You Are My Only by Beth Kephart

Author:Beth Kephart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781606842850
Publisher: EgmontUSA
Published: 2011-11-18T23:00:00+00:00

By the time Joey comes home, I am recovered and the kite’s in hiding, with its long Rapunzel tail. “Now, that’s making quite a statement,” Miss Helen said before Miss Cloris wheeled her away to the back room.

Miss Cloris cleaned the kitchen of its cotton scraps, hid the kite somewhere upstairs, came back down and sat with me, drumming her fingers on the table. Finally she asked if I knew anything about making sand tarts, and when I shook my head no, she said, “Never harmed anyone, making two batches of cookies in a single day.” Five things, she told me, is all that we’d need—the butter, which she’d have to soften; the vanilla extract, which I found in the pantry; the confectioners’ sugar; which is the snow version of sugar, the flour, a softer snow than sugar; and pecans, minced down to nothing. We kept our voices low, and Harvey behaved. we pressed the sweet dough into star shapes, ate the morning’s chocolate chips while we worked. “Forty-five minutes at two-seventy-five,” Miss Cloris told me when the trays were oven-ready. “Miss Helen likes them brown around the edges.”

We set the timer after that, cleaned up the kitchen. We talked about anything but kites, anything excepting Mother, anything at all excluding Miss Helen and her weakness. We each had our hurt spots, I was coming to see, and Miss Cloris was kind, and sometimes she’d say, “Life goes by faster than it ought to,” and I’d say, “But sometimes time moves too slow,” and either way we weren’t judging each other, and when I walked across the kitchen to stare past the alley and around the tree and back on the house where I was living, Miss Cloris didn’t ask me for feelings or explaining, only said, “Those crows ought to pay rent, for all the time they spend up on those branches.”

I didn’t hear Joey until he came through the door, dropped his backpack to the floor, took Harvey’s front paws onto his shoulders. “You big old beast,” he was saying when I turned around. He smiled his bright white crooked teeth at me. His eyes are on the black side of blue. His hair is like a thousand Slinkys, springing, and his shoulders are built out wide, his body lean. His shorts hung low. He wore no laces in his high-tops. He had a bruise below one knee, fading off to green.

“You’re home early,” Miss Cloris told him.

“Mr. Shoe took sick.”

“Is that right?”

“It is.”

“You wash up, now. Miss Helen’s waiting.”

Harvey whined when Joey set him down, looked like he might jump again. “You never learn, do you, dog?” Joey said, but Harvey yipped like he was sure that Joey would return from around the corner and up the stairs, which, eventually, he did. I followed him to the back room and Miss Cloris followed in time with her plate of browned sand tarts, and we all settled in for the reading—Miss Helen’s nothing weight against Joey’s shoulder, Minxy on my lap, Miss Cloris beside me.

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