Summertime Dream Read Online Free

owned it, and then sold it to Dad when he and Mom married.” She patted Penny’s silky copper head through the fence.
    “Really? I’ve lost count of all the places I’ve lived. Cute dog. What kind is she?”
    “Some sort of spaniel mix, we think. Do you like dogs?”
    “Yeah. Never had one though.”
    She opened the gate and Penny bounded to her first for loves and then over to investigate Christopher, jumping against his legs.
    “Sit,” Christopher ordered, firmly, but kindly.
    Penny dropped to her haunches, vibrating with doggy joy.
    Christopher grinned, and crouched down to scratch her soft ears. “That’s a good girl. Friendly, aren’t you?”
    Oh, yes, she really liked his smile. “So, how many places have you lived?”
    “Well, if I thought about it...Dad was in the Army, like Granddad, and we moved a lot when I was growing up. Let me think.” He pondered, stroking his hand over Penny. “Twenty different places, give or take, and four countries since I was born.”
    “Wow. That must have been wild, moving around and going to different schools.”
    “It had its pluses and minuses. Some schools were good, and I didn’t want to leave. Others, well, leaving was a good thing.”
    “A good way to make lots of new friends.”
    He shrugged and straightened. “How far is the house from here?”
    “Just a few blocks over on Peach Street. Okay, time to go home, Penny.”
    Penny bounced to her paws and raced to the porch, where she spun around with a sharp bark, as if to say, “I win! I beat you home!”
    “Good girl.” Margie shut the gate and they resumed their stroll.
    Two blocks further, she turned right on Peach Street and another two blocks along led to the huge old mansion presiding over the neighborhood in all its boarded-up, moldering glory.
    A tower with round windows topped the fancy curved slate roof of the three-story home and made the Falk house the tallest building in Falk’s Bend. She’d always wanted to climb the tower and see the view out those windows over the trees. Her favorite part, a broad porch with elegant paired columns, wrapped around the whole house. The disrepair the once-beautiful house had fallen into was heartbreaking.
    “Aw, hell.” Christopher’s face was grim. “I hoped everyone was kidding.”
    “Sorry about that. Honestly, most of the falling down started long before Mrs. Falk passed. The church ladies fussed about Mrs. Falk living all alone at her age, but she did her shopping and attended church and seemed like she’d never die. It was a shock when she finally passed. She lived in that house until the day she died at ninety-nine, did you know? The Sorensons and neighborhood did their best to look after the property. She was eccentric—well, to be frank, she was a crabby old lady, and she wouldn’t let people help her. She terrified me when I was little. She loved her roses, though.”
    Her fear hadn’t kept her from walking home the long way from school, just to see the roses in bloom. Then came the day Mrs. Falk caught her stealing a rosebud that hung over the white picket fence and ordered her up to the porch, smacking her cane with fierce taps against the top step. When Margie stammered out how she stopped by to admire the roses, Mrs. Falk had then taken her around the yard and taught Margie the names of every single rosebush, mellow and sweet, as if she was someone else than the screechy witch of an old lady. She’d had green eyes, too, all faded with cataracts.
    He snapped a picture with his phone. “Okay, lead on.”
    Margie opened the peeling gate, wincing at the screeching hinges.
    The men may have kept the front and side yards mowed, but dandelions and crabgrass had conquered the lawn and the abandoned garden beds had gone downright wild. Time and neglect had reduced Mrs. Falk’s prized roses to sucker-choked, unkempt tangles of sprawling canes with only a few scattered blooms hinting at their former beauty. Vines of trumpet creeper, bright with