Bone Dance Read Free Page A

together out of the silk of her very breath.
    She turned back and, reaching out, took Deena’s hand. She urged her shyly toward the house. “Come inside,” she said. “I’ll make us some tea.”
    His mom changed after that. She seemed a different person. She was more demanding, less willing to stick around the farm and just be with Lonny and Pop. But she wasn’t crying anymore, and that was a big plus.
    â€œDeena’s coming over,” she’d say. “We’re all going into town now. She’s wallpapering her restaurant today. Tom, where’s that paste you’ve been holding on to? We don’t need it anymore.”
    And at the grand opening of Deena’s Deli, Deena made a big speech about finding friends in places where you’d hardly expect they’d be.
    That night, the night of the opening, Lonny overheard Pop say softly to his mom, “Deena and I had a little something going. That was a long time ago. Before you came along and stole my heart.”
    His mom, in the shocking quiet of their kitchen, said, “I knew that.”
    â€œYou knew? She told you?”
    â€œShe didn’t have to. It took courage for her to come and be my friend.”
    And so, life went on like that for quite a while. A little sister never got to be part of their family. The plans that had been made around her arrival—the freshly painted wicker bassinet that had held generations of LaFrenière babies, the little blue room off Mom and Pop’s bedroom, the talk of a family of four—were replaced by Deena, what she was doing, what she thought about this and that. She was included in family horseback rides in the summer and skating at the rink in town in the winter. And as Lonny grew and took the rural bus to school and started making friends of his own, he didn’t think too much more about that heightened time, about the strange and sad and brave world of grown-ups.
    A week after Earl McKay moved onto the old LaFrenière land, Lonny woke up in his room, his chest heaving with tears. His sobs were so awful and uncontrollable, he was afraid he would wake up Pop.
    He had been dreaming of his mother. She had appeared to him as a vision in a shiny white dress decorated with beads the color of the sunrise and long, soft feathery fringe. She had never worn such a dress when she was alive. She came and sat on his bed, crossed her legs, thoughtfully jigged one foot up and down. “Lonny, my babe,” she said at last in a sad and disappointed voice, “how come you did that? It’s a sacred place.”
    He wanted her to tell him that she loved him, to turn and to cling to her, to keep her close inside his heart. But she just put her hands on her knees and shook her head. “You were supposed to take care of it, not dig it up. Why couldn’t you leave those poor souls in peace?” And then she got up and left through his bedroom door.
    Robert Lang was the only person who shared his guilty secret. And it had all started so innocently. A badger kicked something out of its den on Medicine Bluff.
    It was the year he turned eleven. He and Robert, a couple of raunchy kids, had gone up there, their packs full of sandwiches and cookies and soft drinks and some contraband magazines belonging to Robert’s older brother, Danny. It was a sizzling hot July afternoon,and Medicine Bluff was their favorite place to be.
    Near the top of the slope they saw something bony lying just outside the opening of the badger’s den. Lonny reached down and rolled it over. Faceup. It was a small human skull. Its toothless jaws, its round vacant eyes, stared up at him. This was not the skull of a great chief or medicine man. It was not much bigger than his hand. So much for Pop’s theory. He turned to say something to Robert, and he was gone, already at the bottom of the hill and still running. But twenty minutes later, back at home, Robert took the tiny skull out of