Home Leave: A Novel by Brittani Sonnenberg

glad to drop it when they returned to the States, where she could smile as much and as stupidly as everyone else.
    Not that those smiles, including her own, don’t drive her crazy some days, since moving back. And that isn’t the only allergy Elise has developed to her home country. After their first move overseas, to London, Elise had become increasingly critical of the US. The outlandish food portions at restaurants. The death penalty. Oprah. But in Hamburg, when she would discuss such matters with Germans, even when she was on their side, Elise had often intuited a tiny, perverse relish in their critique, which had never failed to incense her and had inevitably resulted in her vehement defense of America by the end of the conversation, on a topic as silly as whether the first Thanksgiving was as mythical as the Creation in Genesis. Elise had decided the German dislike of America had something to do with the Marshall Plan and the postwar Allied occupation—resenting the person you owe something to, the one who is calling the shots. Elise had felt that way with Chris after she stopped working, before she received her father’s inheritance four months ago.
    It is still a man’s money, but it wasn’t bestowed conditionally, as a reward for toeing the line, the way Charles Ebert had always given his daughter money before. This time, Elise had earned it through her daddy’s helpless death. She can spend it any way she wants and he can’t do a damn thing. Elise is puzzled by the savage nature of her reaction. While he was alive, her fights with her father had been largely silent, characterized by symbolically aggressive acts (Elise not coming home for Christmas her freshman year; Charles withdrawing tuition the following semester), like pushing chess pieces across a board, each player tensed for the other’s next move. Elise misses having an opponent. She spends Charles’s inheritance with a kind of focused revenge, studiously frivolous (Charles had despised nothing more than frivolity), vaguely craving a stern reprimand, which never comes. Although the minute the notion of revenge comes to her mind, Elise dismisses it. She is just having a good time, after a long period of not having a good time. That is the least she deserves, the least they owe her after all those childhood years hiding in hot, humid shadows.
    What is Ivy doing with her money? Elise wonders. The irony being that, of all the siblings, Ivy now needs cash the least. Her band, Choked by Kudzu, which Elise dismissed for so many years, deciding it was an excuse for Ivy to stick around Vidalia with her high school buddies, get high, and “write music,” has had considerable regional success. Elise watched Ivy perform the last time she was in Vidalia, and Ivy is rapturous in front of a crowd, her red hair long now, her voice alternately crooning and harsh, belting out the band’s mix of bluegrass, roots, and rock. Offstage, Elise isn’t sure how Ivy is doing. It’s hard to catch her sister sober; that’s for sure. Then again, Elise thinks, maybe she’s just looking for ways to deny Ivy’s success now, the way she dismissed the band’s potential before. After all, Ivy is still young, in her early twenties, having a blast. You’re just jealous, Elise scolds herself.
    While this theory is hardly flattering, painting Elise as the uptight, petty older sister, Elise settles on it because it reassures her that she doesn’t have to go back down South to check on Ivy, doesn’t have to go into guardian-angel mode. A role that’s never worked anyways, Elise thinks, a tight, bitter smile flickering across her face, remembering Paps’s visits, how Elise would make sure to skip choir and rush home from school to check on her sister, only to find the two of them innocently perched on the sofa, Paps reading A Hundred and One Dalmations , Ivy gnawing on a Snickers bar. In response to Elise’s hesitant inquiries over the years, Ivy has always insisted that Paps