Also Known As Harper Read Online Free Page B

my hand, softly, but her eyes never left Flannery.
    But then the nurse had given Mama a shot, and Icouldn’t get myself to breathe in enough air. Then I’d started to cry, and Daddy had had to pull me away from Mama’s bed.
    I remembered the words that kept going through my head and inching their way out of my mouth.
What if she doesn’t wake up? What if she stays asleep forever, like Flannery?
    Daddy had picked me up and held me close for what seemed like forever. And he’d helped to cool down the mad I’d suddenly felt at Hemingway. Because all Hem did was sit at the nurses’ station, building a Lego garage for his Hot Wheels. Just like Flannery had never happened at all.
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    I LOOKED DOWN the porch steps at Hem. He was busy finding all his plastic dinosaurs and lining them up on the edge of the coffee table. “We having a yard sale, Mama?” He picked up his biggest dinosaur and squinted at the underbelly of it. “How much you think I could get for this one?”
    I gave him my hush-up look and set to work searching out Mama’s special book. As soon as I pulled it out of the laundry hamper, she seemed to perk right up.
    I turned to her favorite chapter, which wasn’t too hard. The book was creased open so good at that particular spot that when you set the book down, it automatically flopped open to that page.
    It was the part where Scout finally gets to see their hermit neighbor, Boo Radley. It’s where she realizes what her daddy’s been trying to tell her all along. That people aren’t always what they seem from the outside. You got to give them a chance and figure them out for your own self.
    Hem piled the cushions back on the couch and we all sat down together in our living room in the yard.
    But Mama wasn’t reading like she usually did, leaned back with her eyes closed. She bent over the book in her lap, her finger tracking under the words, slowly, so Hem and me could let the story sink into our bones.
    Hemingway hummed quietly to himself and held his dinosaurs so they made long shadows on the grass.
    I nudged Mama softly with my shoulder. “That word is ‘embarrassment,’ Mama. Scout was embarrassed, not excited.”
    She nodded and hugged my arm. “I must’ve just looked wrong.” The tops of her cheeks got all pinkand blotchy, and she handed the book to me. “You read, Harper,” she said. “I can’t think right.”
    I took the book from her. Lately, she’d been having me read more. I’d noticed she read better with the lights out when we were going to bed at night. She tended to mix up the words here and there when she did it the other way.
    I smoothed my hand over the page and took up where she left off. But after a couple of pages, I could tell Mama wasn’t paying much attention. Her eyes kept traveling over the piles on our lawn.
    Finally, she tapped her pointer finger on the cover of the book and pushed herself up off the couch. “We need to be good thinkers and problem solvers like Mr. Atticus Finch, and get this mess cleaned up before it gets dark on us. We’ll find what we need for tonight and put it in the car.”
    Mr. Atticus Finch pretty much always knew what was what.
    Mama looked at the light brown sedan parked up next to the house, and I thought how all my clothes would smell like old lady. We had gotten that car all the way from Mississippi when my grandma died.
That old lady never gave me the time of day,
Mama had told Daddy when we were driving him to the busstation.
She never even laid eyes on my children, and now we’re paying more than the cost of that decrepit car for you to go on out and get it.
    Hem and I had poked around in Daddy’s mama’s car for a couple of days when Daddy got back, hoping we could sniff out some gold or diamonds or something she might have hidden in there, but all we smelled was stale old lady. Kind of a mixture of fried onions