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Show Moon - 43 I'd cry, too, if I lost one of my brothers. I love my brothers as fiercely as a mother lion. And Michael was a lost brother to Anne. That much, I think, is certain. I waited for Daddy behind the yellow curtain. My mother had insisted. , She'd been acting strange all evening, fluffing the pillows on the Murphy bed, which she'd taken down right after supper. She kept going back to the pillows. Then she went to the mirror and undid her crown of braids, brushed her hair until it fell in a shiny rippled mass over her shoulders. I made her promise to tell me the very second he walked in, but I wasn't worried. He'd come to me right away. He'd come to me first, for by now I was sure I was the one he'd chosen. I fell asleep. I woke up to the sound of my mother humming on the letter M, which meant my father was kissing her. I heard him say, "Why are you living like this?" And her answering, "It was hard to find a place that would take a child." Probably I didn't hear them say that, exactly, but they would have said things like that, and, as I've said, the details don't always matter. I yelled, enraged that she'd broken her promise to wake me up, that he hadn't come to me first. Everything depended on his coming home, and now everything was wrong. When they finally came to me and lifted me out of the cot, he was frowning, and I knew I'd spoiled everything. Much later, he roared in his sleep like a bear. |