my mother would ask me, all too often, because Olivia had a way of landing in trouble. Like the time she climbed the tallest tree in town during a rainstorm because she said she liked the way it sounded when the drops hit the leaves. Or liked the look of that sound, whatever that meant. I didn’t ask for details, only yelled at her until she got down, then dragged her body home, both of us soaked to the marrow.Like the time she walked alone clear out of town and into the next just to see, in her words, “some old dogs.” I found her at a tiny house huddled beside a wire-haired white mutt, and talking to some old man who had fewer teeth than fingers. My bark won.Like the time she used a vacated ladder to reach the top of St. Cyril’s steepled roof and sat up there for hours, saying she was testing it out for our father because it seemed the best place in all the world for a fiddle show. I threatened to tell Mama about her trip to see the dogs all by herself if she breathed a word of that nonsense to our father.
