Read Online The Summer of Riley by Eve Bunting - Free Book Online Page B

Ellis and Duane be back tomorrow or would one day of standing out there on Main Street be enough for them?
    They were there when we got to Main Street the next day at ten after nine. But our yellow flyers had all disappeared from the trees and telephone poles.
    Grace and I marched up to Duane and Ellis. “You took down our notices, didn’t you?” I said.
    “Us?” Duane gave a little titter. “We wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
    “You know we’re just going to put them up again,” Grace said.
    “You know we’re just going to take them down again,” Ellis mocked. It was amazing the way he could make himself sound like Grace, only soppy and silly.
    I stuck out my lip. “It’s illegal to take those down,” I said. “You’ll see. I’m going to talk to our lawyer.”
    Ellis hooted with laughter, and Duane joined in. “Your lawyer? Give me a break.”
    “Come on, Grace,” I said.
    And then I noticed something I hadn’t really noticed before. There were more people on Main Street than usual for this early in the morning. They gathered in small clusters along the sidewalk, talking loudly, even angrily. I heard bits of conversations. “If this dog gets off … what happens next time?” “… my two lambs last spring up on Plain Meadow?” “Wasn’t that coyotes?” “Coulda been. Coulda been a dog, though.” “Yeah, well, I have two collies that would never …”
    Grace and I pushed our way between them. They stopped talking till we had passed.
    “What’s happening?” Grace whispered to me.
    “I think they’re taking sides,” I whispered back.
    “Yeah. But I don’t see too many on ours,” Grace muttered.
    We stood where we’d stood yesterday. A man moved close to me. He had a handmade banner that said THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
    For a minute I didn’t know whether he was talking about Riley, or all those dead lambs, but then he said, “Is it okay if I stand behind you with this?” I realized he was for us, and I nodded. “Sure, help yourself.”
    Main Street was lined with cars. Kids from school stopped by to talk to us. “Man! That Ellis Porter! He’s such a toad! Gimme your petition and I’ll sign it.”
    I had a feeling the signers had to be registered voters or at least over eighteen, but I was happy to take every name I could get.
    A man stopped and asked me if I knew about red pepper. “Put it on your dog’s nose every time he looks at another animal and he’ll not go near it,” he said.
    “Really?”
    He nodded. “Try it when you get him back.”
    I held on to those words, saying them over and over to myself. “When I get him back.”
    We cycled home for peanut butter toast and cherries and a rest on the porch. Riley used to lie there on the step, snapping at flies. Sometimes he’d rest his head on the big roll of butyl liner. Where was he lying now?
    “I’m tired,” Grace said.
    “Me too.”
    We sat in the cool for a while, drinking iced tea. It comes from a package, but Mom puts lemon slices and mint leaves in it and it’s delicious. I could hear her in the kitchen, working on the computer.
    Grace pushed lazily in the glider. “Sure would benice to take the afternoon off.”
    “I’m not going to.”
    After a minute, she said, “I’m not either.”
    We picked up our bikes and wheeled back down the driveway, past Peachie’s house. She was nowhere to be seen, but the Sultan was peacefully grazing over by the barn. Peachie’s roses were in bloom against the fence. Would she bring bunches of them to us this year? Mom loves them so much. “They smell like summer,” she says.
    I felt this awful suffocating sadness, as if everything in the world were wrong and nothing would ever be the same again. “Sweet William,” Peachie used to call me, and I had this faraway memory of when I was very small and Peachie would call out to me, “Over here, Sweet William.”
    I reached inside me for that cold anger I’d felt against her, and I had trouble finding it. She’d done