The night my sister almost dies for the twelfth time, a foot of snow falls, which makes it harder, though not impossible, to save her. Under normal circumstances - as if they're ever normal when it comes to her - snow doesn't pose much of a problem. As Montanans, we're used to driving the white drifts, crunching down unplowed roads like the trailblazers we pride ourselves on being. But this storm catches us off guard. It's July, after all, a time of beach vacations and ice cream trucks and waterskiing, everyplace but here. We let ourselves get suckered in, stored the chains and boots and parkas in the attic in anticipation of scorching, dry days. I suppose we should have known better. Weather can be unpredictable in Butte.

So can my sister.

As snowflakes tumble from the sky, the telephone wires hum a dirge, black lines tying us into the network, tying us down. The phone hiccups, bring-bring, bring-bring, bearing a message from my sister, who has the habit of disappearing and reappearing like a sequin-clad girl in a magic trick. I know something's wrong the minute Mama picks up the phone. She gets that pained look around her eyes, as if a splinter has lodged deep in the optic nerve.

That doesn't stop her from seeing things clearly. Or, at least, as clearly as you can when you're the mother of a sister like mine. Mama sits down at the kitchen table, the receiver to her ear, listening. For a fleeting moment, she has a this-isn't-really-happening look on her face, distant, dazed. She gazes past me, past the whole town maybe, to the life she'd never managed to have. Her name is Finola McGann Mulcahy, though everybody calls her "Fi." She was the first in her family to go to a university. Even though she had a beautiful singing voice, she took the practical route and studied nursing. She returned to Butte on weekends to see her friends, to see the guy who would become our father. She couldn't separate herself from this place.

Neither can the rest of us.

Then she got pregnant with my sister, came home, and married my father, a boy she'd known almost her whole life. The same old story. He was a good man, even if he didn't have a good heart. By that, I mean one that worked right. His heart was too big in some ways, too small in others, a hidden defect no one discovered until it was too late. He died at the age of thirty-seven, when I was twelve. Ancient history, since the years have collapsed on themselves, like folds of an accordion.

I'm eighteen now. My mother is forty-two. My sister, twenty-one.

Mama knocks a cigarette out of the pack on the table with the same wrist-snap required to roll dice. She does this with the practiced grace of someone who'd gone through the motions for years. She doesn't miss the irony of smoking, though she's a labor and delivery nurse at St. John's. She says you've got to have a vice or two, to keep things interesting. As long as it doesn't hurt anybody. That's the crucial point.

I guess she doesn't count hurting herself.

She only smokes outside, out of consideration for me, even if that means freezing her butt off. She wraps herself up in an old blue chenille robe with a faded bouquet of flowers appliquéd on the back (my father gave it to her years ago, for Mother's Day) and plunks down on the steps of the front porch, the embers of her cigarette like the lights of a small plane unable to land.

She'd be there now if she could. She needs a hit of nicotine bad. She runs her finger along the phone cord - she knows it won't reach as far as the porch - and glances at me. She's thinking about asking for the cordless, but she doesn't dare break away for one second, because she's afraid if she does, Meghan will hang up.

We're waiting, waiting in a silence that causes me to think the worst - that Meghan has dropped the phone, that she's passed out on the floor, spit and vomit dribbling from her mouth. I imagine her with a knife in her chest, because she pissed off the wrong person. Again. "What's going on?" I ask.

Mama shakes her head. "She's there. I can hear her breathing. Honey? Hello?"

I pick up the portable phone. Mama doesn't care if I listen. I'm part of it, too, whether I like it or not. I always have been. The power of blood ties. Or the curse of them.

Excerpted from Snow in July © Copyright 2012 by Heather Barbieri. Reprinted with permission by Soho Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.