Read Online Rowing in Eden by Elizabeth Evans - Free Book Online Page A

she did understand, she did. Which meant she had not been able to ask why her father had to protect the honor of a dead girl, or why their family had to suffer so for some stranger’s reputation.
    Up went the volume on the stereo below, suggesting that Brick and Peg were now out on their walk.
    Franny returned the huntsmen’s photograph to its hook on the wall. Of course she could not take it down to the party to show it to Rosamund. That would be preposterous. Pre-pos-ter-ous.
    In her parents’ bedroom, on the upstairs extension, she dialed the telephone number of Christy Strawberry.
    â€œHey, Chris, knock, knock!”
    Christy Strawberry groaned. “Who’s there, Franny?”
    â€œSacramento!”
    â€œSacramento who?”
    â€œSacramento objects belong in a church!”
    â€œWell, Franny, I guess I’ll just have to take your word on that one.”
    â€œCome on! Sacramento? Like sacramental? I’m making up city knock-knocks! Give me a city! How about—Detroit? Just—Detroit. Troit. Okay. Okay. It’ll be—something with a troika. You know? Those Russian sleighs? This’ll be good. Because it’ll be something, like, I’m talking with a New York accent, see, and when I do the response, I’ll say ‘Detroit’ so it sounds like I’m saying, ‘De troika.’ ‘De troika’s here to take you to the Russian Tea Room!’”
    â€œWhat’s the Russian Tea Room?” Christy Strawberry asked.
    â€œIt’s in books, you know? People in New York City go there on special occasions, and they eat stuff, like, blini.”
    After Franny finished explaining to Christy Strawberry what she believed a blini to be, Christy told Franny how she and Joan Harvett had talked to a boy named Kirk Toomy at City Park’s bandshell that afternoon. Franny did not know the boy—someone from one of the Catholic grade schools—but apparently he had swiped Christy Strawberry’s madras scarf and she had chased him around and around the bandshell stage in an effort to get back the scarf, and it was so funny, Franny—
    A small lamp sat on her mother’s bedside table and Franny turned it off while Christy Strawberry talked, trying to make herself focus on the girl’s words. At the start of junior high, when Christy Strawberry and Joan Harvett had asked her to go to the football games and things with them, she had been pleased. The girls in honors struck her as boring and frumpy. Christy and Joan were not hoods, but they liked boys and cigarettes and swearing out loud— damn, shit, damn all this shit to hell —and they pursued Franny’s friendship in a way that no one else ever had. Especially Christy. Franny had spent most of the Friday nights of seventh grade sleeping at the Strawberrys’ and even taking Christy along to her confirmation classes at the Episcopal church on Saturday mornings. Franny was the one in whom Christy confided when her father left her mother. Lately, however—especially when the two were together—Joan and Christy embarrassed Franny. Downtown, they shouted and hit each other over the head with shopping bags and insisted on practicing cheerleading moves. At the movies, theythrew things at people and the screen. At City Park, they walked up almost on the heels of unknown but attractive older boys, then burst into fits of laughter and ran when the boys turned; and, sometimes, when Christy Strawberry talked to boys—or even talked about boys, like now, talking about Kirk Toomey—she began to speak like a little girl. Fwanny , she said. Which wasn’t entirely her fault, Franny knew. Tiny Christy with her naturally curly brown hair and rosy cheeks and adorable bow lips had been groomed by her parents to be the next Shirley Temple, with tap lessons and ballet and all. Still, by the time the downstairs telephone clicked, and Rosamund came on the line—“Someone