Bronze Pen (9781439156650) Read Online Free Page A

high-pitched voice. A remembered sound that was now competing with Sputnik’s squawks.
    But in spite of having to cope with a bad-tempered cockatiel, Audrey was still managing to concentrate pretty well on what had happened in the cave until her visual memories were interrupted by something even more distracting. Something cold and wet was pressing on the back of her right leg.
    Beowulf ’s arrivals were usually announced by pants and snuffles and clicking toenails, but this time, because of Sputnik’s uproar, Audrey had heard nothing before his nose made contact with her bare skin. Dropping to her knees, she wrapped her arms around the big shaggy head and shook it.
    â€œYou sneaky thing. You scared me,” she told him, glad for his familiar, comforting warmth. They were still wrestling on the floor with her arms wrapped around his neck and most of her left hand inside his big gentle mouth when the wheelchair’s whiny rattle announced her father’s arrival.
    â€œHey, Wulfy, knock it off,” John Abbott was saying. “A guy who’s supposed to avoid excitement shouldn’t have to watch a member of his family being eaten alive.”
    Audrey giggled, and Beowulf ’s growling gurgle seemed to mean he got the joke. He went on growling—doing his killer-dog bit—while Audrey pulled her hand out of his mouth, wiped it on his head, and went to hug her father.
    Hannah Abbott was almost smiling too as she said, “And now that you’re through being eaten alive, please don’t forget to wash your hands before you set the table.”
    â€œGood idea, kiddo,” John told Audrey. “You and I might not mind having Irish wolfhound slobber on our first course, but in today’s world we might be in the minority.”
    Beowulf ’s slobber was another subject the Abbotts often joked about, but this time it was a different part ofwhat her father said that stuck in Audrey’s mind. It was the part about “in today’s world” that came and went and came again as she set the table and even after she sat down to eat.
    â€œIn today’s world.” It was a phrase that Audrey’s father often used when he talked with her about all sorts of things. Important things that were going on all over the world and that were written about in newspapers and magazines. Particularly in the Greendale Times where John Abbott was—or had been—the editor.
    But at the moment “today’s world” meant the world as it existed in the spring of 1973, in the state of California, in the town of Greendale. A world that, on this particular day, was a place where a person’s father could have something called “angina pectoris,” which meant that he had to spend most of his time in bed. And where that same person’s little, skinny mother had to go back to work at a job she hated, besides doing most of the work in a big old house and in what had once been a prizewinning vegetable garden.
    Glancing at her mother, whose thin face made her famous eyes look even larger, Audrey suppressed a sigh and slid into a familiar guilt thing about not doing enough to help around the house. But feeling guilty did have an escape route she’d used many times before, by way of a favorite daydream. The dream about how, after her first published book became a famous bestseller, she wouldbuild a mansion for her folks to live in and hire servants to do all the work. And she would find the best doctors in the whole world, who would have discovered a wonderful cure for angina pectoris. And then, in that “world of today,” everything would be as good as, or even better than, it used to be.
    The famous-author daydream kept reappearing all through dinner and even came back in bits and pieces while Audrey was helping clear the table and clean up the kitchen. A dream that included being recognized and admired wherever she went and having to sign thousands of