say, and she flicks my big toe while she’s hanging upside down from her knees.

The screen door slaps shut and out comes Floey running that happy-dog run of favoring one front leg and ankle and moving like a horse Ethel and I play in the pines off the side of the house, the ones that make a wall marking where we end and Clint Thomson begins. Sometimes we climb them. Sometimes, more times, we swing on the wisteria vine looped over a high, thick bough like a lazy snake about to fall. And sometimes Clint watches us.
“I’m coming up,” he’ll say from the bottom of the tree we’re in, him not knowing which is the only branch to grab and so figuring on all the wrong ones, then getting stumped and fed up. He has this way of only looking at Ethel when he talks, and it makes my stomach grip up for hours.

“The hell you are,” says Ethel, calling down to him.

“Hell you are,” I say.

She tips back her head so I can see she’s rolling her eyes at me. Ethel is older by three years. I am eight and she’s eleven. Ma want- ed us separated three years perfect, but I was preemie and plus her math was off. Ethel says I’m still squishy dough because Ma didn’t cook me long enough. Ethel calls me underdone, half-baked. I’m thick like Daddy, who says that’s a sturdy way of living. Ethel says it’s being fat. She doesn’t know.

Last week I broke Ma’s last glass elephant. Snapped the trunk right off when picking him up and that’s how all the rest broke too so why I didn’t lift him proper I’ll never know, except that Ma’d sat me at the kitchen table all morning long with the empty paper envelope of maple and brown sugar oatmeal I’d snitched from the pantry (feeling the dry powder make goo on my tongue) and nobody, but nobody—meaning Ethel—was allowed to talk to me ‘til I was good and sorry and had sat in front of all the candy wrappers of mine Ma fishes from my pockets when I forget it’s laundry day and she saves them for when I’m bad like this, to make her point. It was hours before she finally let me up, when it was lunch and the carrot sticks came out for her, and peanut butter and honey sandwiches for Ethel and me.

“Go on then,” said Ma, shooing me with a look real hard in the eye. or the wind. Right to our tree, she comes. I see her catch on that Basey was here and she’s so smart, my dog, that she turns her head and looks hard—downright studying—into his yard.

“Good girl,” I tell her. “Smart girl.”

Then she’s off walking the bushes, sniffing everywhere he’s been, stuffing her nose right into all those drips of pee. “You ever wonder what it’s like,” says Ethel, pulling herself back up on the vine to sit by me, “to think about things or do things other people don’t know you do?”

“What’s Ma do secret?”

“You’re such a baby, Enid. Doesn’t it even occur to you that I’m nearly fully grown?”

“Don’t fall,” I say and shove her once, but just a little because I don’t like it when she shoves up high in the tree.
She elbows me back anyhow. “Floey’s going to find him.”

“What do you do?” I say.

“Never mind.” She watches Clint kick his toe into the wood chips beneath all these pines. She touches her hair, the end of one braid, to her mouth. Her lips press themselves inward. Clint’s bent over now, his bottom in the air, and I start to nudge Ethel but she lets go of her braid and sucks at her lip, so I don’t do or say anything. I just watch and his hair’s maybe like honey in the jar now because sunshine’s in it. Ethel leans back and is floating free, swinging again, upside down.

“She’s not coming back this time,” she calls to me. “I hope you’re happy…”