Read The Moon Sisters for Free Online

Maybe you’ll figure it out .
    His name was Rat, and I followed him into the house. Music seeped out at us from unseen speakers, as somber and low as the music that had played at my mother’s wake. When we neared theroom she’d been laid out in, empty now, I stepped into it. The air smelled vaguely of flowers, though there were none to be seen, unless you counted the blue flowered fabric on each of the three couches. Scattered among them were chairs of green and gold thread. Tasseled lamps and boxes of tissue adorned every side table, and art decorated each wall—paintings of trees and butterflies, and more flowers. All of it in place to be a comfort, I guess, to counter being left to face the thing that made everyone so uncomfortable. Death. It struck me then that this was death’s home, this house of illusion and faux control.
    I asked about the job.
    “Was that a town sign, Jazz? What did it say?” Olivia asked as I felt the change; all of a sudden, we had no power. An indistinct rattling sound emanated from all around us, like a beehive full of angry life. I pumped the accelerator pedal. It didn’t matter. We’d been traveling up a hill and wound down real fast. I pulled onto the shoulder for the second time that day and, out of sheer disbelief and frustration, slammed the heels of my hands against the steering wheel, eliciting the bus’s warbling goose-honk warning. We slugged to a complete stop.
    “Jesus Christ, we’re cursed!” I hollered. And for the first time all day there was a quiet behind me so comprehensive that I could hear my own breathing.
    It was almost worth it. Almost.
    We waited in the bus for ten minutes, and when no one stopped to help, and the heat got to be too much, we left to walk alongside the highway. I set myself closest to the white line, between Olivia and the trucks and cars that passed, and settled the pack on my back.
    There were no arguments. We were going to the nearest town to find a phone. The bus—was it even towable? How much would it cost to fix? It wasn’t like we had AAA. Whatever it was, I would have to cough it up, because that bus was my ticket to Kennaton.
    We were calling for help. And then we were calling home. Eventually our father would be sober again, and then he could pick us up.
    Olivia remained silent, her shoulders slumped as she hugged her suitcase to her chest. A crow dropped twenty or so feet from us to pick at something dead or dying.
    “Some things aren’t meant,” I said, knowing she had long shared my mother’s trust in fate and ready to lean on that to make a point if I had to. “Things that are meant slip into place like the missing puzzle piece in your life, right? You get the job, you ace the test, whatever. Your car doesn’t break down, you know?”
    It was a rabbit, I think. Ten feet away now. Hard to tell, but that looked like flattened rabbit ears. The air buzzed with bugs.
    “It’s not the right time,” I continued. “We need to go home and reassess this whole thing.”
    There were no arguments, but for some reason I still felt the need to defend the obvious, sensible course of action, the path we were taking.
    We followed the shoulder to an exit ramp as cars poured off the highway along with us. Buildings created an irregular skyline in the distance; a city I’d never visited before—Jewel—lay just ahead. And maybe my luck was changing, because there, tucked between a diner and a dry cleaner, was a mechanic’s shop. JIM’S , the sign read. There were only a few cars in the lot, too, which seemed promising—an old Chevy, a Jeep with some serious rust issues, and an antique car missing two of its tires.
    “There,” I told Olivia, pushing my sunglasses farther up my nose, the tricky lens staying in place. “The setup couldn’t be better, see? You can sit in the diner while I talk to whoever is at the shop, all right? You can order a Pepsi and a sandwich, and even have a piece of pie.”
    She slanted her head, looked at me