Night Swimmers Read Online Free Page A

Night Swimmers
Book: Night Swimmers Read Online Free
Author: Betsy Byars
Pages:
Go to
you, Johnny?” He followed Johnny to the door. “You’ll let me see the airplanes and the rockets, won’t you?”
    “Roy!” Retta’s voice was suddenly sharp. “I thought you wanted to watch your dough men cook.”
    Roy paused in the doorway. His face was twisted with indecision. Retta was putting his dough men into the oven. He had intended to press his face against the oven window and watch the entire process, but now he abandoned the idea. This was more important. He ran after Johnny.
    “Roy!” Retta called.
    “Not now!”
    Roy followed Johnny to the front porch. His excited pleas floated back through the house to where Retta stood at the stove. “Please take me, Johnny. And if you do, you can have the dough man with the tail.”
    Retta slammed the oven door shut and leaned against the stove. After a moment she began to push at the noodles with her spoon. The water boiled up around the edge of the pot. Retta felt as if her mind were boiling too.
    Her change in mood had been seesaw quick, so abrupt she couldn’t understand it. A moment before she had been happy and satisfied with her day, contentedly letting Roy ruin the biscuits. Now, in some odd way, a balance had shifted and she was down.
    She slapped the spoon against the noodles. She felt her bad spirits deepen.
    This had nothing to do with the fact, she told herself, that Johnny had gone off and made a new friend. And it was not that Roy was out on the porch, begging and pleading, turning Johnny into some kind of supreme being just because he had a friend who made airplanes. It was that she wasn’t appreciated, she decided abruptly. No one in the whole family appreciated her.
    On the porch Roy was making one of his solemn promises. “I’ll do anything in the whole world if you’ll just take me with you.”
    Retta lifted a spoonful of noodles and let them fall back into the water, not noticing that they were done. It seemed like a long time since Roy had begged her for anything other than food.
    Shorty Anderson came into the kitchen doing a clog step. In his high-heeled boots he was two inches taller than his daughter; without them, an inch shorter.
    “Supper ready, honey?”
    “Almost,” she said in an unhappy voice.
    “Mmmmmm, looks good.” Shorty Anderson was always cheerful in the evening when he was shaved, showered, dressed, and ready to go to his job at the Downtown Hoedown. He opened the oven door and glanced at Roy’s dough men. “What are them things?”
    “Dough men.”
    “Hooey! How many dads in this whole world are lucky enough to be having dough men for supper?” He danced around her.
    She did not answer. Holding the pot with dish towels, she carried it to the sink. As she drained the water, she spilled a few drops of boiling water on her hand. Her throat swelled with tears.
    Shorty Anderson looked over her shoulder. “I could eat that whole thing,” he said.
    “You always say that—”
    “I mean it too.”
    “—and then you take about three bites and get up and leave.”
    “I have to, hon. Short people can’t eat like other people.”
    Retta dumped the noodles in a bowl and poured the tomato soup over them. She stared at the dish disgustedly.
    Shorty watched his daughter. He knew something was making her unhappy, just as he had known that morning that Johnny was unhappy. However, he never interfered. After all, he hadn’t interfered with Johnny, and now, only eight hours later, Johnny was on the porch, problems solved, happy as a bug. Besides, if he asked Retta what was wrong, she might tell him.
    “Dish me up a great big plateful,” he said, hugging her. “Even if I can’t eat it all, it makes me feel good to have a lot.”
    He sat at the table and began to spread paper napkins over his purple cowboy suit to protect it from spills. It took eight napkins. If he only used seven—he knew this from experience—he would spill something on that one uncovered spot.
    “Boys,” he called cheerfully, “soup’s
Go to

Readers choose

In Service Of Samurai

Kim Stanley Robinson

Alex Bledsoe

Dorothy Dunnett

Airicka Phoenix

Lady in the Briars