Read Online Liberty Street by Dianne Warren - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t you?” she says. “After I told you not to. You snuck in someplace where I wouldn’t see you.”
    Frances sees no reason to deny it.
    They pack up the blanket and the playing cards, and all the way home her mother says things like “A six-year-old girl is old enough to listen to her mother.”
    Frances is not quite six—she is almost six—but she doesn’t argue. She worries that her mother won’t ever take her to the lake again. She wishes the people in the canoe hadn’t taken the Styrofoam ring with them.
    And then, a week later, the Yellowhead paper comes in the mail, and there’s a grainy black-and-white picture on page 3 of a girl in a floating water-rescue device. The headline says Lost Little Mermaid. Frances’s mother reads the story to her. It’s about a couple who found a little girl floating in the lake and didn’t know where her parents were, but the girl had shown them her mother’s car and said her mother won it at the fair, and she’d convinced them that the mother was there somewhere, although perhaps they shouldn’t have left her alone on the beach.
    Frances’s mother puts the paper down and looks at her. “Is that girl in the story you?” she asks.
    Frances says no. Her mother gets out a magnifying glass and looks at the photo again, and then says, “Oh, that is certainly not you. Of course it isn’t. How could I even ask?”
    Good, Frances thinks. She’s survived her lie.
    That evening, her mother looks at her from across the room and says, “You’re getting sneaky, and I don’t like it.” Then she says, “I hope the girl in the paper—who could have drowned, by the way—I just hope she learned her lesson.”
    The way her mother looks at her, Frances realizes that she has not, in fact, survived her lie.
    At breakfast the next morning, Uncle Vince slaps his leg and says, “Lost little mermaid. That’s a corker.”
    B ERTIE ’ S NEW HOUSE is ready—at least ready enough to live in—by the middle of August. They have a painting bee and Frances’s mother paints inside (eggshell everywhere, Bertie can change it if she likes), while Vince and her father paint the outside glossy white with green shutters and window boxes. Bertie is ready too, all set to come to Canada and get married. She has her things packed and is waiting on the Canadian government to say she can come. Any day now, Vince says. Bertie reports in a letter (to Frances’s mother) that her sisters had a bridal shower for her, and that she has her wedding dress purchased and will be bringing it with her. She even drew a little picture of the dress.
    Then one day Uncle Vince goes to town for the mail and doesn’t come back. Instead, he falls over and dies. Dead. Gone forever. Frances’s parents phone England long distance to tell Bertie. After they get off the phone, Frances’s mother says that Bertie sounded kind of relieved.
    â€œNot that she doesn’t have to marry Vince,” she says. “I didn’t mean that. But that she doesn’t have to come to Canada.”
    Frances wants to know what Bertie will do with her dress.
    â€œHang on to it until she marries someone else, I suppose,” Frances’s mother says.
    Since Vince didn’t know anyone in Canada, there is no funeral. He gets buried in the graveyard in town. Her parents aren’t sure what to do about the house: Does it belong to Bertie now? they wonder. But a lawyer says not. The house goes tothe next of kin—Basie—and after everything is settled Basie wants to sell it, but Alice says it might come in handy if they have to move to town someday. It’s just too bad, she says, that Vince didn’t build a more practical house—a one-storey bungalow, say, like the other new houses in Yellowhead.
    Basie says, “Talk all you want, woman, but the day I move to town is a