A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck

Author:Richard Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Kids
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

10

One Too Many

The Shellabarger place was known for miles around. Abraham Lincoln had slept in the milk house on his way to Bement. That was when the milk house was a log dwelling. Old Man Shellabarger had built the present structure in 1878, with gingerbread porches and a tower as tall as a silo.

The Pickle had gas in it now, but Dad never thought to drive. We ran all the way, kicking through the leaves of the sleeping town. At the Shellabargers’, the porch light lit the yard.

A car was piled up at the foot of the front steps. It had swerved off the road, jumped the ditch, bounced off the mounting block, and plowed a furrow across the lawn. A car door was off and over in a flowerbed. The frame was way out of whack. The car was scrap iron now and hadn’t been worth much even before it tried to climb the Shellabargers’ front steps. An old DeSoto, with mud flaps and a pair of squirrel tails. One-eyed as I recalled it, with a slipping clutch and a Hollywood muffler. The taillights were still on, but the driver was long gone.

We hit the porch steps at a gallop. Miss Flora Shellabarger swung open the tall front doors.

Phyllis was on a settee in the big, shadowy front room. She had an ice pack on her head and both eyes were already black. Her skirt was ripped, and her sock hop socks weren’t so fresh now. She looked pale and washed out, even with lipstick on. The minute she saw Mother and Dad, she felt a lot worse and fell back, clutching her head carefully.

Mother and Dad moved up on her. They checked her over and felt her head under the ice pack. They lifted her chin and examined her black eyes. She looked like a somewhat dazed muskrat, in barrettes.

Mother looked long and hard at her. “Sock hop?” Mother said. Phyllis shrank, though only a little.

Mrs. Dowdel and Miss Cora Shellabarger barged in behind us. They’d fallen back in the dash across town. Mrs. Dowdel could have kept up, but Miss Cora was wearing yarn house slippers, with pompoms.

Mrs. Dowdel filled up every space, even this vast room. She lifted her nose, and her specs gleamed. “What’s that smell?” she inquired. Miss Flora stiffened. There were a lot of smells. It was the eighty-year-old house of a couple of eighty-year-old women.

“Smells like a brewery,” Mrs. Dowdel observed. “I wouldn’t say no to a Miller High Life myself, after that sprint across town.”

“Well, I never!” Miss Flora yanked her bathrobe ties tight. “Mrs. Dowdel, I’ll have you to know Papa was teetotal and Mama was a founding member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I myself turned down a perfectly good offer of marriage from a man because he drank.”

“Orville Butz,” Mrs. Dowdel recalled.

“Never you mind who it was,” Miss Flora snapped, cutting short the local history. “Liquor never crossed our threshold. This is a Methodist home.”

Miss Flora was a lot feistier than Miss Cora, but Mrs.

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