the end of Christmas

It was 9:00 a.m., four days before Christmas in 1969, when I woke to find my life irrevocably changed.

Lying in bed an hour earlier, I had drifted in and out of sleep listening to my parents' low voices. I heard the familiar and comforting sounds of breakfast preparations, of my father banking the fire in the family room.

At nine o'clock, I came instantly awake, but there was no comfort and nothing familiar. This time the thing that woke me was the sound of my father's voice on the phone and it filled me with apprehension.

"My wife left, she just drove away. I think she took a gun."

My father was speaking to the police, his voice loud and shaky. What he said was unimaginable. I can hear it as clearly today as if it were 1969, yet I can never remember the rest of what he said. It was as if something in my mind shattered when I heard those words -- "she took a gun" -- leaving me incapable of further comprehension.

In my pink painted room, the one my mother and I decorated together, I pulled the covers tight around my chin and peeked at my sleeping sister. Could I be dreaming? Please let this be a nightmare. Let me go to sleep and wake to hear my mother's voice calling me to breakfast, urging me to hurry so we're not late for church. Let me wake up to find her by my bed, saying "Get up, sleepyhead." I want her to tousle my hair and kiss my cheek like always, tell me "scoot, baby, you'll have to be quick," like always.

Like always, like always, I want things to be as they've always been. These thoughts have run through my mind as my father's been on the phone. When he hangs up, it's infinitely worse: my father ~ my daddy ~ the quiet, capable, strong man I've counted on my entire life is weeping.

What has happened is inconceivable. It is Sunday morning. The house smells of cedar and the rich chocolate of fudge we made last night. It is four days til Christmas. My mother is gone, my father is crying, and I know nothing will ever be the same.

airborne

Two tortured hours hurtling through a thunderstorm ended my air time in 1972. It was a Conoco jet, a 12 seater, and the only way I lived through that terrifying flight was to sit up front with the pilots. Commercial airlines frown on that. I quit flying.

I had not been a cheerful flyer before, but after two straight hours of thinking I was going to die, while lightning flashed and thunder boomed, as the plane tipped and tilted, I was a firmly earthbound and glad of it.

I tested it once more in 1987. Fifteen years after giving up flying, I headed to Houston with a rowdy band of drunks, all of us off to an AA conference.

The trip down was hideous, my only comfort coming from reassuring the anxious guy next to me everything was going to be okay. He had started in Montreal and was on his way to Chile. We white knuckled each other's arms for the 600 miles to Houston.

The AA conference was a wash. I could only think of the return trip. Once we lifted off, it did occur to me, as my heart pounded without ceasing, as my hands trembled and my palms perspired, that it was quite a miracle, this being in one place and then another far away, in just 90 minutes.

I don't know what made me agree to the trip to Mexico three years ago. It was April when I did it. It was a family thing. Everyone had to go. Mike had been so sick. Whatever it was, I agreed in April to fly to Mazatlan in November. Fool.

November rolled around and, desperate, I picked a fight with my husband Saturday afternoon, hoping we could get a divorce and I wouldn't have to fly Monday morning. Worst fight we ever had two days before takeoff. The end result? "I'm not going to Mexico. You just go without me."

Alas, I was too early. I should have waited until Sunday evening. By Sunday afternoon, we'd kissed and made up and the flight loomed, ever more frightful, 16 hours ahead.

I couldn't sleep. At 5:00 am, my legs were already trembling in the cab ride on the way to the airport. I popped 20 mg of valium, which lifted the anxiety a fraction, but the stark raving terror was still there, like a wild thing, threatening to turn me into a crazy screaming lunatic at any moment.

Deep breathing, a prayer or ten, my husband's smile and my iron grip on his knee allowed me to survive takeoff. I was airborne after 19 years. It was terrifying. Absolutely frightful.

And then we were leveled out and the cabin was full of cheerful folks drinking coffee, reading the paper. There was a tight, secure feeling in the way the plane cut through the air. The sun peeked over the horizon, making a golden ribbon there, and then a full blown glorious display of gold. I took a deep breath and consciously relaxed. It was going to be okay. It was.

It still is. I'm easily airborne now and grateful for the miracle of flight. I still can't get over the magic of standing on the beach in Florida at 10 a.m. and taking a nap in my very own bed that afternoon. I don't know where the fear went, it just vanished. I used valium for the flight back and then I was over it.

Have you ever had a fear you thought you couldn't get over, then you did? Tell, please.

cheater

I hate Rodney. He's sitting across the aisle from me at First Lutheran Elementary. He's a blonde, skinny boy, smart but mean to other kids. A big upper lip gives him a permanent smirk.

I hate him because we are neck and neck for first place in the Read 100 Books This Year contest Mrs. Christianson announced the second week of first grade.

I have read and read and read this year. Fifty two books so far and it's only January. Every day I look at the great big embroidered blue ribbon hanging above the blackboard. It's made of silk with ruffles all around. First place. I must win that ribbon.

"How many books this week?" I whisper to Rodney when the teacher's back is turned.

"Three."

"Three? Really?" I only read two. "How many for the year?"

"Forty six."

He's got a smug look on his bratty face. I want to pinch him but I turn away as if I don't care.

By Valentine's Day, I've read 65 books. Rodney leaves a valentine in the paper sack hanging on the front of my desk. I know he doesn't mean it so I don't give him one back. I feel bad later. He's read 59 books now.

Easter's early this year and I'm up to 85 books. My mother's taking me to the downtown library every Saturday.

Rodney's at 78 books. I stay mad at him. I want him to go away to another school. He's not even Lutheran.

Three weeks before the end of school, at recess, I ask him "How many books have you read?"

"Eighty nine."

"I've read ninety eight." I relish the look on his face.

"Ninety eight? What are you reading?"

"Oh, I read a lot of things. I just finished a dictionary." I say this in a practiced casual manner. I don't tell him it was a kid dictionary, and I am thrilled when his eyes get huge.

"A dictionary?"

"Yup." I wander away, pleased that I've made him anxious.

The next Monday, Mrs. Christianson announces that I've won the Read 100 Books This Year contest with 101 books for the year. She displays my completed list, each title and author painstakingly recorded on a lined sheet. Rodney makes a face at me and throws a spitball. I get the blue ribbon. Everyone claps.

When I put two books on my list I hadn't read, I didn't know how bad I would feel. I won. The blue ribbon was cheap acetate. What I thought was embroidery was just paint. When I got home, I put the ribbon in a box and pushed it under my bed.

seduce me

"I love this thing. Please tell me where it came from, how you acquired it, what you know of its history." I get these requests all the time. I sell antique furniture and while most transactions, most customers, are quick and easy, there are others who want to be courted.

It isn't that they want to know before they've purchased the piece. They always ask for the story after the fact. It's bought, it's paid for, and then they want more.

"Where did you find it," "tell me about its former home." I look back at my ad information and it's all there. French c. 1880s, art nouveau, oak, container purchase. It's there, but they need more than black and white words in a sales listing.

They prefer "French, from the late 1800s, purchased at an estate auction just outside of Paris. Hand picked by a lifelong collector who's only in business because he loves antiques. Packed snugly in a container for shipping before crossing the Atlantic and making its way up the wide Mississippi from the Port of New Orleans."

They don't want to hear of the stinking pollution of the shipyard at the Port of Houston, or the grubby nastiness of the containers arriving reeking of chemicals used to kill insects. They don't want to know that the furniture is bought in bulk by pickers in Europe, that the pickers have no more interest in a particular piece than I have in what shoes you're wearing. It's business, purely, but I'm not in the business of selling furniture as much as I'm in the business of selling romance.

Romance, that elusive, don't-look-at-me-or-I'll-vanish feeling that a certain type of person will experience in certain situations. I say "type of person" as if I'm detached from that, but I am one. I'm one of those seduced by the romance of living, the feeling I get watching the sun rise over the lake on a summer morning, or dancing in the moonlight on a crisp autumn night.

I am captivated by the romance of ordinary life, of my home and the things in it, of the way the sun comes through the stained glass and spills across the floor. Romance is going to sleep in my mother's mahogany four poster piled high with featherbeds and down comforters. Romance is sharing an early morning moment with my sweetheart in the garden as the seeds are sprouting tender green and that moist heavy feeling's in the air.

If you are like me, you can find yourself enchanted, bewitched by the scent of a cup of coffee, by the look of the cream swirling into the dark of it. You may stop your car on a city street in fall, jumping out to stand beneath the sublime crimson glow of a sugar maple in the afternoon sun. Maybe you are mesmerized by the foam wash of waves hitting the beach, by the smoky nightclub sound of a jazz saxophone.

Are you this way? I am, despite such desperate times. And from my customers, I'm getting these requests more often of late. I wonder if people are looking inward, to the small, splendid moments of life closer to home, to the seduction of the spirit which will invariably occur if we stop for just a moment and really pay attention to the world around us.

My people, my customers, they want to be seduced and so I tell them stories. Does it hurt anything in the end? I never tell tales about country of origin or age, that would be terrible and the romance of it isn't in the facts after all. But does it matter, when they want a little fantasy, if I spin an enchanting tale?

I reassure myself that it's okay because the world's dangerously short on romance these days. My story doesn't make the sale, it only adds a little after the fact, a little lagniappe, as my Louisiana friend used to say. It's like gift wrap and a ribbon: the gift is unchanged, but the experience is enriched just the same.

hoarder

Linda sits on the porch surrounded by treasure. Bags and boxes, each filled with tiny bits of glass, broken china, old photos. There's a book about hoarding open on her lap and she's looking at the progression photos to find out where she fits in. We discussed hoarding on the phone this afternoon when she called my shop. I tell her I've got a problem with books and papers; if I didn't have a housekeeper, my house would have trails.

I'm joking but she runs with it. "Just like the Collyer brothers! Oh, they are the example to keep us going, aren't they? How dreadful, to die in one's home, buried beneath one's belongings." Her speech is measured and correct as she sits surrounded by garbage. I vaguely remember two elderly brothers in New York City found dead in their apartment, buried beneath mountains of clutter.

She's tracing through the book with two fingers, maintaining a running commentary about the Collyers and her own downfall. Image 1 is of a tidy house, no clutter, her dream. Image 2 shows a lot of stuff about, but it's easily walkable. Her fingers stroke lightly across the photos, landing on number 9. She lifts the book, holding it close to examine every corner, every concealed table top in the image. Is her house this bad? Is it worse?

Her father was at Iwo Jima in World War II, his prized possession a large framed newspaper photo of the planting of the flag at Iwo, dated 1945. The once beautiful art deco frame surrounding the faded newsprint is flaking away. Rain and weather have damaged it beyond repair. Linda is proud of her father, thinks her brother might want the picture. "Isn't it something? Do you think it's worth a lot?"

Digging through her woven Colombia bag, she offers a book, scrabbling through pages to find the dedication. "Emilia Rosita Ankasia, in memory of our beloved."

"My daughter," she says proudly, tapping the words with her fingers. "My grandmother was a great lady. She put my name on all of these things so I could have them when she left us. I don't know about antiques, what are they worth?"

I look at the Heisey cobalt bowl, the RS Prussia cream pitcher, the tankard from Germany. "Do you think I'll be able to make a thousand dollar donation to my daughter's hospice?" She holds up a shattered Royal Bayreuth vase, "If I glue it back, what could I get for it?"

It pains me to see her, surrounded by her treasures, so filled with hope. I can tell that the house is full too. The windows are covered, but not with blinds or shades. There are stacked boxes and bags pressing against the glass. Linda sees me looking and explains. "I was sick for so long and now I might have liver failure, but talking to you, it helped me. I got a gift for you. Well I didn't get it, but I thought of you because it's what you said."

She digs through the bags, the clink of glass on metal accompanying her burrowing fingers. A cheap blue mug tumbles out and shatters on the sidewalk. She cries out and gathers the pieces, trying to fit them back together with shaking fingers. "I know I can fix this, I got this for my daughter, she loved this shade of blue."

"What do you want for these things, Linda?" My heart actually aches standing here on this sidewalk, watching her touching her beloved objects, the treasures left from her grandmother, each one threaded to a memory.

"Oh, I have no idea, no idea! It's just that I'm overdrawn at the bank and I need to make a donation to hospice. I called my sister and told her about you coming. She asked if I would get the thousand dollars I wanted for the hospice donation and I said I just don't know, I don't know. What are they worth?"

I don't know what they're worth, except not much. I know furniture and I know collectibles like antique canes and potlids, compasses, opera glasses, eyecups. I don't know what these bits and pieces of old china are worth on the market. I know they're worth nothing close to what she expects.

She gazes up at me, long, salt and pepper hair framing her face, her faded brown eyes beseeching me to help her. I don't know what to say. I don't want these things. I wish I'd never agreed to come. I felt sorry for her, my downfall.

"Oh, here's the present I got for you. Well, you know, I had it, but it is what you said to me this afternoon on the phone." She digs and uncovers a motto plaque, a poorly done calligraphy of sentiment in a cheap frame.

"The Love You Give Will Come Back To You." I never said that, yet that's what it says, this thing she hands me. I can't refuse it. I can't refuse the sentiment. I take it from her hand and ask again what she wants for the three pieces standing in the muddy flower bed.

The question is distressing her. She's hugging herself, clasping and releasing her hands over and over, agitated. "I don't know, I just don't know." I decide to spit it out so I can escape. I can't save all of these people, I can't.

"Linda, if I were at auction and saw these pieces in a box lot, I wouldn't pay more than $20 for them."

"Oh nooooooooo! Oh no, I wouldn't dare part with them for that, they are worth so much more than that, I can't part with them. I don't even think I can let you have them at any price. I just can't let them go."

I'm moving to my car, saying all of the nice getaway things, "call me," "we'll talk again," "it was nice meeting you." But I only want to get back in my car so I can be free of this house of pain, of the clinging, grasping woman my age sitting on the front porch, surrounded by junk, by trash.

I crank up my music and open the sunroof, roll the windows down. The spring air washes me clean, blows away the last vestige of the desperation that passed between us. I swerve into a gas station, roll up next to a dumpster. I've got the plaque in my hand, this sad, trite motto from a woman I don't even know. "The Love You Give Will Come Back To You."

I want to throw it in the dumpster but I can't let go, I can't. That's the thing about these people, these injured, damaged souls who find me over and over. The intrusion is forever. A tiny part of me forever bound to the wounded one. I drop the plaque in the back seat and drive on.

deaf dog

The second love of my life is curled on a down pillow, tucked into the crook of my left arm. This is what we do before bed: Betty sits on the stairs next to my old four poster, waiting while I fluff her pillow just so. I smooth the pillow and she steps daintily onto the bed, waiting for my hand signal to fall into the feathers. I pull the down comforter over the two of us, Betty snuggles in, making a soft puppy sigh, followed by a cooing sound, like a baby dove.

It is a ritual I adore and my little dog likes it to. Since she came to us almost three years ago, Betty has slept beside me every night.

She didn't look like much the first time I saw her. Thin, long bodied, scruffy, thin hair, with very pink, freckled skin beneath. She was billed as a Westie. That's dog rescue talk for "small white dog of unknown origin." We were looking for a companion for restless Bill, a grouchy Jack Russell, when we went to Yukon.

Anxious to make a match, the staff let us take her. We took both dogs around the corner from the rescue to the hayfield cum dog park and let them loose to run. It was hot that September and mosquitos cruised thick above the puddles in the pasture.

The dogs sniffed one another briefly, then Bill took off. Betty took off. They ran side by side, in tandem, interacting not one bit. There she was, a scruffy, funny looking small white dog who ignored us when we called, who watched balls fly and did not give chase, who ignored her potential sibling. I don't know why we decided to go ahead with the adoption. Something about her, her strangeness, the oddities in her behavior.

In the car on the way back to Tulsa, Betty paced the back seat looking out first one window, then another. It wasn't until we were 30 miles from Tulsa that she settled down and went to sleep.

Pulling in the driveway woke Billy as it always does. We parked, opened the doors, I got my purse off the floor in the back. Betty slept. I called to her, nothing. Finally, I reached in and stroked her head. She woke up looking sleepy and dazed, let me pick her up and carry her inside.

In those first few days, I would often lift her, hold her next to me on the sofa or in a chair. From my first touch, she would move not a muscle and once on my lap or next to me, she'd stare straight ahead. Thin, long bodied, scruffy dog statue. Not a blink, not a twitch, absolutely still.

I figured it out somewhere around the fifth day she was with us. Drinking coffee, reading a book early that morning, Betty was by my side on a pillow. She was looking away and I said something to her. No response. A glimmer of suspicion about this odd little dog, so I loudly said her name. Nothing. I yelled, clapped, "Betty!" Nothing.

"Mike! Betty's deaf, she's deaf!" and I gathered her into my arms to kiss her little head. It's so strange that I felt instant guilt over not having known. All the signs were there from the first day she didn't respond to our voices, when she slept so soundly on the way home.

Mike came to look at her, administered his own tests, agreed we had a deaf dog on our hands. Our thin, long bodied, scruffy, pink and freckled deaf girl. Knowing made me cry. I imagined how terrified she must have been living on the streets of Oklahoma City, at the construction site where she was found begging food. Without the ability to hear, she is at such risk, even now.

And then I thought of what she misses out on. Happy voices praising her, inciting her to play. She can't hear me when I tell her she's the best little dog in the world. She doesn't hear us laughing when she does something funny and she'll never hear my voice telling her I love her.

We called the rescue folks to tell them of our discovery. The director answered the phone, was a little cool as I related our news. When I told her we'd been reading up on sign language for dogs, she began to laugh, then expressed her relief that we were not bringing her back.

Take her back? My skinny, brown eyed, freckled, scruffy haired deaf girl? Not a chance. She is the child I never had. I'm not a mom, never will be, so I laugh when I tell friends that I couldn't love a child more than I love this dog. Mothers all, they laugh along with me, but I am serious. Do you have ~ have you had ~ an animal love, one you couldn't imagine living life without?

random

David was a smart aleck of the worst kind. I met him in 5th grade, the year I transferred from Lutheran school to public. After Lutheran started taking the town riff-raff, kids expelled from schools for misbehavior, my parents figured they may as well save the money, so surrendered their little girls to public education.

It was daunting for a small school girl to move into that tough kid world, though in retrospect, the toughness of the public schools in that Oklahoma town of 25 thousand is debatable. It seemed tough. It seemed scary. I stayed quiet and devoted myself to my work.

There were a few of us who aced all the tests, who competed hard for top marks in all the major subjects. David and I ran neck and neck through fifth grade. Though there were other kids nipping at our heels, we swapped top spots all year long.

The pinnacle of my public school academic career was achieved at the end of 5th grade, when the top scores on the standardized tests were announced. Nearly all of my classmates turned in anticipation to watch David, sitting in nonchalance, a smug look on his face. Oh, it was so divine when the teacher announced my name. Thirty heads swiveled in unison, eyebrows raised, mouths shaping little round Os. "Lynette!" Yes.

It was down hill from there. I found drugs and the bad kids who came with them. I lost track of David, though I'd see him occasionally at school or we'd pass in the hallways. We shared a math class in junior high, a class I skipped most days so I could read at the library.

I did fall in with Monty, though, David's older brother. Monty ran with my doper crowd while David remained a geeky science freak who never entered my orbit of artists, hippies, drug addicts and thieves.

When I was 16, Monty hanged himself in jail. He had just turned 19, got arrested for possession. Word went around that he was a narc and the story was told that David went to visit him at the jail, told him there were people looking to kill him. Monty was dead the next morning.

I don't know if it was the loss of his brother or a sense that he played a part in Monty's death, but David fell off the planet. He quit school, vanished from that little town. I moved away and forgot about him, forgot about all of the people I'd gone to school with, got in trouble with.

Fifteen years ago, in an AA meeting downtown, there was a guy who kept staring at me over his book. After the meeting, he approached and asked my name. It was David, my arch enemy from grade school, the brother of my dead doper compadre.

David was a drunk like me, and worse. He was living on the street, smoking crack. He rambled and made little sense. I thought he might be mentally ill as well. We said our hellos, isn't it amazing, what have you been doing, all of the superficial pleasantries that pass between strangers of long acquaintance.

A few weeks later, Mike returned from a meeting, said he'd picked up a new sponsee. "Name's David. Lives in an abandoned house down at Haskell and Main. Doesn't have a phone and there's no electric, but he said he's got some gas lamps and we can do the work."

The Work, the 12 steps, the process of recovery. David, 5th grade arch enemy, and my husband, the man who never says no, set to work on the steps. Mike tried. He never quit on anyone. It was David who finally broke it off after almost two years, severed the relationship in a fit of paranoid rage and unfounded accusations.

Isn't life strange? It's been thirteen years now since we've seen David and tonight, just now, Mike came home from a meeting, said "guess who I saw?"

He's got a place to stay, still crazy as all get out. On some kind of medication to control his urge to drink. He's got $40,000 left from his trust fund and he's obsessing about what to do when it runs out, just as he did 13 years ago when he had ten times that much.

David's life trajectory turned and never recovered after a conversation, after one single event. Granted, it was a big event. Suicide is a wretched thing and the loss of a sibling an unimaginable misery. I don't know why some people seem to survive the awful things, to ultimately come through the hard times of life, while others are sucked deep into the vortex of self destruction, never to surface again.

What do you think it is, this resilience of spirit? of mind? I haven't any idea, it seems so random that it frightens me, as if any one of us could wake up one morning, experience a tragedy, and be lost ever after.

breakfast

The day the pony dumped me in a puddle of blood behind the slaughterhouse was the day I learned where breakfast comes from. Morning meals on my uncle's Dodge City farm were extravagant feasts of deep yellow free range eggs, fresh baked biscuits, yeasty cinnamon rolls rich with butter, raisins and sugar, and always, heaping platters of smoked meats and plates of fried, crispy head cheese.

Though I didn't know it at the time, it was head cheese my grandmother was making when I rounded the corner of the slaughterhouse dripping blood. She vaulted to her feet, dropping the hog's head from between her knees and lunged for me. "What happened, what happened to you?," and then, finding me uninjured, "What did you do?"

She shook me ~ hard ~ but I couldn't tear my eyes away from the bloody pig's head that rolled to the ground when she rushed to my aid and I was mute in my shock. It was a grotesque thing, upside down, one hairy ear stuck out to the side. The creature's tongue poked from between enormous teeth and it glared at me with its sole remaining eyeball.

I screeched once and collapsed. I came to surrounded by my kin, half with knives, and all of them grinning. Immediately wary, I sat up and looked for the hog's head. There was grandma, perched on the bench, digging and scraping with her arm buried deep in a bodyless head. She was singing softly in German, the melody of Sunday mornings interspersed with the teeth-on-edge sound of knife on bone.

She caught my eye and smiled. "This is for that head cheese you gobble up at breakfast, and I've got the brains soaking for scrambled eggs tomorrow." Then she winked and my kin dispersed and I was left sitting outside the slaughterhouse, the smell of scalded pig skin stinging my nose, my fingernails filthy with swine blood.

I hesitated the next morning when the platter bearing head cheese passed me, and I have never yet tasted scrambled eggs and brains. But by the end of breakfast, the repugnant realities of hog butchering dimmed and I tore off a piece of head cheese, swirled it through the yellow yolk of my egg and ate.

clamming

We're still on scary stories from childhood. It's all sounding alike to me. My teacher, Miss Peggy, says "Write! No matter what, write!" Okay.

clamming

Margene and I are catching fish in clamshells, our favorite summer activity at 99 Springs. The fattest clams work best because they've got the meatiest insides. We learned this from our teenage cousins who'd stand in the swimming hole clamshells in hand, waiting for little fish to nibble on the pink before snapping shut the shell.

There's no point to it except to be faster than the fish. The catcher whoops and waves the fish, buried to its gills in the shell, then releases the stunned creature back to the water. This year, at six and seven, my sister and I are getting better at it. We've already exceeded the clumsy moves of last year, when we were just babies.

We're supposed to fish clamshells only in the swimming hole with the big cousins around, but Margene and I, we're headed to the Arthur's dock because we've seen bluegills nesting there, silvery scales flashing in the sun.

On the dock, we flatten ourselves to peek through the cracks at the fish below. Dozens of bluegills hover over scooped out depressions filled with eggs, watchful and alert for predators.

Margene drops into the water. I'm scared to go in because it's deeper here and we shouldn't be in the water at all. Our plan was to hang over the edge of the dock. But she's brave, my sister, just 14 months older than I am, and fearless.

I lie flat on the dock, peeking through the crack, watching Margene bend over with an open clamshell in her hands. Tiny fish approach her, but she waits. She wants one of those fat mamas from the nests. I am holding my breath as she is, waiting for the fish to come.

Behind her something moves. It looks like the bottom of the lake is rising. I whisper to my sister, "what's that?" and she says "shut up, I almost got one." I'm riveted by the thing behind her, one braced dock leg over from where my sister stands chest deep in the lake.

Now I can see its head and ancient old eyes peering through slits. Can that be a turtle, that huge ugly thing clawing through the mud toward my sister?

"Margene, get out." My voice is fierce but she tells me to shut up. It is the biggest turtle I have ever seen, at least as big as Grandma McKee's peach basket. Do turtles like clams? They must because it's still coming. "Margene, get out there's a turtle he's huge get out Margene" and she just shushes me. A giant mama bluegill is approaching her tender bit of clam.

The turtle's moving closer and he looks like he could take her hand off. "Margene, now. Get out now. It's coming" but she ignores me, her attention focused on the tentative fish head an inch from her hand. I hang over the edge of the dock and scream and splash my hands in the water. The fish scatter and my sister hollers at me, "I almost had that fish what are you doing?" She's really mad, but when the water clears the turtle is gone. I look for him everywhere. He's really gone.

My sister pulls herself up on the dock and smacks me on the back of my head. "I had that fish, Net, what is wrong with you?" She drops her dying clam on the dock and flounces away, leaving me behind. I stay there, sprawled flat in the hot sun, peering through the cracks, alert to the return of the behemoth in the water.