My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) Read Online Free Page A

granddaughter got held for ransom. So Trusty…”
    Will insisted on calling the scrapyard-dog-with-no-name Trusty because the dog was a husky—just like, Will said, Trusty from
Sergeant Striker and the Alaskan Wild
. Will shook the box of Marvel Puffs. Milk dripped from the bottom.
    “I wish you could watch the show with me, but Dad doesn’t like dogs,” Will was saying, as if this was the biggest problem in our house. “But guess what? As of this morning, I’m just three away from ten box tops! I’m gonna send in for my deed to my own land in Alaska, and then we’ll go see it—”
    “Will!” I went over to him, gently put my hand on hisarm. Dayton was as far as either of us had ever been out of Groverton. “Just leave the cereal for the dog—”
    He jerked his arm from my grasp and went on, louder: “Did you know that Alaska has a flower even though it isn’t a state? The forget-me-not. Ever since 1917! Did you know…”
    He still looked too pale, and his babbling to the nonexistent dog frightened me. I grabbed him and turned him toward me. “Stop it! I think we should get back home, call Dr. Emory after all, have him check you—”
    Will glared at me, the familiar accusation in his blue eyes:
You take everything too seriously!
“I’m fine now.”
    “Will, I’m sure the dog will eat the cereal if we just leave the box. Let’s get back home, call Dr. Emory—”
    He shrugged free. “No. I’m feeding Trusty. Then I’m going to school.”
    “What? You’d take any excuse to stay home from school.”
    “I don’t like Dr. Emory. I’m—I’m just having, like Grandma says, growing pains.”
    Ah…I finally got it. If Will was home sick, and I wasn’t home after school because of my “special project,” Daddy would call Grandma, who called the television “one of Porter’s indulgences for Rita,” along with the house and refrigerator and freezer and furniture and car and everything else Daddy had bought for Mama in 1946, before she got sick, before she left, before he lost himself and his job.
    I studied Will.
    “Come on, then,” I said. “We still have time to get to school early so I can, uh, go to the school library.”
    “You go on. I’m not going until Trusty comes out.”
    “Maybe the old lady across the street can tell us what happened to Trusty.”
    “Her name is MayJune,” Will said. “She lives in Tangy Town.” Tangy Town was a small huddle of houses and businesses across the river, downstream and downwind of the mill—to the people of Groverton, even less desirable an address than Stackville. Nobody lived there unless they were desperately poor or black (although back in 1953, everyone used the term
Negro
). Tangy Town kids went to our school, tainted with the mill’s sour stench, usually dropping out by seventh or eighth grade.
    It was also where Mama had grown up. But we never visited that neighborhood, or knew anything about Mama’s life there. All we knew was that, like Daddy, she was an only child, that her parents were dead by the time she’d married, that Grandma said she was luckier than a four-leaf clover to have met and married Daddy. My guess was she’d met him at the mill.
    “Sometimes MayJune babysits her grandkids here,” Will said.
    Will moved toward the gap in the chain-link fence, and I realized that he was going to wiggle through into the scrapyard to search for Trusty. I thought,
What if Trusty is in there after all and runs out and attacks Will? What if Mr. Stedman comes out with a shotgun?
I grabbed Will. He tried to twist from me, but I tightened my arms around his chest. “Will, it’s got to be a quarter to eight by now. If you want to go to school—”
    “Let me go! I have to find Trusty!” he shouted. And then, suddenly, he stopped screaming and writhing and went so limp that I thought he’d passed out again, but then I saw the dog limping out of the camper door, this Trustysurely nothing like the one that fans of
Sergeant Striker and