A Summer to Die Read Free Page B

just as beautiful as Molly once. Maybe it's because I have straight stringy hair and glasses that the whole thing makes me feel a little sad.

    So Dad has a grip on Coleridge, whatever that means, and Molly has a grip on Tierney McGoldrick. Me, I can't actually say I have a grip on anything, but good things have been happening to me here, too.
    I have a new friend.
    Just after New Year's, before school vacation ended, I went out for a walk. It was a walk I'd been meaning to take ever since we moved to the house, but things had been so busy, first with school and
fixing up the house, then Christmas, then settling down after Christmas—I don't know, the time just never seemed right for it. I guess I like to think that it was fate that sent me out for this particular walk on this particular day. Fate, and the fact that the sun finally came out after weeks of grayness and snow.

    I took my camera—the first time I'd taken my camera out since we came to the country—and went, all bundled up in my down jacket and wearing heavy boots, down the dirt road beyond our house. I walked toward the abandoned house that I could see across the fields from the upstairs window.
    The snow kept me from getting close to it. The house is a long distance back from the road and of course the driveway, really a narrow road in its own right, hadn't been plowed. But I stood, stamping my feet to keep warm, and looked at it for a long time. It reminds me of a very honest and kind blind man. That sounds silly. But it looks honest to me because it's so square and straight. It's a very old house—I know that because of the way it's built, with a center chimney and all the other things I've learned about from living in
our old
house—but its corners are all square like a man holding his shoulders straight. Nothing sags on it at all. It's a shabby house, though, with no paint, so that the old boards are all weathered to gray. I guess that's why it seems
kind, because it doesn't mind being poor and paintless; it even seems to be proud of it. Blind because it doesn't look back at me. The windows are empty and dark. Not scary. Just waiting, and thinking about something.

    I took a couple of photographs of the house from the road and walked on. I know the dirt road ends a mile beyond our house, but I had never gone to the end. The school bus turns around in our driveway, and no other cars ever come down this road except for one beat-up truck now and then.
    That same truck was parked at the end of the road, beside a tiny, weatherbeaten house that looked like a distant, poorer cousin of the one I'd passed. An elderly cousin, frail but very proud. There was smoke coming out of the chimney, and curtains in the two little windows on either side of the door. A dog in the yard, who thumped his tail against a snowbank when he saw me coming. And beside the truck—no, actually in the truck, or at least with his head inside it, under the hood, was a man.
    "Hi," I called. It would have been silly to turn around and start walking home without saying anything, even though I've promised my parents all my life that I would never talk to strange men.
    He lifted out his head, a gray head, with a bright red woolen cap on it, smiled—a nice smile—and
said, "Miss Chalmers. I'm glad you've come to visit."

    "Meg," I said automatically. I was puzzled. How did he know who I was? Our name isn't even on the mailbox.
    "For Margaret?" he asked, coming over and shaking my hand, or at least my mitten, leaving a smear of grease on it. "Forgive me. My hands are very dirty. My battery dies in this cold weather."
    "How did you know?"
    "How did I know Meg for Margaret? Because Margaret was my wife's name; therefore, one of my favorite names, of course. And I called her Meg at times, though no one else did."
    "They call me Nutmeg at school. I bet no one ever called your wife Nutmeg."
    He laughed. He had beautiful blue eyes, and his face moved into a new pattern of