Read Online Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz - Free Book Online Page A

cheered every time a motorboat passed, making waves that reached our shore as the smallest ripples. She waved at a water skier who didn’t wave back. I took off my shoes and waded in, hunched close over the water, looking for tadpoles. With every step, I kicked up sand, no matter how softly I tried to walk. Every pace yielded a sandstorm, an underwater mushroom cloud.
    â€œWe should have brought a volleyball,” Sadhana said. She was on the school’s junior team, the Gators, who were the reigning city champions. In the final game of the year, she had broken her pinky setting the ball for match point and had become an instant school hero. I hated volleyball.
    â€œNo net,” I said.
    â€œNo problem,” said Sadhana. “I bet Mama could build one.”
    On the first night, there were bats, and I had never seen my mother so excited as when they swooped down close to our heads before gliding back out over the water. Sadhana and I shrieked and cowered, and Mama hushed us, urging us to open our eyes and watch them arcing and crossing each other and reversing direction mid-course.
    â€œThat must be how we look to someone on the outside,” said Mama. “The way they fly, blind but sure.” She held her hands out to the side like a scarecrow, as though she wanted to catch one or show us how well they could avoid her. Two came plunging over her head, but she didn’t flinch.
    â€œCareful, Mama,” said Sadhana. “They carry rabies, you know.”
    Mama just laughed at us and stretched up to the sky, arching her back as if she was about to swing down into a set of sun salutations.
    â€œDon’t be afraid, kittens,” she said. “Not ever.” Mama was a specialist in impossible advice.
    Then Mama got a fire blazing and led us in a dance around it, singing out a rhythm like a drum beat, BOOM-bah-boom-bah-bah , BOOM-bah-boom-bah-bah . Mama made herself small on the downbeat before springing up on the next one, her head bobbing back, her arms folding in and out like book covers falling open. I tried to imitate her but it turned into a chicken dance. Then we were all doing it, with Mama clucking out the song until Sadhana and I were laughing so hard we both fell down in the dirt.
    The evening before we were supposed to leave, Sadhana searched the cabin up and down and came up with a bottle of tequila, a fifth full. It was in a cabinet, tucked away behind a make-your-own-stained-glass kit.
    â€œOh no.”
    â€œOh yes.” She put the bottle down on the table and went to the cupboard to get two small glasses. Mama was outside chopping more firewood, and we had promised to gather kindling as soon as we were finished our game of Crazy Eights.
    â€œI think they hid the bottle for a reason.”
    â€œThey won’t even notice.”
    Sadhana poured us each a shot, and I wondered where she had ever even gotten the idea to drink. She was eleven and a half. When I was her age, in grade six, my friends and I were mostly into skipping double-dutch, with the occasional tame foray into Truth or Dare.
    â€œI think you’re supposed to mix it with something,” I said. I was trying to sound disapproving but it came out excited.
    â€œThere’s nothing.”
    We were clinking glasses when we heard the sound of the screen door. Mama was standing in the cabin, clothes and hair spiked with sawdust. She was an owl, with her eyes wide and the moon rising behind her over the lake. She drew her head back and then forward again as she stared first at our guilty faces, then peered at the bottle on the table.
    â€œMama,” said Sadhana. “We just —”
    She broke off as Mama strode past us, seizing the bottle, wood chips flying from her flannel shirt. Neither of us had ever seen her lose her temper.
    Mama took a glass out of the cupboard and poured a double shot of tequila. “It’s been seventeen years,” she said. “Why not?” She held the