Read Online Porch Lights by Dorothea Benton Frank - Free Book Online

captain would throw them in the hole with the treasure !”
    “You mean, they were buried alive?”
    “I imagine they shot them first. But being buried alive was a recurring theme in a lot of Poe’s work too.”
    “That is some seriously creepy stuff, Glam.”
    “Well, it could never happen today, but back in Poe’s day they didn’t have funeral homes who prepared bodies for burial. So the family would see about all that. And sometimes people in deep comas were accidentally buried alive. You should read The Fall of the House of Usher . I’m telling you, Poe was like Stephen King!”
    “Stephen King? The guy who wrote that movie Carrie ? It’s Mom’s total favorite.”
    “Really? Well, Stephen King wrote the book on which the movie was based. If there is one, you should always read the book before you see the film.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? Oh, my dear . . . because a book lets your imagination soar and a movie makes all the decisions for you. A book is almost always, but not always, a far richer experience than a book turned into a movie. But I think it’s probably a real challenge to condense a whole book into an hour and a half or two hours on film.”
    “Wow. Mom says books are better too, but now I know why.”
    I smiled. If I had done anything right with Jackie, I had given her a love of reading. We walked and walked, talking about pirates and treasure maps and all kinds of things until we were finally walked and talked out.
    “Let’s go home,” I said. “It’s long past lunchtime.”
    “It is?”
    “Charlie? Look at the position of the sun.”
    I gave him a quick lesson on the sun and shadows, and he was simply amazed. What did they teach these kids in school nowadays? How to write poetry in Mandarin? Phooey on that.
    “And,” I added, “you’re going to notice that when the thermometer gets to around one hundred degrees, around four in the afternoon, the skies will get very dark and then we’ll have a great thunder boomer for about half an hour. When it’s over, the skies turn blue and the sun comes back out.”
    “Wow, this is like being in a rain forest or something, isn’t it?”
    “Some people consider us to be semitropical.”
    “Semitropical.”
    “Yep. Semitropical.”
    Later, at home over a fast lunch of tomato sandwiches and cups of leftover soup, Charlie regaled Jackie with all the things we talked about on our walk.
    “She knows all this stuff ! I mean, amazing stuff! Can I have some ketchup, please?”
    “She is the cat’s mother,” I said with perfect timing, but neither one of them reacted. I was so sleepy then, I would have given a front tooth to just close my eyes for an hour. Charlie had flat worn me out, and it was barely three o’clock.
    “You’re telling me?” Jackie said and handed him the bottle of ketchup, which he used to thoroughly douse his sandwich. “She’s my mother, you know.”
    “I know! But how come you never told me any of these stories?”
    “I don’t know . . . I guess because you never asked?”
    “Well, children, if you’ll clean up, the cat’s mother is going to take her book out to the porch and read for a while.”
    Finally they stopped talking and looked at each other.
    “The rule is,” Jackie said, “you’re not supposed to refer to Glam as she , especially when she ’s right in the room. It’s considered disrespectful.”
    “Oh,” Charlie said. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”
    “It’s okay, precious,” I said. “Have a brownie.”
    I was lost in tenth-century Scotland’s social machinations and what the lassies and laddies did in the dark when Jackie and Charlie joined me. I quickly closed my book, not that there was anything to be ashamed of in the pages, just a few bees and a couple of birds.
    “So what are you up for this afternoon?” Jackie asked. “I was thinking I might take Charlie to the aquarium. You want to go?”
    “Oh, no thanks. All those sharks give me nightmares.”
    “Sharks?”
    “Charlie, you