Family Reunion Read Online Free

house just like DeWitt's, with brown shingles and big porches. The porch ceiling was painted light blue, like morning sky, and the floor was painted gray, and everything was peeling. Once on a rainy day we roller-skated for hours, wearing dents in the porch floor. Grandma just smiled and made more lemonade.
    I always think of Barrington like that. It's always summer, and we're always drinking lemonade, and Grandma is always giving me a hug.
    But Grandpa died, and Grandma moved to Arizona to escape the harsh winters. Somebody bought their house and put yellow siding over the shingles and took off one porch and added skylights. I saw it in a photograph, but I don't want to see it in real life, because I'm afraid of losing the memory of the brown house where Grandpa lived and Grandma hugged and Mommy and Daddy were still married.
    We sat quietly while Daddy had his iced tea and Angusand I had ripe red cherries from the bowl Annette had put on the table among the pastel Queen Anne's lace. Angus and I collected the cherry pits in a cup he had made by sawing off the bottom of a plastic soda bottle. He was going to plant the pits in the gutter to see if they would root in the rotting leaves Daddy had not yet cleaned out. This was a project that would involve the danger of falling and would have to be done when Daddy was in New York and Annette was shopping.
    I imagined the August reunion.
    The Perfects would be all lined up, clean and calm and camera-ready. Their clothes would match and might even be ironed. Everybody would have had a haircut the day before.
    We would be a shambles. Angus would wave his leg, and Annette would be dull. Daddy would look like an illustration from “The Three Bears,” and I would be herding my family into place, like a little sheepdog.
    “Did you sign up for the library summer reading program?” asked our father. He probably figured any children's activity at a Vermont library had to be safe.
    “Yes!” cried Angus, with whom nothing is safe. “They're doing unusual pets. Mine will win all the prizes.”
    It is always Angus's intention to win all the prizes. He gets one now and then, usually from a science teacher who is just praying he will go away.
    The library here has only two rooms: children's andgrown-ups', divided by the circulation desk. The children's room is old and soft, with dark wood walls and old wood tables. I love it there. But I was not in the summer reading program. The librarian said I was too old. He waved me away from the safe little shelf of choices for summer readers and shooed me into adult books. I don't like real adult books. My reading tastes had frozen at the third-grade level, and I read exclusively those books where everybody lives happily ever after and not much goes wrong in the middle either.
    “What pets?” said Annette, puzzled.
    “Wait here,” Angus ordered her, and he raced down to the basement and came up a few minutes later with a box he had constructed by soldering together cookie sheets and an old metal-framed window. It was rickety, with a sideways list. He had attempted to correct this with duct tape and a piece of kindling. “Look,” he whispered.
    Through the glass wall of his box, you could see two little dark things racing around.
    “Cockroaches!” screamed Annette.
    Angus beamed at her. “Good for you,” he complimented her. “They're very smart, you know. When the world ends, they won't. They've been here since dinosaurs. The librarian said that was very clever of me, bringing my own cockroaches from home.” Angus stared admiringly into his shaky box.
    Annette yelled that we didn't have any cockroaches ineither of our homes. She wanted to know how she could even enter the library now to borrow a simple mystery novel when the librarian thought our house was full of cockroaches and the other patrons thought we routinely sold shares in bombs.
    Angus waved away her distress. He said the librarian was a great guy who really believed Angus