The Sister Season by Jennifer Scott Page B

liked the fried okra there, and it was one vegetable they didn’t grow in their own garden, so he felt justified buying it. Of course, Robert felt justified doing most anything he wanted to do. It was only Elise and the girls whose wants he denied.
    Stepping in through the front door, Julia noticed that little had changed since her childhood. The same dirty black-and-white tile held the same scuff marks, and the same jukebox sat dusty and mute in the corner. The place still smelled of old frying oil, and the chairs were still sticky against the backs of her arms.
    She half expected to see her father, flannel sleeves rolled to the elbows, frowning and chewing methodically, holding a fork in one fist and a knife in the other, at one end of the table. Silent to everyone, and everyone wanting it that way, because when he spoke at the dinner table it was only because someone had tested his last nerve, and it was frightening and appetite-killing. She would never have thought it, but Sharp’s really did make her think of her father. In some ways, she may have felt his absence there even more than she did his absence at home.
    She tried to drum up a feeling of mourning, but nothing would come, other than a remote sort of grief, a loss that she couldn’t quite feel because she’d spent so many years of her life pounding it away, pounding
him
away from her heart. You couldn’t miss something you never had. She supposed she had grieved him little by little, year by year, many years ago, and now, where he should have existed in her heart, there was simply a void.
    Julia couldn’t be sure, but she was almost positive that she could remember a time, way back before her sisters were born, when Robert had occasionally smiled. When he hadn’t worn that angry vein in his forehead all the time. When her parents seemed flirty, happy. Could it have been the pressures of the family and the farm that made him who he was? Julia hated to think so, and she hated to have those fond memories, even foggily, because it was just so much easier to feel nothing but distance.
    They trailed into the restaurant, one by one, and Julia pretended not to notice that the dinner crowd had seemed to stop and clam up, as if witnessing something spectacular. She wondered if the small-town gossip train still rolled through this area, if she and her sisters were speculated about, reviled. She wondered if her father ever came into Sharp’s alone and told stories of ungrateful children over sweaty glasses of stale beer. She wondered if what had happened at the Chuck Wagon was still legend to some folks. She didn’t know why, but she thought it likely.
    The waitress led them to a room in the back. This, Julia didn’t remember, and the slightly modern decor of the add-on room was a physical reminder that time had apparently marched on, even at Sharp’s, while she’d been away.
    “This work?” the waitress asked, and Julia nodded, appraising the long table, already set. The waitress methodically placed a menu at every place setting while the rest of the family filed in and began claiming seats. “Real sorry about your dad,” the waitress said on the way out, and again Julia just nodded. What was to be said? She was certain that the man the waitress was sorry to hear about couldn’t have been the man who’d bellowed in the barn, his fists of rage frightening and painful against the sides of her skull.
    It took some uncomfortable shifting, but eventually everyone got seated. Nobody seemed to want to say much to anybody else, and it was obvious that Maya and Bradley were shielding themselves with their kids—Molly at Maya’s side and Will at Bradley’s. Though they, for some reason, looked no more comfortable sitting next to each other than they might have if they’d been sitting next to one of the sisters.
    In the end, they were able to artfully arrange themselves so the empty seats would fall like moats between enemies, and before long those empty seats