Read Online The Second Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares - Free Book Online Page A

I promise.”
    Carmen often promised this but never actually did it.
    “Oh, all right.” Lena always gave her another chance. It was a little dance they did.
    “Hi, Jesse,” Carmen said, hurrying up the walk. She grabbed him in a brief headlock as she passed through the door. Jesse was four and liked to keep track of who came and went on Quincy Street. Also, he liked to yell puzzling things to people on the sidewalk from his second-story bedroom window.
    Carmen walked straight back to the kitchen, where Mrs. Morgan was cleaning Rice Krispies off the floor with one hand and holding Joe, the nine-month-old, with the other.
    Carmen had already learned not to give the kids Rice Krispies, because they were harder to clean up than, say, Kix. That was something an outsider could figure out in a day and a mother would never think of. Wet, walked-on Rice Krispies were part of Mrs. Morgan’s unquestioned burden.
    “Hi, everybody,” Carmen said. She held out her hands to Joe, but he clung to his mother. Joe did like Carmen, but only when his mother was out of the house.
    “Hi, Carmen. How are you?” Mrs. Morgan threw some Saran-wrapped objects from the refrigerator to the garbage can. “I’m going out to run some errands. I’ll be back at noon. I’m on the cell if you need me.”
    Prolonging the inevitable, Joe surveyed Carmen from where his head lay on his mother’s shoulder. Carmen remembered what Lena had said about not being kind to your mother. Joe was kind to his mother. He adored her. Had Carmen been kind to her mother when she was a baby? Maybe you were kind only when you were very young or very old.
    She accepted a wriggling, protesting Joe from Mrs. Morgan.
    As soon as she had him settled on the floor with stackable buckets, he took off his sock and started chewing on it. The sock had a little rubber tic-tac-toe pattern on the bottom. For traction, Carmen figured.
    “No, Joe. Don’t eat your socks.”
    Jesse was watching the cars go by through a small pane of glass just the height of his face at the side of the front door. “Hey, Jess. What do you see?”
    Jesse didn’t answer. Carmen liked the fact that though grown-up people felt the need to check in with a lot of useless questions and statements, children rarely felt the need to answer them.
    “I have to make a pee,” he said after a while. Carmen picked up Joe and followed Jesse upstairs. For some reason Jesse only liked to use the bathroom upstairs. She decided to change Joe’s diaper while she was up there. She laid him down on the diaper pad and let him gum the tube of ointment. Could zinc oxide hurt you if ingested?
    She opened the top drawer of his bureau, admiring the neat assortment of socks, all carefully matched, all primary colors, all with the little tic-tac-toes on the bottoms. Mrs. Morgan seemed like an intelligent woman to be spending so much energy on socks. Hadn’t she gone to law school? Could you be overqualified for this job?
    Carmen thought of her mother sitting at the kitchen table of the old house, dragging a fork along the bottoms of Carmen’s new birthday-party shoes so Carmen wouldn’t slip on the shiny floors at Lena’s house.
    Downstairs, Carmen called her mom at work. “Hi,” she said when her mom answered. That was really all she wanted to say.
    “
Nena,
I’m glad you called.” Christina was breathless. “I’m going out for dinner with David tonight. If that’s okay. There’s, uh, lasagna in the freezer.” Her mother sounded distracted. Not distracted as in looking for the stapler, but deeply distracted.
    “Really? Again?” Carmen paused awhile, wishing her mother would pick up on her mood.
    “I won’t be late,” her mother assured her. “It’s crazy this week.”
    “Well. Okay.” Carmen’s voice was soft. “Bye.”
    There had definitely been a time, maybe as recently as the day before, when Carmen would have loved the idea of a night with the apartment all to herself. But right now she didn’t.
    An