Delta Girls Read Online Free Page B

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batatas?”
Mr. Vieira bent down to say to them. “These are our lawn mowers,” he told me. Quinn woke up and got out of the car as Mr. Vieira was hoisting the sheep into the back of his truck to take them back to the orchard; she looked startled by the animals’ thrashing and bleating.
    I wrapped my arm around Quinn and pointed at the houseboat in the water below. “What do you think?” She nodded, her hair crackling with static electricity against my shirt.
    We followed Mr. Vieira down the rickety metal steps to the small pier.
    “I have to turn on the generator,” he said. “And a guy’ll come around to pump the septic in a day or two.”
    The houseboat was a blocky metal thing, like an old trailer plunked on top of a deck, a large A/C unit parked on top of it. The whole thing bobbed a bit when we stepped inside, and I wondered if I had the stomach to live right on the water.
    The interior had a tweedy, earth-tone, Brady Bunch vibe. An olive green cooktop in the small kitchen. A brown dorm-size fridge under the counter. A stacked washer/dryer in the shade of marigolds. The booth in the dinette set that opened into a bed combined all those colors into a nubby weave. The plastic shower liner was the same color as the stove, the toilet the same color as the laundry machines.
    Mr. Vieira checked the sinks to make sure they worked. “You probably don’t want to drink the water,” he said. “Comes straight from the slough.”
    The bedspread on the double bed in the back offered the only nod to the last couple of decades—a really nice bedspread, deep burgundy with eggplant piping. It smelled a little musty, but looked inviting; I couldn’t wait to fall onto it. I wondered if the Vieiras had a similar bedspread in their house. It was hard to imagine—they would probably sleep under something more utilitarian: a navy woolen blanket, maybe a quilt one of theirgrandmothers had patched together. I doubted they gave themselves the luxury of high thread counts, luxe fabrics. They probably got the bedspread as a gift and couldn’t bear its pretension, so they shuttled it out to the houseboat to gather dust. “It’s a queen’s bedspread,” Quinn said. It was the fanciest bed she had ever seen.
    I had memories of feather beds in Paris, mints on pillows, maids coming in the evening to turn down sheets, but I didn’t share those with her. She didn’t need to know.
    “This going to work for you?” Mr. Vieira said. The generator was loud; I hoped we’d get used to its whir.
    “We really get to live here?” Quinn looked ecstatic. It certainly beat sleeping on a cot in a horse stall or curled inside the car. Other than the occasional motel, we hadn’t had a place with a real bed in ages. Not a place we could call our own.
    “For now,” I told her, and watched her face fall when she remembered that this, like every other place we’d stayed, was just a way station. We were just stopping through.

T HE ELECTRIC GUITAR MADE KAREN’S HEAD FEEL LIKE IT was about to burst. Nathan liked to blast his CD collection over the rink’s sound system when they had the place to themselves at 4 a.m. She complained to her mom, but Deena said that it would get their energy going while they warmed up. More often than not, Nathan hadn’t slept all night, and he needed Jane’s Addiction or Jimi Hendrix to keep him awake. Karen knew he’d sleep in the afternoon after their three hours of skating, their hour of joint ballet lessons, their hour of Pilates mixed with weight training and off-ice lift practice, his wrangling with Deena over choreography while Karen spent time with her tutor. Sometimes when Karen was going to bed at 9 p.m., she pictured Nathan just getting up for the night. She wondered what it would be like to wake up and do whatever you wanted rather than getting out of bed to eat your twenty grams of protein and hit the ice.
    It was hard to keep her focus with the male voices screaming through the speakers.