When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood

Author:Monica Wood [Wood, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I slip over to the Vaillancourts’ as often as I can, where Denise and I sit on the whaleback of grass that passes for her front yard, planning stakeouts or refining our code or reading Nancy’s next case, Denise trying to puzzle out the plot’s secrets in advance. My own secret is that I’m waiting for Mr. Vaillancourt to come home.

I wait for him.

I watch him.

I love him.

Every moment in his company feels desperate and vanishing.

“Don’t tell me what happens,” Denise warns me, looking up from her book. She’s reading volume 9, the one where Nancy saves an orphan who turns out to be an heiress.

“Keep your eye on the guardians, that’s all I’m saying.”

What I’ve been reading in the Times is also a mystery. Employees of Oxford Paper Company, goes the United Mine Workers’ quarter-page ad, you owe it to yourself and your future to obtain the from the UPP officials . . . Watch the UPP when you demand in , guarantees to ensure your .

This sounds like the dramatic talk of Suspicious Characters, so I ask Mr. Vaillancourt what “squirm and twist” means. Mostly I want to hear his heartening voice. His is name is Omer, but everyone calls him Oats. When I imagine him climbing the massive machinery—which I do, often—he seems too small for a job like that, too handsome and wavy-haired. I imagine his path having crossed Dad’s every day at the gates:

Hello, Red!

Hello, Oats!

There’s a contract negotiation coming right up, Mr. Vaillancourt explains; a tough one. Management wants change and the papermakers don’t. The United Pulp and Paperworkers union has been signing up members, lobbying to replace the existing union.

“Is that what you wanted to know?” he says, standing by the sink in his coveralls, unpacking his lunch pail. I have followed him inside.

“I guess so.”

He looks at me. French, soft-spoken, and young, Mr. Vaillancourt isn’t much like Dad, but he goes to work on the morning shift like Dad, wears hard-used boots exactly like Dad’s. Are my eyes filling? I don’t know what I’m after, but he does. “Your father was still one of us,” he says.

My father: promoted to foreman but a union man to the bone. A light blinks on inside me.

Mr. Vaillancourt pats my head. “It’s good that you’re paying attention.”

I nod, yes, yes, I’m paying attention! The Vaillancourts, like everybody else, have a Times lying out where anyone can pick it up. Sometimes I read it over here. On this day there is likely a front-page photo of the Oxford’s president, Bill Chisholm—grandson of the first Hugh Chisholm, son of the second Hugh Chisholm, the third Chisholm to make his way in paper. He’s handing out a scholarship, or planting a tree, or cutting a ribbon for the new steam plant or power station or grinding room, always in that good dark suit. A Yale man in heavy, bookish eyeglasses, Bill is in his seventh year at the helm, following the four-decade tenure of his father, the great Hugh II, whose legacy still burns high in the breasts of Mexico’s fathers.

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