An Acceptable Time Read Online Free Page A

most was that although the room was pretty it wasn’t pretty-pretty. Charles, she thought, would have liked it.
    She had turned to her grandmother. “Oh, it’s lovely! When did you do all this?”
    “Last summer.”
    Last summer her grandparents had had no idea that Polly would be coming to live with them. Nevertheless, she felt that the room was uniquely hers. “I love it! Oh, Grand, I love it!”
     
    She had called her parents, described the room. Her grandparents had left her to talk in privacy, and she said, “I love Grand and Granddad. You should see Granddad out on his red tractor. He’s not intimidating at all.”
    There was laughter at that. “Did you expect him to be?”
    “Well—I mean, he knows so much about astrophysics and space travel, and he gets consulted by presidents and important people. But he’s easy to talk to—well, he’s my grandfather and I think he’s terrific.”
    “I gather it’s mutual.”
    “And Grand isn’t intimidating, either.”
    Her parents (she could visualize them, her mother lying on her stomach across the bed, her father perched on a stool in the lab, surrounded by tanks of starfish and octopus) both laughed.
    Polly was slightly defensive. “We do call her Grand and that sounds pretty imposing.”
    “That’s only because you couldn’t say Grandmother when you started to talk.”
    “Well, and she did win a Nobel Prize.”
    Her father said, reasonably, “She’s pretty terrific, Polly. But she’d much rather have you love her than be impressed at her accomplishments.”
    Polly nodded at the telephone. “I do love her. But remember, I’ve never really had a chance to know Grand and Granddad. We lived in Portugal for so long, and Benne Seed Island might have been just as far away. A few visits now and then hasn’t been enough. I’ve been in awe of them.”
    “They’re good people,” her father said. “Talented, maybe a touch of genius. But human. They were good to me, incredibly good, when I was young.”
    “It’s time you got to know them,” her mother added. “Be happy, Polly.”

    She was. Happy as a small child. Not that she wanted to regress, to lose any of the things she had learned from experience, but with her grandparents she could relax, completely free to be herself.
    She grabbed her bathing suit from the bathroom and went along to her room. Downstairs she could hear people moving about, and then someone put on music, Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, and the charming music floated up to her.
    She left her jeans and sweatshirt in a small heap on the floor, slipped into her bathing suit and a terry-cloth robe, and went downstairs and out to the pool. She hung her robe on the towel tree, waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim light, then slid into the water and began swimming laps. She swam tidily, displacing little water, back and forth, back and forth. She flipped onto her back, looking up at the skylights, and welcoming first one star, then another. Turned from her back to her side, swimming dreamily. A faint sound made her slow down, a small scratching. She floated, listening. It came from one of the windows which lined the north wall from the floor up to the slant of the roof.
    She could not see anything. The scratching turned into a gentle tapping. She pulled herself up onto the side of the pool, went to the window. There was a drop of about five feet from the window to the ground. In the last light, she could just see a girl standing on tiptoe looking up at her, a girl about her own age, with black hair braided into a long rope which was flung over her shoulder. At her neck was a band of silver with a stone, like a teardrop, in the center.
    “Hi,” Polly called through the dark glass.
    The girl smiled and reached up to knock again. Polly slid the window open. “May I come in?” the girl asked.
    Polly tugged at the screen till it, too, opened.
    The girl sprang up and caught the sill, pulling herself into the room, followed by a gust