Better to Wish by Ann M. Martin

Author:Ann M. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Sarah arrived just before lunch. “Bye, Mother. Bye, Dad,” she called as the Moresides waved from the windows of their car.

“How long can you stay?” Abby asked her.

“Mother said they’ll be busy for three or four hours. Let’s go play with the baby first. Please? Can I hold her?”

“In a bit,” said Abby. “She’s napping now.”

“You’re so lucky to have a brother and sisters.”

“Yeah,” said Rose, “but at your house on Christmas morning, you get all the presents.”

“Rose?” called Pop’s voice from the parlor. “That sounded greedy.”

Rose looked at the floor. “Sorry, Pop,” she replied.

Lunch was chicken soup and cinnamon toast served at the kitchen table, Fred kicking his heels noisily against his high chair. Abby’s parents ate in the dining room, much to the girls’ relief.

“Done!” Rose cried suddenly, drinking the last swallow of soup directly from her bowl. She cast a nervous glance toward the dining room. “Let’s go now.”

“Where are we going?” asked Sarah.

“Into town?” Abby suggested.

“Let’s play in the snow first,” said Rose. “We’ve hardly had any snow so far.”

This was true. Except for a surprise snowfall in the middle of October, the autumn had been unusually mild.

“What do you want to do?” Abby asked Sarah.

Sarah screwed up her face. “Take a walk?” she said finally.

“Take a walk?!” exclaimed Rose, dismayed. “You sound like the grown-ups.” But when Abby and Sarah bundled up and left the house, she followed them.

Snow had started to fall again, and Abby and Sarah scuffed through it in their lace-up boots. “Are you going to walk with us or not?” Abby shouted, without turning around.

“How did you know I was here?” Rose called.

“You’re noisy. Come on. Catch up.”

“Are you going to talk about boys?”

Sarah laughed. “What boys?”

“Any boys.”

“No. We’re talking about what we want for Christmas.”

“I want a dog,” said Rose, hurrying to Abby’s side.

“A sister,” said Sarah.

“Poetry books,” said Abby.

“You just want poetry books because Zander likes poetry,” said Rose.

The girls emerged from a grove of fir trees at the western edge of town and found themselves at the top of a small hill.

“Look, there’s Miller’s Pond,” said Sarah, pointing to the bottom of the hill. “Last one there’s a rotten egg.”

Sarah took off down the hill, slipping in the snow and laughing, her legs pumping faster and faster. Abby and Rose ran after her. At the bottom of the hill, Abby skidded to a stop, Rose running into her, but Sarah kept going and called breathlessly over her shoulder, “I’ll bet the pond’s frozen now!”

“No, it isn’t!” Abby called back. “Not after one snowstorm! Sarah, stop!”

“Stop, stop!” shouted Rose.

But Sarah laughed and sped up, and when she reached the old, ragged stalks of cattails at the edge of the pond, she leaped through them, skidding across the fragile sheet of ice that had formed. Abby could see puddles of water around some of the cattails and she remembered the previous winter when she and Zander and Rose had stood at this same spot after school one day and watched a dog step curiously onto the snowy pond and fall through the ice.

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