Romeo Blue Read Online Free Page B

talk to you.”
    “Oh well, that’s peachy keen,” said Derek, dropping his pencil and turning round.
    Then I got rather bold in a British sort of way and I said quite sadly, “Derek, is Brie the cat’s pajamas as well?”
    “Oh, Brie, she’s the dog’s necktie!” Derek said and he smiled that smile that sent me spinning out over the ocean like a piping plover or a bufflehead or a lost and diving common goldeneye.

I cried that night alone in my widow’s peak room at the top of the house, with the widow’s walk outside it and the terrible gray ocean beyond and all round me. That little walk was built so that Captain A. E. Bathburn’s wife could look out and wait for her husband’s ship to come over the horizon. And that fall it didn’t. And it didn’t and it didn’t and it didn’t and winter came and the snow roared at these windows and she waited and she waited.
    I cried for three reasons that night. The first was for un–Uncle Gideon, my newfound father whom I had grown to love during these many months in America. The second tears were for Derek, because his father had returned, changing everything here forever. And the third tears were for myself, because Derek was going to the dance with Cousin Brie. Those tears were the most raw. I wasn’t at all a pair of cat’s pajamas anymore. I was a pair of plain gray flannels with ugly buttons down the front.
    That night, the wind and rain came in under the window ledges into my room, and when I woke up in the morning, my pillow was damp. When Gideon found out, he said, “Fliss, we’ll have to get you out of that roomfor winter. The windows have gotten worse and you’re just too exposed to the sky and the sea up there.” Well, I had always liked Miami’s large, airy room anyway.
    And so it was that I packed my yellow suitcase and Uncle Gideon shut up the tower room. “Leaving Wink up here, are you? Too old for Wink now, I imagine,” he said to me as he turned the key to lock the door. “Well, you’ll outgrow us all, I suppose, soon enough. Yes, soon enough.”
    “Oh,” I said. “I don’t need an old bear anymore. I’ll be sending him off to England soon.”
    “It’s a shame you and Derek are in such a hurry to grow up and throw away old friends,” said Gideon. “Well, bears like the cold and I suppose he’ll be hibernating anyway.” He looked at me then with a good-bye kind of look in his eyes that reminded me a tiny bit of Wink for just a moment and then I did feel a little tug in my heart.
    That night I moved downstairs to Auntie Miami’s room, which was quite grand. She had a lovely canopy bed that they said had once belonged to Captain A. E. Bathburn and his wife, Ada. And there were great, long windows to the sea and soft hooked rugs on the floor, covered in wild roses and trumpet lilies. (The Gram had hooked them all.) I had a little bed at the far end of the room. It had a bedspread with a cat on it but the cat was not wearing a pair of fancy pajamas.
    It was nice because Auntie and I could lie in the darkness and talk. That very first night we did. UncleGideon popped in with a cup of Ovaltine for me. He wanted to say good night. He sat on the edge of my bed with the hot chocolaty drink steaming up between us, looking at me as if I were a new kind of seashell he’d just found on the shore. “I was visiting Derek a moment ago, and I think he’s going to listen to us, so there’s no need to worry. And I won’t be leaving for several months. That’s ages away.” Then he frowned in the almost darkness and said, “It’s for Winnie, you know, and Danny.” And he didn’t say anything else and I understood what he meant and in my heart I felt proud and sad and nervous.
    Later I heard his Victrola in his room playing jazzy songs again. One of them was “I Think of You.” And I knew he was thinking of Winnie, dreaming of her, reaching out to her as she floated near him, with her beautiful, dark eyes, reaching out to her as she