Read Online What the Waves Know by Tamara Valentine - Free Book Online Page B

tires of Mr. O’Malley’s Thunderbird crunched past a tidy stone carriage house through whose doors I fully expected seven midget men to whistle their way into view. It was cinnamon-sugar warm; the sort of place where a chimney fills the yard with applewood smoke in the fall, and whose shallow knolls seemed to tremble with children giggling their way through a toboggan race. Autumn roses climbed the chimney bricks and spilled over the roof in huge cotton-candy tufts; wisteria tangled so thickly around the garden its vines had long ago wrestled the chicken wire to the ground. The whole scene shooed away formality in a way Grandma Jo would have adored.
    â€œSit back and relax.” Remy laughed. “That old hovel belongs to me. The Booth House is at the very end of Knockberry Lane.” Remy must have noticed the corners of my mouth change direction, because she gave my knee a quick squeeze, adding, “But I have high hopes that you’ll visit. Lord knows I could make good use of two more hands bringing in the cabbages and carrots. If I don’t get ’em harvested just as soon as they’re ready the wildlife around here will have them for supper. That crazy old Goliath in the front seat has a history of putting out salt licks. Now every form of cotton-tailed rodent on the island lives in my back orchard. There used to be gardens all through here. My mother would save her potato shavings all winter long and at the first thaw, she’d be out seasoning the soil. Priming the pot, she used to call it.” Remy laughed again.
    My mother jerked around in her seat, locking eyes with Remy, and for a long second not a peep came from anyone. I looked back and forth between them curiously.
    â€œAnyway . . . ,” Remy finally said. “Well, they aren’t so grand anymore, but the damn deer seem to like them just the same.”
    There came a chortle from the driver’s seat, followed by the muffled chhh of a match striking against Thomas O’Malley’s jeans. He dragged the flame to the pipe bowl in slow motion and touched it to the ball of tobacco, setting Remy to shaking her head again, the thin red ringlets at her neck bobbing like miniature Slinkys.
    â€œGo ahead, grill your damn lungs. But don’t think I’m feeding those rabid mongrels you’re so damn fond of when you drop over gasping for air,” she grumbled.
    â€œMy lungs are just fine. It’s my ears that are aching.” He chuckled, smiling at her in the rearview mirror. The statement said “Go on and zip your lips,” but the way Mr. O’Malley wrapped it all up sounded a lot more like “I love you, too.”
    I glanced down at the journal in my lap. That was the problem with getting a phrase to sing the way you wanted it to. You could get the words all straight and neat between the lines, but the meaning was in the way they zigzagged toward a person when you gave them life. Mr. O’Malley and Remy tossed words into the space between them like a father tossing a child in the air and spinning around until both were laughing great big belly laughs. They could say, “You’re a big old pain in my ass,” and know it really meant “You are the sparkle in my stars and the wind in my wings,” because each knew no matter how dizzy the universe got, the other would never let them hit the ground when it went off kilter.
    The small stone inside my front pocket grew heavy, and my throat tightened. During the last eight years, I had rubbed its edges soft. In my back pocket, the corners of Grandma Jo’s map poked into my hip and I wondered, not for the first time that day, where my father was, if his fingers missed the feel of my hair running through them.
    For months after my father left, I slept in my parents’bed with my mother on one side of me and Grandma Jo on the other, my face buried in my father’s pillow. The fact of the matter is, I knew in the darkest