Read Online Sea Glass Summer by Dorothy Cannell - Free Book Online Page A

approaching the guillotine. He and Grandpa had watched a black and white film called
A Tale of Two Cities
. It had been very sad, but in a good sort of way because the hero had been very brave while waiting for his head to be sliced off, saying it was the best thing he’d ever done; only he said it in a poem sort of way that Grandpa already knew by heart. Oliver, brushing his teeth with his head bowed over the basin, was far from nobly resigned to believing that going to live with Gerard and Elizabeth was the best thing. But the thought flickered pathetically that there was still a reason to be a hero, because to act miserable would worry Grandpa.
    â€˜OK,’ he told his round-cheeked, sandy-haired reflection in the mirror haughtily, ‘I already know that, but if they decide they don’t like me and say I’ll have to live with Twyla, or even Brian’s parents, I don’t think Grandpa would mind a bit. He’s only sending me to them because Gerard was Dad’s brother and he thinks it’s the right thing to do. How can I get out of living with them without behaving in a way that would upset Grandpa?’ That would take consultation with Brian, who had already expressed a wish to blast Gerard and Elizabeth to Mars or Venus, whichever was the farthest away. What Brian wasn’t as keen on was visiting the Cully Mansion because it looked real creepy from the outside. His Aunt Nellie, who lived quite close to it, had made him take a look and he was sure he’d seen a ghost glide past one of the top windows.
    Returning to his bedroom, Oliver slowly got himself dressed in his almost new jeans and the green cotton sweater Twyla had given him for Christmas. On any other morning he would have dragged on his clothes so he could race down to breakfast.
    Grandpa believed that getting ready for the day included sitting down to a proper breakfast at the kitchen table. He said breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Bacon or sausage and eggs, juice and toast or English muffins with strawberry or raspberry jam. Never grape jelly. Oliver thought grape jelly was yuck. Grandpa said Oliver’s mother hadn’t liked it either, so Granny Olive had stopped making it. She had died a couple of years after his parents were killed in that plane crash. He only remembered that he’d loved her and felt safe when she held him. The narrow two-story house in Ferry Landing could have been a sad, empty place. But Grandpa hadn’t let that happen when Granny Olive died. He hadn’t let it happen even after getting the diagnosis from his doctor that explained what Grandpa called the ‘trembles.’
    He had continued to manage fairly well for a while, and Oliver had done his best to help out. Grandpa had told him he was the best potato peeler ever, and that was saying something because Granny Olive had been something to see with a paring knife. Twyla believed boys should know how to cook and not go thinking it was a girl’s job. It had been a great day when Twyla arrived. She’d said straight off that she didn’t mind a bit doing the cleaning and cooking the meals as well as being Grandpa’s nurse. Twyla was black. Oliver had never met a black person before. She said if people wanted to call her African American that was OK too; it made not a speck of difference to her. It was what was in people’s hearts that counted. ‘Don’t you go letting anyone decide who you are,’ she’d told Oliver when he’d let on about being bullied by two boys at school. ‘Seems to me, lamb baby, those children don’t know the Golden Rule.’
    Oliver went to church with Twyla now that Grandpa couldn’t take him. It wasn’t the same sort of church she’d gone to in Virginia, she told Oliver, but going to St Michael’s was just dandy with her. If God made the rounds every Sunday, she could go somewhere else for a change and be secure in His being