Read Online Liberty Street by Dianne Warren - Free Book Online

really hot almost every day. Uncle Vince says he had no idea Canada could get so hot. “Hardly fit for an Englishman,” he complains at breakfast. Bertie has still not arrived from England. She’s waiting for her house to be done.
    It’s washday and Alice is hanging the sheets on the clothesline while Frances hands her the pegs. It’s so hot and breezy that the first sheet is dry by the time her mother getsthe last one up. She starts to take the dry ones down but then pegs them back up again and says, “Oh bother, let’s we two girls go to the lake.”
    Frances can’t believe it. She hadn’t even asked.
    She puts on her bathing suit while her mother packs a lunch and their beach bag. She says they can stay for only an hour—“so don’t pester me to stay longer”—and they get in the car and go. Her mother has changed into clean shorts and a sleeveless blouse, and she has her sunglasses on. Frances sits on the seat beside her in her yellow cotton bathing suit, wishing she had some sunglasses too.
    It takes half an hour to get there. There are no other people at the spot they like because it’s a weekday, but there are several cars in the parking lot and a few families down the beach where the picnic tables are. Frances immediately goes to the shore and begs her mother to go in the water with her and hold her for the dead man’s float, which Alice does, but not for long because, she says, their white English skin burns too easily. She makes Frances put on a hat and convinces her to sit on the blanket in the shade and play crazy eights.
    When her mother says she has to go the toilet (“Badly, Frances—I can’t wait”), Frances doesn’t want to go with her. She hates the pee smell of the outhouses and tells her mother that she will throw up if she has to go near them. Her mother says she can wait outside, but even then Frances digs her heels into the sand and has to be dragged along until they reach a path through the trees, and then she gives in and follows.
    â€œYou wait right here,” her mother says when they come to the outhouses, one for men and one for ladies. There’s another path through the trees, which is the one Francesthinks leads to the playground. Her mother sees her looking at it and makes her promise she will stay right where she is. Frances promises, then her mother lifts the latch on the ladies’ toilet and goes in.
    Frances can smell the toilets, even outside. She starts to walk backwards away from the smell, but it follows her, so she turns and runs through the trees and down to the beach, even though she knows her mother will be mad. She’s just about to sit on the blanket when she sees an old Styrofoam rescue ring lapping at the water’s edge, so she walks down to the shore to check it out. She looks up and down the beach. In one direction, there are some teenagers throwing each other around in the water and a man tossing a stick as far as he can into the lake for a dog to fetch. In the other direction, there’s a little point of land with shrubby trees on it but no people. There doesn’t seem to be anyone watching Frances.
    She’ll be quick, she thinks. Try out the ring and then be back on the blanket before her mother returns. ( Is that her mother calling now ?) She knows she should wait—she’s not allowed to go in the water on her own—but instead she grabs the ring and runs along the beach until she’s out of sight around the point. She steps into the ring, pulls it up to her middle, and wades into the water until she feels her feet lift off the sandy bottom (magic!), and all of a sudden she’s bobbing like a frog on a lily pad.
    She forgets about her mother and the blanket. All she thinks about is how perfect it is to be floating on the warm surface of the water as though she’s in a magic water world. When she looks down, she can see rocks on the bottom of the