Page 1

Prologue

Once when we all had a quiet moment, when no one was demanding anything of us and our punitive chores were completed, we sat and watched the sky turn from deep blue to mauve and turquoise.

A sparrow landed on the top rail of the horse corral and tapped about for a moment before settling and staring at the three of us. Teal was the first to notice.

“I wonder,” she said, “if birds who live in cages ever wonder why they are in cages.”

Robin looked at her as if she were going to say something sarcastic to her and then she looked at the bird and her face softened.

“I suppose we could pretend to be confused about that ourselves,” Robin said. “Couldn’t we, Phoebe?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m not confused. I know I don’t belong here.”

“Phoebe, we’re all so good at lying to everyone else, we’re even good at lying to ourselves,” Robin replied.

Teal smiled.

“She’s right, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Well, I’m telling you, Phoebe. We don’t need to be told or shown why we’re like caged birds. We each know why we’re here.”

“I know why I am. Let me tell you,” Robin said.

And then she began…

PART ONE

ROBIN

1

Jerked into the Night

“Wake up, Robin!” I heard my mother say. I felt myself being rocked hard.

At first I thought the rocking was in my dream, a dream so deep I had to swim up to consciousness like a diver from the ocean floor. Each time my mother shook my shoulder, I drew closer and closer to the surface, moaning.

“Quiet!” she ordered. “You’ll wake Grandpa and Grandma and I’ll have my hands full of spilt milk. Darn it, Robin. I told you what time we were headin‘ outta here. You haven’t even finished packin’,” she said.

My suitcase was open on the floor, some of my clothes still beside it. Mother darling had insisted I not begin until after I supposedly went to bed last night. My mother said I couldn’t bring but one suitcase of my things, and it was hard to decide what to take and not to take. She needed everything of hers because she was going to be a country singing star and had to have her outfits and all her boots and every hat as well as half a suitcase of homemade audiotapes she thought would win the admiration of an important record producer in Nashville.

I sat up and pressed my palms over my cheeks, patting them like Grandpa always did when he put on aftershave lotion. The skin on my face was still asleep and felt numb. My mother stood back and looked at me with her small nose scrunched, which was something she always did when she was very annoyed. She also twisted her full lips into her cheek. She had the smallest mouth for someone who could sing as loudly as she could, but most women envied her lips. I know that some of her friends went for collagen shots to get theirs like hers.

Everyone said we looked like sisters because I had the same petite features, the same rust-colored hair, and the same soft blue eyes. Nothing she heard pleased her more. The last thing she wanted to be known as was my mother, or anyone’s mother for that matter. She was thirty-two years old this week, and she was convinced she had absolutely her last chance to become a singing star. She said she had to pass me off as her younger sister or she wouldn’t be taken seriously. I was sixteen last month, and she wanted everyone, especially people in show business, to believe she was just in her mid-twenties.

Although I was closer to one of her idols, Dolly Parton, than she was when it came to breasts, we did have similar figures, both being a shade more than five feet five. She always looked taller because she hardly ever wore anything but boots. She wore hip-hugging tight jeans most of the time, and when she went out to sing at what she called another honky-tonk, she usually tied the bottom of her blouse so there was a little midriff showing. Grandpa would swell up with anger, his face nearly breaking out in hives, or just blow out his lips and explode with biblical references.

“We taught you the ways of the righteous, brought you up to be a churchgoing girl, and you still dress like a street tramp. Even after… after… your Fall,” he told her, and swung his eyes my way.

That’s what I was in his way of thinking: the Fall, the result of “the grand sin of fornication.” Mother darling had been sexually active at the age of fifteen and had me when she was only sixteen. Grandpa, despite despising the situation as much as he did, would not permit even talk of an abortion.