Where The Heart Is by Elizabeth Lowell

Author:Elizabeth Lowell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Man-Woman Relationships, Contemporary, General, Romance, California, Historical, Fiction, Love Stories
ISBN: 9780380767632
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1985-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The math workbook looked as frayed as Billy had before Shelley began helping him. Now she was sitting on the floor near him, because she had discovered that he preferred doing homework where Squeeze couldn’t snake off and hide.

The boa delighted in curling up inside desk drawers, beneath sofa cushions, and in sunny corners behind furniture. After a few frantic hours of turning the house upside down looking for a rosy boa, she had decreed that the snake stayed in her bedroom, where the hiding places were limited.

At the moment, Billy was sitting cross-legged wearing Squeeze coiled around his narrow waist.

“But if they don’t tell me the length or the width of the room,” he argued, “how can I—Nudge, back off—know the area?”

Nudge gave the boy a hurt look and stopped pawing at Squeeze, who was slowly uncoiling from the boy’s waist.

Warily Shelley kept one eye on the wildlife and one eye on the math.

“You do know the dimensions of the room,” she said.

“I do?”

“Think about it. How long is the room? Not in feet or inches, but as though you were describing it to a friend.”

He frowned and pushed aside a snaky coil that was covering a diagram in the math book.

“Twice as long as it is wide?” he asked finally.

“Good!”

“Yeah, but they want feet and inches and stuff.”

“We’re getting there. Now, if—back off, cat.”

She snagged Nudge by the scruff. The cat batted with sheathed claws at a firm section of boa slithering by.

“If you call the width X—enough, Nudge!—what would you call the length?” she asked.

“Twice X?”

“Close.”

“Oh, two X, like in problem three.”

“Right!”

Dawning excitement lit Billy’s lean features. “Then the area is X times two X, right?”

“Twice right.”

He gave her a quick smile and bent over the workbook.

She held on to Nudge and watched the boy attack the assignment with real enthusiasm. He wrote confidently and rarely erased. Once he had accepted the idea that X could stand for anything, anytime, anywhere, he was happy to put X to use.

As Shelley had guessed, he had a quick, inquiring mind, though at first it had been a test of wills to get him to use his mind for anything other than stubbornness and evasion.

To Billy’s surprise, she had proved to be more stubborn than he was and every bit as quick.

The intercom buzzed.

“That’s probably your mother,” Shelley said. “Go ahead and let her in.”

Squeeze slithered off in a heap as the boy bounced to his feet. The snake started coiling across the room in search of new mountains to conquer.

Billy pressed down the intercom button. “Door’s open, Mother, c’mon in. We’ll be up as soon as Shelley helps me with my last math problem and we put Squeeze away.”

He flipped off the intercom and flopped on the bedroom floor with the coltish grace that only teenagers have.

Shelley stared at him, surprised that he hadn’t run upstairs to say hello to his mother. After all, he hadn’t seen JoLynn for six days.

“This can wait while you say hi,” Shelley said.

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