My Sister's Tears Stole My First Life, Not My Second novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Sunshine

"I've stopped saying her name."

It came out of every speaker in the room at once, low and hoarse, with Boston in the vowels.

Half the older guests knew that voice before the first sentence was over.

A woman at the board table put her hand flat on her chest.

"Out loud, I mean," Mother said. "It was easier on the house."

On the stage, Tinsley had gone white to the lips.

"I say it to you instead," she said. "You're a wall."

The tap ran in the background, the way it had on my porch, then stopped.

"Winnie. Winnie. Winnie."

On the porch, Simon had stopped the file there.

Tonight he let it run.

There was a long breath on the recording, the rustle of a blanket.

Then Mother started to sing, very softly.

"You are my sunshine," she sang.

Her voice cracked on the high note, and she went on anyway, through the whole first verse.

It was the song from the tape.

The tape Tinsley had erased the day after Quentin took it out of my hands.

I hadn't known it was on the memos. I hadn't let myself listen that far.

I stood at the foot of the stage, holding a sailor dress.

My mother was singing to me, for the first time I could remember.

"Turn it off," Tinsley said.

Nobody did.

Mother kept singing, slow and off-key, into the second verse.

"Turn her off!"

Tinsley's voice broke out of her, high and raw, nothing like the soft one she used in rooms.

She spun toward the AV booth.

"Turn her off! She's dead! She doesn't get to..."

Simon's hand stayed where it was, on the rail, an inch from the board.

He looked at me.

I shook my head.

Mother sang the last line very softly, and the file ended, and the hiss ran on for a second after.

Then nothing.

Tinsley was breathing hard into the microphone. Every breath came out of the speakers.

"Every year," she said. "Every single year, the Fourth of July, the whole house went dark. Fifteen years. She lit a candle in that window like a crazy woman. Nobody ever lit a candle for me."

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