1 Her feet plopped painfully on the floor. The swollen wood groaned- icy cold even through her thick wool socks. She did not dress, instead pulled a heavy sweater on over her flannel nightdress and started down the stairs to the kitchen. Overnight, the wood in the basement furnace had swilled to a soft red glow- not enough heat to braise these hardwood floors. Floors her daddy had ladi with his own rough hands; dark hands on dark planks. Reyna raised her voice, thick and cracking in the cold. She knew they would not come willingly in this cold, but raise them she must.
"Max, Angel, Hullah....get yourselves out of bed."
Just as Max's reluctant feet sounded on the creaking wood of the stairs, the glass bowl Reyna held slipped from between her fingers (strong fingers that almost never dropped anything) and landed on the floor in a thousand slippery pieces. Later, she would recall that as the first sign that something was happening. That and the creaking sound that shivered and howled around her when Max opened the door to the basement to load the furnace. The bowl had been the last of her wedding set, and its disappearance must mean something...for all women know that signs of the future may be read in the easiest of doings, the most common of occurrences.
2
Max made his way to meet her. He stopped in
the doorway and watched her as she sweeped
up the remains of her marriage. What did he
remember of his father? He was the man of
the house now. She leaned on his strong
shoulders too much, she knew; he was,
after all still a boy, only sixteen."Where're your sisters?" Reyna asked.
"I'll get'em," Max said, and turned his
back. She watched it retreat and disappear.
She shivered; not so much from the cold.
It was a shiver that came from somewhere
inside. "What's wrong?" she asked herself,
worried.
3 The answer came soon enough, just after the children disappeared from the house, out into the blinding white of sundrenched snow. Reyna washed breakfast dishes clean of sodden cereal, drying oatmeal, and wiped the foggy milkstains from the clear glasses. More feet on the stairs. This time, she knew them from their heavy-heeled plod.
Katy's touseled head appeared just behind her lugging belly. She yawned, stretched and made a face at Reyna's proferred plate.
"You know I can't eat nothing in the morning. Can't do nothing, either. MIght as well just sleep in late as I can."
Reyna glared at her. Lazy. Lazy and no good. Not like her own daughters, raised clean and quiet. Raised as far away from whore-houses and Voodoo Queens as this girl had been close to them.
"Think I'll get dressed and go down to Joe's." Katy yawned again, when she stretched her back, her belly popped up and protruded, looking strangely out-of-place on her thin, lithe frame. Though pregnancy suited some girls, it did little for Katy...no glow, no inner shining..and her natural grace taken hostage by her small round front.
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