On the Road to Mr. Mineo's Read Free Page A

reasons:
    1. Mildred Perry had a big mangy dog that once ate his sister’s purse.
    2. Mildred Perry had a teenage son who smoked cigarettes and squealed the tires of his pickup truck in the middle of the night.
    3. He didn’t want to.
    Stella looked a little surprised.
    Gerald felt a little surprised. He never said no to Stella.
    She plopped down on one of the lawn chairs and crossed her arms, glaring at him.
    The sun was beginning to sink behind the trees. Lightning bugs flickered down in the yard below. Gerald’s gray-faced dog whined at the back door.
    And high above the rooftops of Meadville, a one-legged pigeon headed toward the outskirts of town.

 
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    Little Brown Dog
    On the far end of Main Street, where the shops ended and the cornfields and orchards began, was a farm with a small brick house and a big wooden barn. A little brown dog had been living in the big wooden barn.
    Nobody fed the little brown dog.
    Nobody played with the little brown dog.
    Nobody loved the little brown dog.
    Amos and Ethel Roper lived in the brick house and had no idea the little brown dog was living in the barn.
    Amos and Ethel had no children to take care of. Theirs were all grown up and had flown the coop, as Amos often said.
    â€œYou spend half your life wiping their noses and buying them stuff they don’t need and driving them to the emergency room for stitches and then they fly the coop,” he complained.
    Amos and Ethel had no crops to take care of. The big fancy cannery down in Columbia had bought the Ropers’ fields and sent big fancy machines to harvest the beans and the corn.
    So Amos and Ethel had a lot of time to argue.
    They argued about whether to fix that rotten railing on the back porch or just let the dang thing fall off.
    They argued about whether to cut down the sweet gum tree that was shading their small tomato garden under the kitchen window or to move the tomatoes out by the clothesline.
    And they argued about what kind of critter had been hanging around the place at night.
    Something had been getting into the garbage by the back door.
    Something had been scratching at the soft, rotting wood of the barn.
    And something had been making holes in the dry red dirt under the old pig trough.
    Amos was convinced it was a raccoon.
    Ethel was convinced it was a skunk.
    They argued and argued.
    But when they were awakened in the middle of the night by the sharp, frantic barking of a dog out in the barn, they knew they had both been wrong.
    â€œA dog!” Ethel said, padding to the window in her bare feet and her thin flowered nightgown.
    â€œI told you it wasn’t a skunk,” Amos said, pulling the sheet over his head.
    The dog barked and barked and barked some more.
    â€œWhat are we going to do?” Ethel said.
    Zzzzzzz .
    Amos’s snores swirled around the room and irritated Ethel. She took a flashlight out of the drawer of the nightstand and went to the back door.
    The dog was still barking. She shined the flashlight across the yard. Everything seemed so still and spooky.
    The clothesline.
    The wheelbarrow.
    The broken lawn mower.
    The hose snaking from the faucet over to the tomato patch.
    Ethel crept down the back steps and out into the yard. The tall grass was cool and damp beneath her bare feet. When she got closer to the barn and shined the flashlight in big sweeping arcs, the dog stopped barking.
    Ethel shivered in the breezy night air. She should have grabbed her sweater from the coat rack by the back door. She tiptoed over the smooth, packed dirt of the path that led to the barn.
    The dog barked again. One uncertain yip of a bark.
    Ethel shined the flashlight into the half-open door of the barn.
    There was a very faint rustle in the pile of old hay in the corner.
    There was a very faint fluttering of wings up in the rafters.
    There was a very faint pitter-patter of Ethel’s heart under her thin flowered nightgown.
    She shined the flashlight into the corner