Read Through the Heart for Free Online Page B

provided some protection for each other. But then she left for college, and she met Boyd (her husband), and I met Dan, and we just didn’t see each other much. For a long while it seemed like it was just distance and time that came between us. But it turned into something else when I moved home. For some reason, my sister hated the fact that I was taking care of our mother during her illness. I figured it was probably guilt.
    I said, “Mom might not be up for a bit. She had her fifth chemo session yesterday, you know.”
    “Oh really?” Deirdre acted as if she were completely uninterested. Most of the time I thought it was an act, but sometimes I wondered.
    As usual, she changed the subject and said, “I’ve got to go get May from the car. Here, take Frankie.”
    When I took him, Frankie was as heavy and unwieldy as a sack of potatoes. You would never guess that when awake he turned into a whirling dervish of energy.
    Deirdre returned a minute later with May. While she waited for the coffee to brew, she settled the two sleeping twins into a portable crib she had brought. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee in a travel mug, and before I knew it, was gone, mentioning something about meeting a friend in town for breakfast.
    It was nine hours before my sister returned.
    My mother came downstairs when the twins were just waking up. But when Frankie hit May and May started to scream, she said, “I don’t feel up to this right now. I think I’ll go lie back down for a bit,” and she disappeared upstairs and didn’t come down again. I was relieved. The one thing my sister and I agreed on was that our mother was not good with children, even her own. We knew—we had firsthand experience.
    I was exhausted after two hours with the twins. I had no idea how my sister managed. After eight hours I thought I’d figured it out—at a certain point autopilot takes over, and you do it because you have to, because there’s no one else.
    When Deirdre finally walked in the door, I was in the living room, the twins sprawled out asleep on the sofa. I was sitting on the floor, my back against the sofa, still in my nightgown, trying to find the energy to get up and get some food. I hadn’t properly eaten all day.
    Deirdre came back looking like a different person. She took after our mother, small boned and birdlike, with dark brown hair that she wore in a bob. This morning her hair had been pushed back in a headband—and it looked like she hadn’t even brushed it beforehand. Now it was glossy and perfectly cut and dried. She had arrived wearing gray sweatpants and a T-shirt, and now she had on a red scoop-necked top and jeans. Her nails were polished dark red to match her top. So I knew at least three places she’d been in the last nine hours: the beauty parlor, the nail salon, and the mall.
    I was about to say something to her about her disappearing act, but Deirdre looked at the sleeping kids on the couch, held her finger to her lips, and pointed at the kitchen.
    I nodded and got up from the floor carefully, so as not to wake them, and followed her.
    “So you can’t wait to go to sleep, is that it?” my sister said when we reached the kitchen and closed the door safely behind us. She was looking at my nightgown.
    “No, I never changed from this morning,” I said.
    Deirdre laughed. “That’s why I wear sweatpants and a T-shirt to bed, so if it’s one of those days, no one can tell,” my sister told me, giving me a view into her life that I had suspected but hadn’t known for sure. I decided not to say anything about her disappearing. Deirdre didn’t have an easy time of it. My life wasn’t a walk in the park either, but if you compared it to twins and an alcoholic husband, my sister won.
    “I need to take some coffee so I don’t conk out while I’m driving home,” she said as she crossed to the coffee maker. She put in a filter, then opened the jar where we used to keep the coffee.
    “It’s in the freezer,” I