Read Online Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry by Susan Vaught - Free Book Online Page A

like Avadelle Richardson with all her awards.
    According to Mom and Indri, I had an “expressive face.” Maybe that would help me scare the snot of people if I decided to tell spooky tales.
    I had a sudden image of Grandma, asleep at home in her hospital bed, her thin fingers gripping the white sheets like they were all that kept her from floating up to Heaven. My throat tightened. Grandma always thought I was smart andspecial. My parents said that stuff to me, but Grandma really made me feel it, whenever she looked at me and smiled at me. Back when she remembered me, anyway.
    I really, really missed her, even though she was still alive. Sort of. Jeez, even thinking stuff like that made me feel guilty. I slid my pack into my lap, and carefully eased out the page from Grandma’s packet that I had been reading this morning.
    . . . On your second birthday, I gave you a magnetic alphabet board with big purple letters, and your daddy about had kittens when you threw those letters every which place and they kept wrecking his vacuum cleaner. You were running ninety miles an hour up and down the halls, and you could say so many words, but NO and WHY were your favorites. By the next year, you were spelling all kinds of things on that alphabet board, and I told everybody how you’d take after me and write for a living. . . .
    â€œEarth to Dani.” Indri poked my shoulder.
    When I looked at her, I realized she was getting to her feet. Everyone was. Reality seeped back into my brain, and my legs felt like concrete. Worse than that, I had a seriouslybad case of mat-butt. I tucked the pages back into the envelope and put it in my pack.
    Indri yawned and stretched. “Lunch time. And then we’re going to the Grove to draw or take a break if you don’t want to sketch.”
    I pushed myself off the mat and stomped my feet to wake them up. Indri was good at sketching, not me. But my grandmother thought I’d take after her and write books. That made me happy. She was telling me again how smart she thought I was, even though she couldn’t really talk to me anymore.
    How awesome was that?

6
A N I MPLIED P ROMISE
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    Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 163
    â€œI took a class in peaceful resistance,” Leslie Marks told me a few weeks later as I held a dropper over a cut on her right shoulder and dripped Mercurochrome on the broken skin, staining her bright red.
    â€œOuch!” she hollered. “That stings.”
    I blew on the cut just like I blew on my son’s skinned-up knees, to lessen the ache, then I covered the spot with a Band-Aid strip. “Well, they should have taught you to duck when people’s throwing rocks.”
    â€œI can’t believe that happened,” she said. “He had on a business suit. I think he works at the bank where I put my money!”
    â€œHoney, you’re a White woman walking out of Mt.Zion. He knows why you’re here. He knows what you are.” I glanced past her to the door to the bedroom where my mother lay sleeping, fighting off cancer as best she could. When I was young and fresh back from Chicago and college with all that I thought I knew, did I try her patience like Leslie tried mine?
    Leslie frowned. “He called me some of those names, yeah. He told me exactly what he thinks I am.”
    I put my first aid kit back together and closed it up with my red-stained fingers. “Just being at my house on this side of town, you know that can earn you a lot worse than a rock to the shoulder.”
    â€œI’m not scared of those people, CiCi.”
    â€œYou should be,” I said.
    T HE AFTERNOON BREEZE FELT WARM on my arms as Indri and I sat at our wooden picnic table in the Grove. The rest of the class had scattered to the other tables, and Indri had a case of pastels open in front of her. She busily shaded the devil-horse she had drawn on her sketchpad, using first black, then a