She arrives here by bus, in a shapely red dress. I watch her walk up our drive, dragging her roller wheels across the gravel. She steers well away from my beehives, even though they are far away, near the fence. I am busy making my grandmother tea with honey, when she sees what I see through the kitchen window. She loses her breath and drops her dish cloth. She smashes the bottom half of the stable door open and runs out. She loses a shoe on her way to the glamorous stranger, wailing, “Khethiwe!”

“I wanted to surprise you, Umakhulu.”

They hug each other all the way to the house. Khethiwe is sweating in the midday heat but still smelling of Dove perfumed deodorant. If it was me I would be stinking. Her mascara is running under her eyes but it only makes her look more dramatic.

I can’t smile. I’m not good at pretending. I shake hands with the sister I have not seen since I was eleven. Khethiwe has turned into a woman; a woman with my mother’s build and her breasts, and her sweet, kind smile. Umakhulu takes her to my room and lets her fill it with her chemical perfume and her purple suitcase and all the clothes she has stuffed into it – mostly fancy underwear. For what? To milk goats?

“So what’s happening, Asanda? Are you happy?” Khethiwe asks me.

“I have been.” I deliberately use the past tense.

I was happy, until she arrived and lined her hair combs and make-up brushes on my table. I was quite fine until she displayed her underwear on my only chair; turned my room into a lingerie shop. As she leaves my room I sling my blanket over it, the pink one Mom sent me before winter. I see that Khethiwe has brought a matching blanket in her bag.

In the kitchen Grandma is laughing at something Khethiwe is saying.

“What is this ‘frisbee?’” Umakhuluasks.

“It’s like a plastic plate that you spin. We play it on the beach in PE.”

“It’s something I don’t know.”

I walk in. “Here we play with broken balls and stones,” I say sarcastically.

Khethiwe smiles at me. She should be hitting me.

Okay, I’m jealous.

I’m jealous of her big breasts, her thick eyelashes, her curvy calves. Even as a baby she was shiny and plump and gurgling. She was always the one people picked up and squeezed – not me with my sharp elbows and knees. I was a premature baby, with a narrow head and limbs like thin, bony wings. My mom stayed here long enough to get me home from the incubator. And then she left with Khethiwe.

I’m jealous because my mother took her, not me. Umakhulu and Ubawomkhulu raised me and I only saw my mother every second or third Christmas.

***

Tell us what you think: Is Asanda right to be jealous? Why might the mother have only taken one of her children?