Read Online Black Dog Summer by Miranda Sherry - Free Book Online Page A

must’ve been cold.
    I came up beside her and climbed onto the gate too. Her nose was pink and her cheeks were wet. She didn’t look at me. A car drove past. Inside it, there were people carrying on their normal lives with no clue that our dad was sick and might die.
    â€œAssholes,” I said.
    â€œYeah,” Adele agreed. She was shivering.
    I shuffled closer, unwound half of my scarf, and tucked the one end around her neck.
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œSure.” My voice wobbled.
    â€œI hate this.” Adele leant her forehead against the chilled metal bars.
    â€œDitto.”
    â€œNothing’s ever going to be the same again, is it, Monkey?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThink he’s going to . . . ?”
    I was glad she didn’t finish her question. The word was as impossible to hear as it was to say. It hung between us and clung to us both, just like the woolly scarf.
    â€œI don’t know, Addy.” I put my arm around her shoulder, and that’s how we stayed until the sky started to go orange at one corner. The bars of the gate had chilled our fingers into stiff claws. We walked back to the house holding on to each other to stop the scarf from pulling and strangling us both.
    Now I plunge through the iron ribs of the new gate and into thegreen garden. The first thing I notice is that the tipuana tree is gone. I remember the vast reach of its strong, curvy limbs, the perfect thumbprint rows of leaves, the whirling helicopter seedpods, and the exuberant yellow, crumpled-tissue-paper flowers that used to litter the ground beneath it.
    Adele and I used to hate walking under the tree because of the foamy bugs that lived on the branches and would spit drops of insect goo into our hair. But it was fun to climb. I loved scrambling up as high as I could go and looking down over the surrounding gardens.
    My most memorable tipuana-tree-climbing occasion happened years after my bark-scrambling days were done. I was already well into my second semester at university.
    It was the day Liam challenged me to a climb.
    Had we still been in high school, Liam would’ve been the jock (he’d been captain of the school cricket team, for heaven’s sake) and I would’ve been the weird, arty chick who read poetry, and we would probably never have exchanged a word, but although he was studying towards an LLB, and I was doing a bachelor of arts, we sat beside each other once in our only joint class: English Literature.
    As I was walking home from the bus stop after lectures, I heard the grumble of an engine and turned to see a rather clapped-out old Ford Sierra slowing down beside me. Inside it was the gobsmackingly unattainable blond god who’d sat beside me in Eng Lit 101 earlier that day.
    He leant out of his open window and squinted against the sun. “You live on this street?”
    â€œJa.”
    â€œMe too. Number seventy-seven.” He looked up at me, shading his eyes with one hand. “Did you walk all the way from the bus stop?”
    â€œYeah, it’s not so far.”
    â€œI can give you a lift home tomorrow if you want. Just meet me in the campus parking lot if you fancy a ride. Look for the dodgiest car in the lot.”
    â€œUm, OK.” My breath came in shallow little gasps.
    â€œâ€Šâ€™K. See you then.” He grinned and drove off.
    The next day, I waited by his Ford Sierra, and, as promised, hedrove me home. The next day, he did the same. At first, we sat side by side in silence, but then, quite suddenly, we were talking. We talked about our classes at varsity and the lectures we liked or didn’t like, the people we had been to school with, our families, our first pets, our first dates, and, just like that, we were friends.
    Soon, Liam was parking his Ford Sierra in my parents’ driveway and following me inside the house, rather than dropping me off outside the black iron gates. Most days, he’d stay till just before