Watch How We Walk by Jennifer LoveGrove Page B

in the family who listens to worldly music, though usually just through headphones, so as to avoid their father’s objections. As far as Emily knows, her mother owns only a box of music theatre albums like Oklahoma! and West Side Story , which she never listens to. The only records her father even has are 45 s of moose calls. He listens to them just before hunting season, and practises mimicking the guttural grunts. Lenora says that they sound like someone struggling, unsuccessfully, to go to the bathroom.
    Emily can’t make out the words, but her mother’s powerful vocals surge through the house — loud, louder than any of them are allowed to be at home.
    â€” Stop, stop, stop. Emily’s mother gasps, choked with laughter. Something, possibly her mother, thuds against the wall.
    â€” Start that part over again, I love that verse! Come on, play it again!
    â€” Okay Viv, okay, just hold on — I dropped the pick.
    Emily takes off her boots, careful to keep them on the rubber mat and not get any snow or mud on the carpet. She hears the refrigerator door open and close, then the clank of bottles.
    â€” Thanks. The other person’s voice is muffled, as though he has something in his mouth, but sounds familiar. Before she even begins to guess, the window-rattling guitar screeches up again.
    â€” So where were the spiders . . . The pair sing in the kitchen and Emily hangs her coat on the gun rack. She has no choice but to walk by the kitchen doorway to get to the stairs to her room.
    Emily hates to sing. Like her father, she moves her lips accordingly, with little or no sound sneaking past them. At school, music is the only subject in which she doesn’t get an A. She hopes her mother doesn’t force her to sing with them. She doesn’t always know what, at any given moment, her mother will do next.
    As she runs past the kitchen, the music stops in the middle of a line. The last guitar note hums through the speaker and fades away.
    â€” Hey Emily! How are you, kiddo?
    She turns back to see that it’s her uncle Tyler.
    â€” Hi. She tries, and fails, to smile as he hides a beer bottle behind his back. She doesn’t let on to them that she’s seen it. He wears dark blue jeans that look too small and a black sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His strawberry blond hair is longer, shaggier than when she last saw him. He still hasn’t gotten it cut.
    â€” Say congratulations to your uncle. He just bought that fancy new car today.
    Emily nods at her uncle. He hasn’t been at all of the meetings lately, at least not the Sunday morning ones. Missing meetings is always a sign of either defection to the World or serious illness. When she asked her parents last week if Uncle Tyler was sick, her mom and dad both answered at the same time.
    â€” That’s one way of putting it. Her dad raised his thick eyebrows and shook his head.
    â€” He’s fine. Her mom glared back at him.
    Emily hadn’t known that her uncle could play the guitar. She didn’t know anyone who could play an instrument, for real, other than a couple of kids at school who played the piano during music class. Emily did know that her mom could sing though. Sometimes she wonders if that’s the only reason she goes to the meetings at the Kingdom Hall anymore. While she may look angry — likely at her, Emily assumes, or Lenora — during the brothers’ talks, when it’s time to sing one of the meeting’s three songs, she opens her purple and gold songbook, and jubilantly belts out the lyrics, resounding and beautiful. Her voice is clearer, louder, and better than any of the other sisters’ in the congregation. Sometimes her parents fight about that.
    â€” You’re being immodest, and showing off.
    She just rolls her eyes and ignores him.
    Her mother’s long dark curls bounce in every direction and are splayed across her face. She pulls back