looks. He still frowned, confused, as if seeing Sylvie for the first time in
a long time, like she had emerged from the kitchen a new kind of sister,
one that could still surprise him and his twin. But his face was soft,
almost apologetic. Sylvie would see to their mother and that knowledge
sat between them like a physical thing.
Billy Jr. sometimes helped Sylvie’s father paint the fences. He
followed Daryl and Ben around on their various chores. He let Sylvie read
to him under the ash tree by Brown’s Pond, picking at the long blades
of grass and making whistles of them. The accident that had blunted
his intelligence had left his physical body intact. He maneuvered the
paintbrush with a slow, meticulous grace. He rolled replacement tractor
tires with ease. He stretched under big gray skies as nimbly as a cat,
letting Sylvie’s voice rush into the silence of the day like a quiet river.
Sylvie’s mother sat upright in bed, the big motorized chair
bulking off to one side. “I’m ready for the day,” she said when Sylvie
came all the way in, starting the late morning ritual that had dominated
both their lives since the day Patricia fell off her favorite horse and landed
wrong.
“Like Superman,” Sylvie’s father often murmured under his
breath, in the kitchen peeling potatoes for supper, passing shingles to
Ben while repairing a leaking patch on the barn roof, waxing the wheels
of Sylvie’s tractor-trailer on her down weeks. In these small moments of
busy work, life on a horse ranch keeping things together, he’d stop long
enough in his chore at hand and mention his wife’s disability with a mild
edge of surprise as if still unsure of its realness.
It didn’t seem real until these mornings happened, when Sylvie
began the process of getting her mother out of bed. Then, it became the
most real thing in the world.
She peeled the bedspread off her mother’s narrow, deadened legs
to find them soaked.
“I thought,” she whispered, not unkindly, “you were ready for the
day?”
Sylvie spied it for herself that evening. The sun slowly sank below
the first stretch of mountain, casting the land in long shadow. Next
week, Sylvie would start her journey west, reviving the tractor-trailer now
sleeping beside the barn like a giant’s pet. She had begged for the job, for
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