Spoonhandle by Ruth Moore

Author:Ruth Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Islandport Press
Published: 2020-10-26T18:11:25+00:00

Part Three

Donny Mitchell sat on the stringpiece of the fish­wharf, listlessly dangling his feet and looking off over the harbor. The weather was warm for the last of March, but the gusty little breeze that blew around the wharf buildings and made dark riffles off over the sunny water was chilly in quite an unpleasant way on the back of his neck. It made him wish he hadn’t shucked his heavy underwear quite so soon. The thin summer stuff he had on under his pants and jacket sure did let the cold right through to his skin.

This morning when he’d got up to see the sun shining and the sky such a bright clear blue, he’d felt that winter was surely gone for good. If Mis Mackay’d been up and around, he wouldn’t have dared to dig out his summer underwear. She’d have been after him like a ton of bricks, just as soon as she went up to make his bed and saw the thick union suit lying there across the chair.

But Mis Mackay was sick. She’d been in bed for two weeks with bronchitis, almost pneumonia, and Jory, her boy Dave’s wife, had had to come on from Somerville to nurse her through it.

That Jory wouldn’t give a hang if Donny walked out of the house start-nakid. She was just about the kind of tough skinny female you might expect Mis Mackay’s boy Dave to marry. She made Donny think there were worse people in the world than Mis Mackay.

Jory ran the house and him, too, ragged. She kept after him to do things and to wait on her from the time he got up till he went to school, from the time he got home in the afternoon till he went to bed. Mis Mackay always had made a touse about him doing his schoolwork evenings, but that Jory didn’t even give him a chance to do that. She was always digging up a job.

It was pretty important just now that he do his schoolwork, and a lot of it. All last fall he’d coasted along, not caring whether he finished eighth grade or not, and he’d got way behind the class. But since the day Sam Freeman had told him he had a good build for a basketball center, and implied that he might have a chance to get on the team if he got to high school, Donny had buckled down to make up work. He had an even chance to pass now, the teacher told him, if he did all right on the spring tests. They’d be coming up next month. And so, now, here was that Jory, yapping around Mis Mackay’s house from morning till night, never giving him a minute’s peace.

He’d got away from her today, though. It was Saturday, and he’d made up his mind when he heard her up in the night tending to Mis Mackay. She’d sleep later than usual, and by the time she got up, he’d be gone.

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