Read Online Eggs by Jerry Spinelli - Free Book Online Page B

like a nightcrawler, slid out, poked around her upper lip till the yellow spot was gone —
httthhhp —
back into its hole. “It’s the frames I’m selling, not the pictures.”
    “I just want a picture,” said David.
    “Two bucks, you get the whole shebang.”
    David held up his dime. “This is all I have.”
    A voice croaked, “Give the kid a picture.” The voice came from an old man in a lawn chair. He was eating something out of a plastic cup.
    The lady growled, “What am I, Santa Claus?”
    “Give it to him.”
    The lady glared at the old man, glared at David. She snorted like a horse and snatched one of the small silvery frames. She worked out the picture and jabbed it, scowling, at David. “Merry Christmas.”
    David took it and walked away. And now he wondered: Why? Why had he asked for it? What was he going to do with it? He didn’t know. He stared at the picture. Could he be wrong? No. Thanks to Primrose, he had seen the face too many times to be wrong. This was the man, all right. Her father. Bob.
    So why wasn’t he racing to her and shouting, “Primrose, look, your father’s picture! It’s all over that table there!”? Because something didn’t feel right. Something so wispy it would not fill the hollow of a thought. Something that made him want to drape a sheet over the table of gold and silver frames.
    Across a dozen tables he could see Primrose. She was lobbing popcorn at the backs of people who failed to stop at her table. He put the picture in his pocket.
    Minutes later it was Primrose who came running. She was waving money. “Look! Twenty-five
bucks
!” Some lady bought the orange bowl. She said it’s called Fiestaware and she has a whole set of it except for the bowl, and she said would I take twenty-five dollars for it.” She grabbed his arm. “Come on. We’re packing up. We’re going for paint!”

23
     
    David just could not make himself do it. He put down his brush. “Primrose, are you
sure
?”
    She looked down from the roof. “If you ask me that one more time.”
    “But it feels so weird.”
    “You’re going to
look
weird with a white face in about two seconds.”
    “But who ever heard of a bedroom without windows? You have to have at least one.”
    “Why? So the egg throwers can look in at me?”
    “So you can look out.”
    “There’s nothing to look out
at.
Paint.”
    It had been hard enough to paint the side windows. But the last remaining window? The most important window of all?
    Primrose thumped across the roof on her knees and with an angry swat left a three-foot track of Buten’s white primer across the front windshield. “There go your excuses,” she growled. “Now finish it.”
    Reluctantly, David took up his brush and, standing on a chair, began painting the windshield. The last thing he saw inside before the last brushstroke was the propped-up picture on Primrose’s dresser. He had wanted to ask his father about it, but he would not be home for days, and David did not have the patience to wait. So he had resorted to his grandmother.
    First he asked her if she knew that picture frames were sold with people’s pictures already in them. His grandmother, who was snipping the stems of flowers from the backyard, simply stared at him for a moment, shocked — and overjoyed — that he would ask her a question. She quickly recovered and said yes, she knew that. David walked away. If he had to speak to her, at least he would do it in pieces, and if possible at her inconvenience.
    Later he caught her as she was talking on the phone. “Why do they do it?” he said.
    “Just a second,” she said into the phone, not at all irritably, and cupped her hand over the receiver. “Do what, David?”
    “Put pictures in the frames.”
    “So they can give the customer an idea how their own picture would look in the frame.”
    She was heading out the door for her evening walk when he asked what kind of people they used for those pictures. “Oh, usually models or