The Last One(16)

“Noooo.” The little girl shook her head. “But they could visit.”

“Sorry, toots. No horses here.” I stabbed a slice of white meat and put it on my plate. “Pass the gravy, please.”

“But Uncle Sammy, we live on a farm. We don’t have any animals. It can’t be a real farm if we don’t have any animals.”

“That’s not true, Bridge.” Ali reached over to tug her daughter’s braid. “We have Loopy and Butler.”

“But Mom, they’re not real farm animals.” Her voice came dangerously close to the whine line, and I watched Ali’s eyebrow rise. “They’re only a dog and cat. And they have to live outside.”

“I’m pretty sure Old McDonald includes those, right? With a woof-woof here and meow-meow there, here a woof, there a meow, everywhere a woof-meow ...” My sister had many fine qualities, but singing in tune wasn’t one of them. Bridget and I clapped our hands over our ears.

“Make it stop!” I moaned, and Ali stuck out her tongue at me. Bridget giggled, and another crisis was averted.

“The drawing really is good, sweetie. You should take it in and show it to Mrs. Norcross.” Ali sipped her water.

“I drew one for her in school today. She asked me if I was gonna take art lessons.” Bridget poked at her green beans.

“Hmmm. Did she?” Ali frowned. “Eat your vegetables, Bridget, don’t play with them.”

My niece dropped her fork to the plate with a clatter. She clutched at her throat and pretended to gag. “Poison ... beans ... killing ... me ... ’

I rolled my eyes. She’d been on an anti-veggie kick for the last month. “Just eat them, Sarah Heartburn. No drama tonight.”

She scowled at the four beans and then used her fork to push them into the small mound of mashed potatoes she hadn’t eaten yet. Before I could yell at her for trying to hide them, she scooped up the whole deal and put it in her mouth, chewed a few times and swallowed. “Done!”

“Chickens are done, little girls are finished. Go scrape your plate and put it in the dishwasher, please.” Ali patted her back as she passed.

I watched her skip over, dump crumbs into the trashcan and then slide her plate onto the bottom rack.

“Do I have a little while before I have to get a bath? I want to draw some more.”

Ali nodded. “Fifteen minutes, then I’ll be up to run it for you.”

We finished eating in silence. Bridget had gone a long way to soothing my mad, but in the quiet, I started thinking about red hair and flashing eyes again.

“So guess what?”

I’d known my sister for twenty-six years, ever since the midwife had plopped her onto my four-year-old lap in our living room about twenty minutes after her birth. I knew that these three words were the opening to something she was nervous to tell me. She’d begun that way the day she’d told me she was marrying that loser, Craig Moss, and again when she was pregnant with Bridget. So the wave of dread that washed over me wasn’t an overreaction. I put down my fork and stared at her.

“Just tell me. What did you do?”

Ali rolled her eyes. “Talk about the drama. Why does it have to be something I did? Maybe I just have some gossip.’

“Nah, if that were it, you’d start with, ‘Do you know what I heard?’”

“Bite me.”

“Nice talk for a mom. C’mon, just tell me whatever it is.”

“I don’t know if I want to anymore. You came home in a lousy mood, and now you’re making fun of me.” She pushed her chair back and picked up her plate and the empty potato bowl.

“Yeah, well, I had an annoying afternoon.”

Ali glanced back at me, interest etched on her face. “What happened? I thought you just went in to pick up the spark plugs.”

“I did. Never mind, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did you and Boomer have a lover’s spat?” She grinned, wiggling her eyebrows. My sister liked to tease me that the garage owner and I had a relationship that was closer than just friends, mostly because we could talk about cars for hours on end. Hey, girls had their hairdressers and guys had their mechanics. It all worked out.

“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it. Stop trying to stall me. What’s happening?” I finished my last bite of chicken and began to clear the rest of the table.

“Well ... it all started when Bridget brought home that painting last month. Remember? The one with all the flowers?”

“Yeah.” It had been the most colorful piece of paper I’d ever seen, heavy with paint, but somehow more defined than what I expected from a little girl in first grade.