Night Swimmers Read Online Free Page B

on!”
    Retta slammed the bowl on the table. The noodles trembled. “It’s not soup!” Retta said. The tears moved up from her throat to her eyes. “It’s spaghetti!”
    Shorty looked up in surprise from the safety of his paper napkins. “I know that, darling.” He began to serve himself, taking more than he wanted. “Hmm-mmmmm,” he said as the steam reached his face. He tucked his napkins more securely around him and began to eat.
    “And what’s more, I need seventeen dollars!” Retta said, leaning over the table toward her father.
    “Well, hon, you can have it. I get paid tomorrow.”
    At that Retta burst into tears, ran from the kitchen into her room, and slammed the door. The door didn’t catch and opened again, banging against the wall.
    Through the open door she heard Shorty Anderson say, “Clean your plates now, boys. Retta’s touchy tonight.”
    This time when she slammed the door, it stayed shut.

“S OMEBODY’S SPYING ON US ,” Johnny said in a low voice. He reached across the water for Retta’s arm.
    It was the next night. The Anderson kids were in the Roberts’s swimming pool. They were floating in the black inner tubes Retta had gotten, and they were holding on to each other so that they made a three-leaf clover in the center of the pool.
    “Isn’t this fun?” Retta had been saying as they turned in formation. “Don’t you like your inner tubes?” She was trying to be especially bright and cheerful tonight to hide the fact that she was miserable. Also she wanted the evening to be a special success because Johnny hadn’t wanted to come. “Aren’t you having a good time, Johnny?”
    “It’s all right,” Johnny had answered. He was enjoying himself, but he was not going to let Retta know that. For the first time in his life he felt superior to his sister. He had consented to come—that was the way he thought of it.
    He certainly was not going to jump up and down like Roy, screaming, “Inner tubes! Inner tubes!” After all, inner tubes were just old tires.
    “Do you like your inner tube?” Retta had asked.
    “I said it’s all right.”
    Johnny could hardly believe that just getting a friend—even a fascinating friend who made rockets and airplanes—could make such a difference in his life.
    Johnny had been seven years old when his mother died, and he had mourned her more than anyone. He would go into her closet and sit for hours hunched among her high-heeled boots, his face buried in the folds of her western outfits. He would dry his tears on her skirts before he crawled out.
    After those first terrible weeks he had started clinging to the only person available—Retta. He had clung as tightly as a person in a storm, but now, some how, he felt the storm was finally over. He felt he was stepping out into a world that actually welcomed him. It was while he was enjoying his inner tube and this new security that he had noticed a figure by the garage. With his words, “Somebody’s spying on us,” the good feeling left him. He was, once again, a skinny kid in a patched inner tube, swimming illegally in the colonel’s pool.
    “Where?” Retta asked. She glanced up immediately at the darkened windows of the house. “I don’t see anybody.”
    “Not there. There!” He pointed with one dripping arm to the garage.
    “I still don’t see anybody,” Retta said.
    There was a light that burned over the garage doors, casting a pale light on the driveway and bushes. Moths, drawn by the light, flitted around the bulb.
    “Well, somebody was there a minute ago,” Johnny said. “I saw them.”
    “Let’s go home,” Roy wailed. Being spied on, something he had never even thought about before, suddenly became the scariest thing there was.
    “Oh, Johnny’s just seeing things,” Retta said. “Let’s go around in our inner tubes again, want to? And this time—” She broke off because she, too, saw the figure moving behind the shrubbery. She paused in the water. Her long legs,