Read Online Ask Him Why by Catherine Ryan Hyde - Free Book Online Page A

wondering if we were still on for Friday,” I said.
    “Well, sure,” he said, as if nothing could be more obvious. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
    But it was a question I couldn’t answer, so it froze me again.
    “Wait,” he said. “You didn’t think I was going to drop you just because people are mad at your brother, did you?”
    “Um,” I said. I wanted to say no, unequivocally no. Instead I said, “Maybe. I don’t know.”
    “You’re not your brother,” he said.
    And he may have said more. I’m sure he did, in fact. I could vaguely hear him talking in the background, but not a single word came through, because that was the moment I heard the big knock at our front door.
    I didn’t know how to tell Sean to stop talking, so I just stopped listening.
    I ran with the phone to the smoking room—I mean the reading room—and looked out the window again. The painters were gone. Standing on the porch were two very official-looking soldiers in uniform, their faces grim, as if the gravity of their mission was weighing them down.
    “Sean,” I said, cutting him off in the middle of a sentence, but a sentence about what I’ll never know. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

Chapter Six: Aubrey

    I ran past Ruth’s room. Down the stairs two at a time. Because I heard my mom arguing with somebody at the door. Well. Arguing at somebody. I never heard any other voice argue back.
    I didn’t talk to myself on the way down. So I wasn’t clear on what I was expecting. But when I skidded up behind my mom and saw the two uniformed soldiers, then I knew. I knew in retrospect what I’d been hoping for.
    I’d hoped maybe Joseph had come back. I could tell. Because I could feel the loss of it. I could feel it being ripped away.
    “I will tell you one more time,” my mom said, as if there was nothing the tiniest bit scary about them. “He was here barely twenty- four hours. My husband went downstairs to tell him to leave, but he already had. We don’t know where he is, and we don’t want to know. As far as we’re concerned, he’s no longer a part of this family.”
    She wound down. Turned around. Saw me there. Her face darkened further, if such a thing were possible.
    “This doesn’t concern you,” she said.
    She turned me back toward the stairs and sent me on my way with a swat on the butt. Like you do with your four-year-old.
    My face burned. But I just ran. Ran up to my room.
    I remember thinking in a vague way, A couple of army soldiers are here to arrest my brother. What could possibly concern me more than that?

    At dinner that night, I could tell Isabella was back. Or had been back, anyway. Even though I hadn’t seen her with my own eyes. Because the food was great again. A perfectly seasoned chicken-and-rice casserole. My mom couldn’t have approached it on her best day in a kitchen.
    I could hear voices. Motors. No more and no less than I’d been hearing all day, but still. The circus on the other side of our gate was becoming a constant.
    I stared at the chandelier while my dad announced that the following day we would go back to school.
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said.
    “It’s not ridiculous,” he said. “Not at all. What’s ridiculous is thinking we can hide them away from all this. How many days of school do you think they can miss?”
    “I can get some homework from their teachers, just the same as if they were sick.”
    “For how long, Janet?”
    His voice had hardened in that way it did sometimes. I glanced over at my sister, Ruth. She looked a little green around the gills.
    My father continued to lecture. “We thought this would blow over. One, two days of lost school for them and that would be that. It didn’t play out that way, Janet. Face it. That was back when we thought Joseph just refused duty. Before this whole . . . mutiny mess. Now we’ve got four times the media clowns out front. And now we’re headed for a military court-martial. With the whole country