Read Online Ship of Dolls by Shirley Parenteau - Free Book Online Page A

Grace. They’ll be sorry then. Or maybe they won’t be. Maybe they’ll forget me and ask each other, “That girl who was here . . . What was her name? Do you remember?”
    Through the window, she saw a light go on in Jack’s room on the far side of the old tree.
This is all Jack’s fault. He must have told Louise. How else could she know?
    Anger blazed again, and she slid off the bed and climbed through the window and onto the tree branch. She crawled along the branch and gathered a handful of twigs. When she had crept as close as she could to Jack’s window, she threw them, one after another.
    He raised the blind and shoved open the window. “What do you want?”
    “To tell you that you can be happy now. I’m paid back. Louise told her mother about the doll and she told Grandma and now Grandma hates me!”
    “Louise? How’d she know?”
    “How’d she know? You told her. Her mother said so. I heard her.”
    “You dumb Dora. I didn’t tell her. You oughta know me better than that.”
    “Then who did?”
    “Nobody. Louise probably heard us arguing after school that day. She’s a sneak. She was probably listening.”
    “If you knew that, you shouldn’t have said anything.”
    “You were the one who insisted on talking about the fight with Ollie. The whole story came out. Remember?”
    She did remember. And she knew he was right. He’d said she should be punished and she’d said she was and he’d said sewing a dress wasn’t punishment. Louise must have heard it all.
    Before she could say she was sorry for blaming him, Jack slammed down the window and closed the blind. Lexie reached for another twig, then changed her mind and crawled along the branch back to her room.
    She wanted to stay angry. She needed to stay angry, but slowly her earlier words to Annie spread through her. She’d been wrong to accuse Jack. And she should have told Grandma at once about the accident with the doll. Downstairs, she should have tried to explain instead of clamping the truth away just because she hurt inside.
    Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe she could go down and apologize. Then she could start over and tell what happened from the beginning and why she couldn’t stop it once it got started and how Louise had taken it into her head that making a dress for Emily Grace was an honor.
    She tiptoed down the stairs, trying words in her head, pushing away any that tempted her to make things sound better for herself. She would tell it exactly the way it had happened. At the bottom of the stairs, she paused as she had when Grandma and Grandpa talked about the letter from Mama. They were talking now. About her.

“Y ou may be right.” Grandma sounded tired, making guilt stab into Lexie as she listened from the stairs. “I may have been too harsh, but she’s a smart child, growing up faster than we want to see. She needs guidance.”
    “She’ll receive guidance,” Grandpa said gently. Lexie pictured him rubbing Grandma’s hand the way he sometimes did when she was upset. “We must be sure to temper guidance with love, Sophie.”
    “Of course I love her,” Grandma exclaimed, sounding insulted. “But when I look at her, I see her mother and I think of the outlandish choices that woman has made. Look where those choices led her . . . . Singing in nightclubs, and who knows what goes on there.”
    “We won’t imagine what we don’t know,” Grandpa warned.
    Grandma sighed so loudly that the sound carried to Lexie on the stairs. “We know she insisted on buying a fancy motorcar that carried our son to his death.”
    Lexie couldn’t listen any longer. She ran back up the stairs, careful to make no sound. Grandma blamed Mama for Papa dying in the motorcar crash.
That’s reason enough for Grandma to lock away tender feelings when she sees anything of Mama coming out in me.
    As she climbed onto her bed, Lexie felt more confused than before. Slowly, she let her body sink into the covers while she hugged Annie.
    Much later, a