Between Sisters

by Kristin Hannah

Her past wasn’t a collection of memories to be worked through; it was like an oversize Samsonite with a bum wheel. Meghann had learned that a long time ago. All she could do was drag it along behind her.

They were what Meghann wanted them to be: polite strangers who shared a blood type and an ugly childhood.

Sometimes God gave you a mama that made normal impossible.

Bullies were bullies; their defining characteristic was the need to exert power over the powerless. Who was more powerless than a child?

She was forty-two years old, and since it felt as if she’d been thirty a moment ago, she had to assume it would be a blink’s worth of time before she was fifty.

“I can’t remember the last time I went out without having to do enough preplanning to launch an air strike.”

Claire let the music pour over her like cool water on a hot summer’s day. It refreshed her, rejuvenated her. The minute she started to move in time with it, to swing her hips and stamp her feet and clap her hands, she remembered how much she loved this.

“Sooner or later, Meg, it’s always about family. The past has an irritating way of becoming the present.”

When you’d been raised by a stripper and grown up in a trailer on the wrong side of town, you couldn’t move to Mayberry and fit in.

Take her home. Stop fighting the diagnosis and start fighting the tumor.”

There was Claire, half bald, pale as parchment, smiling up at her. “I thought: Christ, I’m dead and she’s still yelling at me.”