Read Online Anastasia at This Address by Lois Lowry - Free Book Online

the wedding unless he could wear blue jeans. Mrs. Krupnik said absolutely not; he would wear his white sailor suit. Sometimes before she had talked him into the sailor suit by pointing out that it made him look like Popeye.
    Finally Sam said grouchily that he would wear the white sailor suit if he could have a ballpoint pen tattoo of an anchor on his arm.
    Mrs. Krupnik said yes, and told Sam that she would even do a three-color tattoo for him. So Sam agreed, and Mrs. Krupnik whispered to Anastasia and her father that fortunately Sam had forgotten that the sailor suit had long sleeves.
    "But I won't take a bath before the wedding," Sam added. "Not unless Anastasia sells me the sloop."
    "Anastasia?" Mrs. Krupnik gave her a questioning look.
    "Nope."
    "I'll give you
fifty
pennies!" Sam wailed.
    "No sloop. Sorry," Anastasia told him. "I'll consider renting it to you for a day, but that's the best I can do."
    On Saturday Daphne's mother, Caroline Bellingham, announced, as Daphne had predicted, that she would not attend the wedding because
that man
would be there.
That man
was John Bellingham, her ex-husband, Daphne's father.
    Mrs. Halberg talked to Mrs. Bellingham very tactfully and explained that Reverend Bellingham would be there only in his official capacity, not as an invited guest.
    Finally Mrs. Bellingham agreed to go, but only if
that woman
were not invited.
    "Who's
that woman?
" Anastasia asked Daphne with interest. The four girls were at Sonya's house on Saturday afternoon, talking about hair styles for the wedding.
    "You know, the woman my dad's dating. Her name's Frances Bidwell. She's in the church choir."
    "So my mom assured her that Frances Bidwell wasn't on the list of invited guests," Meredith explained.
    "But," she added guiltily, "what she
didn't
tell her is that Frances Bidwell is going to be in the church balcony, singing a solo right in the middle of the wedding. Don't you dare tell her, Daphne."
    Daphne giggled. "I won't. But she'll probably freak when Frances Bidwell stands up."
    Word had gotten out that Steve, Eddie, Norman, and Kirby were planning to bring skateboards to the wedding reception. So there had been a conference with Steve, Eddie, Norman, and Kirby's parents; now the skateboards were forbidden.
    "That's
so
immature," Sonya had said, shaking her head. "I don't know how I ever liked Norman Berkowitz."
    More presents were arriving daily at the Halberg house, and Mr. Halberg said he was spending every waking minute of every day signing UPS delivery slips for woks, then returning woks to the store they had come from. He was beginning to think that they were getting the
same
wok again and again, as new people bought it every day. Finally they decided to keep all the woks until after the wedding, returning them after Kirsten and Steve had left for their honeymoon.
    "Or, of course, we could open a Chinese restaurant," Meredith pointed out.
    Sam loved the word "wok." He used it whenever he could. In the evenings Anastasia could hear him in the bathtub, singing, "Wok, wok, wok your boat, gently down the stream..."
    And he made up wok jokes. Some of them were pretty funny, actually.
    "Why did the Chinese guy put a leash on his dog?" Sam asked one afternoon.
    "I don't know. Why?"
    "So he could take it for a wok! Get it?"
    But his family tried to distract Sam from his wok infatuation because Kirsten Halberg said she never wanted to hear the word "wok" again as long as she lived.
    "Sam," Mrs. Krupnik said one evening, "it's okay to talk about woks a
little,
here at home. But when we go to the wedding—"
    Sam's eyes lit up. He was quite interested in the whole topic of weddings, now that he was going to have an anchor tattoo on his arm. "Why did the Chinese lady have a wedding?" he asked.
    Mrs. Krupnik responded with a sigh. "I don't know. Why?"
    "So she could wok down the aisle!" shrieked Sam. "Get it? Get it?"
    "Sam," said his mother, laughing, "when we're at the wedding, it would be nice if—"
    Sam