What Happened to My Sister: A Novel by Elizabeth Flock

Author:Elizabeth Flock
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Psychological, Sagas, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345524447
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2012-08-07T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Carrie

Ever-where you look there’s something interesting to look at. They got so many things it’d be hard to count even if someone offered to pay you a penny for every item you made note of. So many that if Miss Chaplin had to move from here to a tiny map dot in the mountains—Hendersonville maybe—it’d take her weeks just to pack it all up. Don’t even get me started on how much money she’d make if she decided to sell it all in a yard sale because she was turning the page by moving away. I’m telling you: there are a bazillion things under this one roof.

Miss Chaplin tells Cricket and Mrs. Ford that she’s borrowing me for a minute. She stands behind me and with her hands on my shoulders she guides me like a shopping cart into the front room with all the boy dolls.

“It’s taken me over three decades to gather all of this together,” Miss Chaplin says, standing now in the middle of the room. “We have the premier collection of Charles Chaplin memorabilia in the United States.”

I worry she thinks I’m staring on account of the way she looks. Her being so fat and all. She probably weighs a thousand pounds. I went to a county fair once and there was a booth where you could guess the weight of the person setting there and if you got it right you’d get a huge jar of gum balls and I guessed wrong but Tommy Bucksmith was close so he won the jar and he didn’t share one single gum ball with anybody. Not one. That was the fattest person I ever saw—the man at the guess-the-weight booth at the county fair. Until today. So I try to make her think I’m not thinking about her being fat by asking her questions I didn’t put any thought into.

“Where’d that one come from?” I point to a random doll that’s no different from a million others lined up alongside it and I make sure to look her in the eye because that’s what polite people do.

She looks as pleased as if I’d told her she won the Miss America pageant. Which, not to be mean or anything, she isn’t likely to do anytime soon.

“Well, someone has a good eye,” she says, putting strength behind the some part of the word someone. “That particular likeness is one of a limited edition put out by Madame Alexander on the occasion of what would have been Uncle Charlie’s one hundredth birthday.”

The skin on the back of her arm stretches into a wing when she reaches to bring it down from the shelf. She’s as careful with it as Momma was with that glass pitcher we had to part with back in Hendersonville.

“Look at this,” Miss Chaplin says, turning it over and holding the base up close for me to get a look. “See the numbers there? Read them out loud for me, honey, will you? My eyes aren’t as good as they once were.

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