Read Online Sister Golden Hair: A Novel by Darcey Steinke - Free Book Online

plate. How he would say she was getting a little chunky and how she had to listen to his same goofy jokes over and over.
    Eddie handed me a bunched-up piece of newspaper.
    “Open it,” he said.
    Inside the paper was a good-looking rock, granite with flecks of mica.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    He’d been giving me presents lately, including a handful of acorns and a bracelet made of buttercups.
    “Don’t mention it,” Eddie said, hanging his freckled arms over the seat.
    “In a battle,” he said, “do you think a lion could beat a moose?”
    “I’ll say yes.”
    “What about a skull? Could it beat a karate man?”
    “Unsure about that one.”
    He set his cheek down on the top of the front seat.
    “Does your mom ever say she’s going to kill herself?”
    “Not in so many words,” I said.
    “My mom said it.”
    “She doesn’t mean it though.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I just do.”
    “Can I sit on your lap?”
    “Sure.”
    He squeezed himself into the front seat and onto my lap. His hair smelled like butter and his knees were covered with dirt. He turned the radio dial. All that ever played on the Roanoke radio stations was Lynyrd Skynyrd, with an occasional Little Feat or Allman Brothers song. All day Skynyrd blasted out of car stereos and at night from duplex windows. I twisted the dial down to the far end of the numbers, the one station that played the trippy stuff from the sixties—Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and my favorite song, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Eddie showed me how when you pressed your fingertips against your closed eyelids, colors came up, reds and oranges melting into each other.
    Sometime later, Sandy came running down the slate path, her mascara smudged around her eyes. I looked up through the windshield. Sonny stared downat us from an upper-floor window; he had a strange smile on his face.
    Sandy swung open the door.
    “What happened?” I said.
    “Same old shit,” she said. “At first he said he’d give me back the car but then he said he wouldn’t.”
    She made Eddie and me get in back and put on our seat belts.
    “Hold on,” she said as she jumped the sidewalk and ran over a row of rhododendrons and up onto the lawn. Eddie and I looked at each other and he gripped my hand. She spun the car around the fountain in the middle, shards of grass and dirt flying up outside, before the car bumped over the curb and ran right through a patch of petunias.
    “I believe that’s called a donut,” she said, once we were back on the road. She moved the dial to the Skynyrd station and turned the volume up loud.

    It rained the next day, and I stayed in my bedroom arranging my school supplies into different configurations, putting pencils into my new puppy pencil case and sniffing my new erasers. After practicing it many times in different script styles, I wrote my name very slowly on the cover of all my new notebooks. To me the blank white sheets were like photographs of the Milky Way. They gave me a weird feeling of reverence.Every little while I went to the window and looked out. Sandy’s blinds were closed and whenever I went to her duplex, which I did every few hours, Eddie came to the door in his pajamas and told me she was still asleep.
    The next morning, just after Sandy had left for work and Eddie and my brother had gone off to their hooch in the woods, a van pulled up and parked in her driveway. It was still raining. Two men, one short with a fringe of hair around the side of his head and the other a surly-looking high school kid, used a key to open the door of her duplex. At first I thought Sonny, in an effort to make up, had sent guys over to paint her place. In a few minutes, though, the men carried her couch out to their truck.
    I ran down in the rain to get Mr. Ananais.
    I told him what was happening at Sandy’s and he followed me up the hill. I stood by the doorway while he talked to the older man, who showed him a pink slip of paper.
    “Are they breaking in?” I