Read Online Beyond Summer by Lisa Wingate - Free Book Online

fish I carved from a bit of pecan wood that was floating in a puddle in the ditch where the children play beside the white apartments. I know how to find the story in a bit of wood. My grandfather taught me.
    “It’s just a little thing,” I tell him, but the fish is good. I rubbed it against the paint on the curb to give it the red color. I saw fish like it in the ocean, after my grandfather put me on the boat. Auntie showed the fish to me, and she told me to watch them. When I looked up again, the shore was far away, and my grandfather was as tiny as the little wooden fish, now dangling from the orange string.
    “It’s very nice,” Michael decides, and I am pleased.
    “I can carve a good fish.” For just a moment, I feel taller, and then I realize that I am smiling, and my teeth are not pretty. “It is equal to a bowl and a spoon.”
    Michael nods. “It certainly is.” He pockets the fish and hands a bowl and spoon to me. The red-haired girl chews her lip, and I can see what she is thinking. The bowls and spoons don’t cost. But she does not know me. She does not know that I pay my own way. When you pay your own way, no one can own you.
    I feel inside my pocket again. There’s still a turtle and a bird in there. I will have need of both yet today.
    I go through the line and have my bowl filled, and then I’m off. I can walk and eat at the same time. If I arrive at the Summer Kitchen to help clean the dishes, the woman there will pack a sandwich and chips for me to have for supper, and I’ll have no need of going to the mission tonight.
    My bowl is soon empty, so I slip it into a trash bin and wipe my face and walk down the block toward the white church, where the Summer Kitchen is in the squatty building beside the chapel. The line stretches out the door, so I know I have arrived too early to wash dishes. At the Book Basket, the sign is turned to the side that means the door will be locked, so I move to the tree and stand there to watch the Indian chief, instead. The big doors on his part of the building are open, and I can hear music. The soft, clear tune of a flute draws me closer as if I am a snake, charmed from a basket. I walk to the corner and look in, then come nearer. I do not see the Indian chief, but it would be no matter if I did. I am invisible to him.
    The big room where he works is empty. He has been painting on the large canvas again—broad, angry strokes that make a picture of a warrior on horseback, galloping. The white spaces yesterday have become mountains today.
    There are splatters of paint by the door. Blue and green, still glistening wet. I look around for the chief again, and then I slip inside just far enough. I reach into my pocket, take out the turtle and the bird, push my finger into the paint, and color the turtle green and the bird blue. These are the right colors for them, and now both are finished. This is good, because I will need one for my sandwich from the Summer Kitchen.
    The other is for the family in the new yellow house.

Chapter 6
    Shasta Reid-Williams
    Something weird happens when you’re from a big family, and all your life, y’all have been bouncing off one another like mixed nuts in a can. Even when you finally break out, you can still hear all the relatives talking in your head. I never really counted on that when Cody and I moved to Dallas. I had it pictured that once we were in the city, and Cody was finally on with the police department, we’d get all settled in, and I’d finally feel like a grown-up adult, like I really was almost twenty-four years old. After being married five years and having two (and a quarter) kids, it seemed like it oughta be time.
    But all I could hear the first day I was alone in our little yellow house was my mother whispering in my ear. I lay down on the mattress in the boys’ room just long enough to get them to take a nap, and Mama pointed out right away that the ceiling had a big spot in the middle where the plaster dipped