Frankie pulled a string of hair from her mouth. From where she lay on the ground, the cloud that blew across the sky looked like the trail from one of Bern’s smokes. She kicked her legs against the thought of her sister, rubbed her left palm against her g*n’s holster. Bern was as ornery as they come, as usual. She woke up on the wrong side of the bed, that’s what their mom would have said. Maybe Mom was watching from heaven now, and she saw how mean Bernie was, and someday she was going to punish Bern with some plague from above that covered her face in zits or made her front tooth fall out so that she would look like a hobo. Frankie would laugh her guts out. And Bernadette would cry.
But later she would help Bern. She would carve her a tooth from stone or find a cure for zits. Or she wou
