The Moon by Night Read Online Free Page B

married, we sat out on Grandfather’s screened porch and felt that we couldn’t possibly move an inch, even to go to bed. And maybe that was why Mother didn’t blast me for disappearing in the morning before the wedding.
    I thought it would be nice if I did something to make up for it, so I said, “If anybody feels like lemonade or coffee or tea or anything before bed I’ll make it.”
    Mother leaned against Daddy and yawned. “Thanks, Vicky, but let’s all just go to bed. Come on, Wally.”
    Daddy yawned, too. “Come on yourself.”
    â€œFather can’t go to bed until we get off the porch,” Mother
said. “Come on, Wallace. I’m so tired I’m like a piece of cooked spaghetti. Give me a shove.”
    Daddy gave her a shove and she slid off the chaise longue and onto the floor, and then we were all laughing, and John pulled her up. We kissed Grandfather good-night, Mother and Daddy went to sleep in Grandfather’s big double bed, John and I went on up to the loft, and for some reason just being silly out there on the porch had made me feel better. Even if everything around us was different from now on, where we lived and school and everything, as long as Mother and Daddy were the same, as long as the family didn’t change, then there was still something to hang on to.

Three
    T he next day we saw Maggy off and then lazed around on the beach. In the afternoon Daddy and John got the car ready and practiced setting up the tent on the small patch of lawn in front of the stable, while Mother, Suzy, Rob, and I stood around criticizing. John got mad, and Rob thought he really meant it and went and flung his arms around him to comfort him, which slowed things down. But the tent was really quite easy to manage. It hangs from tubular aluminum poles that fit together, so that there isn’t any pole in the middle of the tent at all. The back of the tent lifts up and hitches over the end of the station wagon with the tail gate down. Mother, Daddy, Rob, and John were to sleep in the tent, and Suzy and I in the back of the station wagon, and we’d all be under one roof.
    The next morning we got up at five o’clock and put the last things in the car. It was a soft morning, with the light a kind of fuzzy, golden-pink, the sort of hazy early morning that always
brightens up and clears into a beautiful day. We hugged and kissed Grandfather good-bye and got into the car. Suzy and I wore Bermuda’s and knee socks and sweaters, and John and Rob and Daddy wore jeans. Daddy doesn’t like women in pants and Mother never wears them, but she looked comfortable and all ready for the trip in a plaid skirt and white blouse and red cardigan.
    In the very back of the station wagon Daddy had made a kind of bed out of the sleeping bags and air-mattresses, and so forth, with a couple of extra blankets spread over the top. Rob immediately curled up there with Elephant’s Child in his arms. Suzy crawled in by him, so she could lie on her stomach and look out the back window. John and I sat in the middle seat with the stove, the pots and pans, the big water thermos jug, and the ice box. There was room for us, but not an inch extra. Mother and Daddy sat in front with the food box and Mother’s big straw bag of odds and ends, and a wooden box of books. Mother said she knew she wasn’t apt to read them if she brought them, but she was even less apt to read them if she left them behind, so she was going to bring them.
    Daddy stood by the car checking everything off on his list: tools, hatchet, saw, fire extinguisher, laundry rope, big-batteried lantern, everything he’d decided that we couldn’t possibly do without. Then he, too, said good-bye to Grandfather, got in and started the car, and suddenly my stomach felt very empty, as though we hadn’t had any breakfast at all.
    For once we were glad when the ferry trip to the mainland was over, because now that