Under the Watsons' Porch by Susan Shreve

Author:Susan Shreve [Shreve, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54854-2
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2004-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

8. The Sunporch

It's Monday afternoon and Milo has started swim lessons and I think my parents have left to clean up their classrooms for summer, packing away the books and student papers and costumes in the theater closet at my mother's school.

Tommy and I are in the potting shed, which my mom uses for gardening, looking for seeds—zucchini or corn or squash or even flower seeds—but we can't seem to find any on the shelves.

“We can buy some at the drugstore,” I say as I look through a tool case.

“We'll find some.” Tommy is rummaging in the back of an old bookcase where my mother keeps her little cardboard pots, which she fills with seeds every spring and puts in the ground in summer after the seeds have sprouted. “Here's one,” he says, handing me a package of zucchini seeds.

I slip it into my pocket.

“Aren't you going to open it to see what they look like?” he asks. “They could be rat poison, you know. I read about a boy served rat poison in his cereal.”

“Seeds are seeds,” I say, heading for the door, planning to go with Tommy into our empty house, get out the wine-glasses and lemonade and chocolate chip cookies my mom made last night for a snack, and sit on the front porch with our feet on the railing.

But I'm just out the potting shed door when I hear my mom screaming “El-ea-nor!” and all this time I've thought she was at school with my dad packing up for summer.

El-ea-nor means bad news, so I tell Tommy I've got to go and so does he and I'll call him from the sunporch as soon as I know what's up with my annoying mother.

“My mom is always changing her mind,” I say. “She promised she'd be at school with my dad all morning. And she's here.”

“And you can't bring me in the house like an ordinary friend because your parents think I'm a criminal?” He's standing outside the potting shed, his hands in his pockets, in full view of my mother who's probably in the kitchen looking out the window at us.

“Something like that,” I say.

“Tell them I'm only a petty thief,” he says, and takes off, jumping over the fence.

As it turns out, only my father has gone to clean his classroom. My mother is on the telephone with Clarissa Bowers.

“Have you seen Tommy Bowers?” she asks when I burst into the kitchen.

“No,” I reply. “I saw him earlier. He was headed up to the shops.”

“He's headed up to the shops,” my mom says to Clarissa Bowers.

Probably at this very moment while Clarissa is standing in the kitchen with the telephone in her hand saying goodbye to my mom, Tommy is walking in the back door.

“I thought you were going to school today,” I say, reaching into the cookie jar.

“Well, I didn't.”

“Evidently,” I say.

“Why don't you have some carrots?” she says. “I've got a fresh bag of the tiny ones in the fridge.”

“Because I want a cookie,” I say, sitting in a chair, looking sullen I imagine.

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