Read Online Dust Devil by Rebecca Brandewyne - Free Book Online

so
Evie rode a different bus to and from school, Sarah nevertheless sat
down right behind Gus, coveting his protection. She spoke not a word
all the way home, not even when some of the other girls who lived in
Miners’ Row tried to offer comfort. The boy who had come to her
defense would surely be suspended from school for it, Sarah thought,
and she felt terrible on his behalf for all the trouble she had
inadvertently caused him. She had never even got a chance to thank
him!
    That
evening, she told Mama and Daddy what had happened that day at
school. The following morning, Iris Kincaid determinedly carried the
lunch box back to the Holbrookes’ house.
    “ I
declare, Iris, I just don’t know what to say,” ZoeAnn
Holbrooke uttered coolly, without the slightest hint of fluster or
embarrassment. “I thought Evie was tired of that old lunch box.
Otherwise, I’d never have dreamed of putting it in that pile
for the church rummage sale. Besides which, she mostly eats the
school lunch, anyway. It’s so important for a growing child to
have a hot lunch at midday, I’ve always believed. But J.D. gave
her that lunch box, and Evie’s always set such a powerful store
by her daddy. You do understand, don’t you, Iris?”
    “ Yes,
ma’am, I do,” Sarah’s mother replied tonelessly,
her head held high.
    “ And
of course, Iris, it goes without saying that I know you don’t
steal.”
    “ No,
ma’am, I surely don’t.”
    “ Well,
now that that’s settled, we’ll just forget all about this
unfortunate incident, shall we? After all, there’s no sense in
us becoming embroiled in a silly little children’s quarrel, is
there?” ZoeAnn insisted, her lips curving in a small, superior
smile.
    “ No,
ma’am, there isn’t,” Iris agreed, her face
expressionless.
    Afterward,
when the lunch box was returned to her by her mother, Evie smugly
shoved it away in the very back of her closet. Everybody who was
anybody knew it wasn’t cool to carry your lunch to school in a
lunch box, that a plain brown paper sack was all the rage.
    ZoeAnn
Holbrooke kept the fifty cents.

    I
was a child and she was a child,
    In
this kingdom by the sea;
    But
we loved with a love which was more than love—

    Annabel
Lee
    — Edgar
Allan Poe

    Although,
after that day of the lunch box and the fight at school, Sarah
watched the commons alertly, ceaselessly, for the boy called Renzo
Cassavettes, she never saw him. For his part in the incident, Bubba
Holbrooke, she knew, had been suspended from school, and she worried
that Renzo, lacking a father as prominent and influential as J. D.
Holbrooke, had been expelled. The thought gnawed at her, for the boy
would never have been in trouble had he not come to her defense.
    But
then at last there came an afternoon when she sought her favorite
meadow in the woods beyond Miners’ Row, the meadow that was
like a vast green sea and where her daddy had built her a tree house
in an old, spreading sycamore tree. That tree house was her own
private little kingdom. There, at the meadow’s grassy edge, she
drew up short at the sight of Renzo Cassavettes reclining on the
ground, as though she had wished him there, his back against the
sycamore that was home to her tree house. His dark head was bent over
a book, and he didn’t notice her at first.
    “ Hey,”
Sarah called shyly from where she stood.
    “ Hey,
yourself,” Renzo replied, smiling as he glanced up and saw her.
He closed the book he had been reading. “No more trouble over
lunch boxes, I hope.”
    “ No.”
Sarah shook her head forlornly at the memory. “I had to give it
back. I guess Evie’s mama didn’t know when she put it in
her pile for the church rummage sale that Evie still wanted it. So my
mama returned it, even though she’d bought it and so it was
really mine. My mama works for the Holbrookes, you see. She’s
their maid, and it would’ve gone hard on us if they’d got
mad and fired her I over the lunch box. But I want to thank you