Read Online Sisters of Heart and Snow by Margaret Dilloway - Free Book Online Page B

small. I remember him saying so over ice cream on the patio, my earliest memory of him. One of my friends’ mothers had been asking about Mom, and I must have been almost four when I asked my father how they’d met, because Killian’s hair still had some blond in it and Drew wasn’t born yet. I had to squint at him, the sun halo-bright around his head, and all I can remember is his hair color as he spoke. “Your mother’s what people call a gold digger, Rachel. People will think we’re no good.”
    I glanced up at my mother, who cleared our empty bowls without expression, her I’m-staying-out-of-it face. “Isn’t a gold digger a miner? That’s not bad.”
    Dad laughed. “No, it means a woman who married for money. Not love.”
    â€œYou love Mom, don’t you?” This worried me. I knew certain things to be true. Santa Claus came on Christmas Eve, the Easter bunny never hid eggs where you couldn’t find them, and married people loved each other, like Cinderella and Prince Charming. Childhood lore.
    Mom carried the bowls inside, sliding the screen shut behind her. Dad leaned forward, coming into full focus, and ruffled my hair. Unlike Mom, Dad had bags under his eyes, wrinkles by his mouth. He’d been fifty when I was born, and was often mistaken for my grandfather. “People get married for all kinds of reasons, Rachel. That’s how the world works. Now, don’t tell your friends, or they might not be allowed to play with you.” He chucked my chin. “And we had you. A sweet, perfect little girl. Hopefully we’ll get a little brother one of these days.”
    Of course, we did not. And it wasn’t long before I grew out of being his sweet, perfect little girl for good.
    Because I was never perfect to begin with.
    Once, only once, and not until I was ten, did I ask Mom directly how she and my father met. “Do you still have the letter?” I asked. I imagined it to be grand and romantic, full of hearts and expressions of love. Maybe she’d written back and squirted perfume all over her reply. Maybe she kept his letters tied up with a silk crimson ribbon, high up on a closet shelf.
    â€œNo,” she said. “It wasn’t a letter like you think. It was a form.”
    â€œA form?” I didn’t understand.
    She nodded. “It had boxes for what he preferred. Hair: Long. Height: Short. Wants children: Yes. Speaks English. That kind of thing. Then the catalog people wrote to me and asked if I was interested.”
    â€œHe ordered you? Like you were a television set?” I had never heard of such a thing. All my classmates’ parents met during high school or college or at some young adult job. “Could you have said no?”
    â€œHe was the only one who wanted me,” Mom responded matter-of-factly. “Now, what do you want for dinner?”
    It seemed like a blatant, crass transaction. The woman who wanted to be kept. The man who wanted a subservient Asian female. In our community, where girls weren’t told to keep their mouths shut, I kept mine shut. I was embarrassed to have such a nonfeminist stereotype for a mother.
    When Quincy was in middle school, one of her classmates’ parents was a Russian woman known to be a mail-order bride. She was in her late twenties, married to a taciturn biotech executive twenty-five years her senior; she dressed flashily, in short skirts and low tops and high heels, even on field trips, with lots of diamonds. She was a centerfold come to life, and completely intimidating. No one spoke to her. She spoke to no one and never smiled.
    â€œTypical,” Susannah had said. “She doesn’t love him. She just wanted his money.”
    Was that how others perceived my mother? I remembered my father telling me my classmates might not be allowed to play with me if their parents knew. Did I harbor a similar prejudice against the Russian woman?
    I focused