The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge (38 page)

Except maybe Wade. He’d probably miss her some.

The thought of her little brother missing her—maybe even crying for her—made her cry even harder. He was only seven, and he still didn’t really understand that his father wasn’t coming back or why. For that matter, neither did Dallas.

It was bad enough that her father had died, but dying so suddenly, without even having been sick, had denied his family the chance to say good-bye. Ned MacGregor’s heart attack, at age forty, had come totally without warning. Dallas had gone to the viewing and the funeral with her mother’s sister, Lynette, who’d flown up from Florida as soon as she’d heard, but the still man in the wooden box surrounded by flowers didn’t look anything like her father, even though everyone said it was really him.

Maybe that had been another lie.

And then to have her mother send her and Wade away for the whole rest of the summer … why, that all but made them orphans. Unwanted and alone like Anne Shirley, in
Anne of Green Gables
. Her eleven-year-old’s sense of drama awakened, she would now be Dallas of … of …

Did Aunt Berry’s house have a name? She wasn’t even sure what a gable was, so it was hard to tell if the house had any of those.

Dallas sat up and wiped the tears from her face with the backs of her hands. Her arms wrapped
around her knees, she stared out at the river, feeling immensely sorry for herself. She just wanted someone to tell her why her father had been taken from them, and why her mother seemed so far away even before they left home to come here, and why she’d left her son and daughter in St. Dennis when she returned to Dunellen where they lived.

Her father had always told her that the only stupid question was the one you didn’t ask when you didn’t know, but what if you ask and no one has an answer that makes any sense? Her mother certainly hadn’t made any sense when she told Dallas she just wanted “you kids to have a good summer and enjoy yourselves.” Obviously another lie.

Dallas began to sob again, so loudly that she didn’t hear the girls who had parked their bikes under the trees and were creeping up behind her.

“Look at the crybaby, crying like a baby.” One of the girls stood in front of Dallas, her fists on her hips, her face an ugly mask of derision. “Do you do anything but cry, little baby?”

“ ‘My daddy died, boo-hoo,’ ” one of the others mocked, rubbing her eyes.

“Maybe you should be riding that bike instead of sitting around,” the girl to Dallas’s left taunted. “Maybe you wouldn’t be such a pudge.”

Dallas’s stomach clenched, and for a moment, she was afraid she’d throw up. She tried to think of something to say that would make them shut up and go away, but there were five of them and only one of her, and humiliation had clouded her mind and cut off all hope of coming up with something smart or clever to say.

“Go away,” was the only thing she could think of. “Just go away and leave me alone.”

“Who’s gonna make us?” The girl who was standing behind Dallas poked her in the back.

“Maybe I will.”

The boy had come out of nowhere, but he walked up the riverbank with a fishing rod in one hand and a bucket in the other. “Brooke, why don’t you take your stupid friends and just get lost?”

“Or what, Grant?” A girl with dark blond hair in a long ponytail stepped out from behind Dallas.

“Or maybe I’ll toss this bucket of worms on you.” The boy held up the bucket.

“You wouldn’t dare.” She smirked.

He did.

The girls screamed, swatted the worms away, and ran for their bikes. When the girl who’d issued the dare reached the trees, she turned around and called back over her shoulder in a singsong voice, “Grant’s in love with Pudge!” and the others took up the chant.

The boy ignored them and sat down next to Dallas on the ground. For a long time he didn’t speak. When he did, he said, “You ever been fishing?”

Still so embarrassed she dared not speak, she shook her head no.

“Come on down by the water.” He stood. “If you want to, that is.”

Dallas couldn’t tell him that all she really wanted was to go home and have things be the way they used to be, with her mother and father and brother, so she didn’t say anything. He walked down to the river’s edge and sat on the bank and threaded a worm onto the hook that was hanging from the rod’s line. He
turned to look over his shoulder before casting the hook out into the river with a flick of his wrist. She sat and watched while time and again he reeled in the line, only to put another worm on the hook to replace the one that was missing, and cast back out again.

“Why do you keep doing that?” she called to him.

“What?” He half turned. “I can’t hear you. Come down here if you want to ask me something.”

She hesitated, then looked behind her and found the taunting chorus had disappeared. She got up and joined him. “I asked you why you keep putting more worms on that hook and throwing it back into the river.”

He shrugged. “I figure something out there must be eating the bait but is smart enough to avoid getting hooked. Maybe it’ll get careless and take the hook one of these times.”

“Maybe you’ll keep losing your worms.”

“Maybe. Plenty more where they came from.”

They sat for a few minutes in silence, then he asked, “How old are you?”

She looked up into his eyes. “Eleven.”

“You’re small for eleven. I’m almost twelve.”

“Maybe you’re big for almost twelve,” she said, and he smiled, the ends of his mouth turning up.

“I am. Everyone says so.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Grant. What’s yours?”

“Dallas,” she told him. “Dallas MacGregor.”

“You’re Miss B’s niece, aren’t you?”

“Grandniece,” she corrected him. “Aunt Berry is my dad’s aunt.” Her throat constricted just to say the
word “dad.” When it passed, she asked, “Do you know Aunt Berry?”

“Everybody knows her. She’s a famous movie star. She’s the only famous person who ever lived in St. Dennis.”

He looked down into her face and stared at her for a moment, then said, “You do know that she’s a famous movie star, don’t you?”

“Of course. I’m not stupid.” She frowned. “She’s my aunt. Great-aunt.”

“No one thinks you’re stupid,” he told her.

“Those girls do,” she said softly.

“Those girls who were here before?” He shrugged. “They don’t know anything. None of them do.”

“Do you go to school with them?”

“Uh-huh. They were all in my class this year.” He reeled in the line and started over.

“Why were they mean to me?” she whispered.

“They’re mean to everyone. Especially Brooke.”

“Are they mean to you?”

He laughed. “Like I would care.”

She wanted to thank him for making himself a target for her sake, but couldn’t figure out the right way to say it.
Thank you for making them stop calling me names?
It just sounded dumb so she didn’t try.

“Why did you chase them away?”

“Because I hate it when people are mean and say mean things for no reason at all.”

They sat in silence again. Finally, Dallas heard herself say, “My father died. He had a heart attack and died while I was at camp.”

“I know.”

“Everyone says I’ll see him again when I get to
heaven, but I don’t know where heaven is. People say it’s up there”—she pointed toward the sky—“but if they’ve never been there, how would they know?”

“I don’t think grown-ups know as much as they pretend.”

“Where do you think heaven is?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I think it’s wherever God wants it to be. He doesn’t have to tell us where.”

She thought this over and it made sense. It was the first thing that had in weeks.

“I think I’d better get back to Aunt Berry’s,” she told him after a while. “She might start to worry.”

“I’ll walk you back.” He started reeling in the line.

“You don’t have to, but thanks.”

“I want to. Besides, I’m done fishing for the day.”

“But you didn’t catch anything yet,” she pointed out.

“I didn’t really expect to.” He secured the hook to the rod and picked up the bucket. “I just like to come and sit by the river sometimes. Fishing’s just an excuse to be here.”

She walked off to get her bike then returned to the path that followed the flow of the river, and joined her new friend. They were almost to Berry’s house when he said softly, “My little sister died in April. She was only four, and she was sick for a really long time.”

Dallas was so stunned that at first she couldn’t speak. When she finally found her voice, she said, “I am so sorry.”

“Yeah.” He nodded solemnly. “So am I.…”

*   *   *

From downstream on the riverbank, Grant had watched the small army of girls descend on the unsuspecting new kid who’d been sitting by herself for the past twenty minutes or so. Grant had been on his way to a point about a hundred yards beyond where the girl sat when he’d heard her sobbing as if her heart was about to break. Not wanting to walk past her, because that would likely embarrass her to have someone see her crying like that, he’d set up to fish where he’d been when he first heard her. The sound of her weeping had made him sad: it would make anyone feel sad for her. Except those bored and stupid girls who decided that they’d have a little fun at her expense.

One thing Grant Wyler had no tolerance for was mean.

Not that he’d ever borne the brunt of it. He was the biggest kid in the class and the most popular, partly because he didn’t have an ounce of mean in him. He’d always taken up for the underdog, and anyone in grade school who had a lick of sense knew that on any given day, anyone could be the dog on the bottom. So it made good sense to be nice to Grant—he was everyone’s ace in the hole.

He’d seen Brooke Madison cut down other kids for no reason other than she could, and he didn’t think it was fair that the new girl couldn’t even sit and have a good cry without being bullied.

Grant had known why Dallas was crying—he knew that her father had died not long ago and that she’d been sent to St. Dennis because he’d heard the grown-ups talking. He’d heard his parents talking about how the sudden death of Ned—Dallas’s father—had
nearly broken Berry Eberle’s heart: He had been the favorite of her late sister’s children. For a while, back when Ned was a boy, he’d spent so much time in St. Dennis with Berry, there was speculation that he was not her sister Sylvie’s son, but Berry’s. Grant’s parents had pooh-poohed the story whenever they heard it repeated, but there was still the slightest wisp of doubt in some circles.

Not that any of that mattered to Grant, though he suspected it might matter to Dallas if she ever heard the gossip. What did matter was that after he’d sat down next to her, she’d looked up into his face, and the minute he’d looked into those strange-colored eyes, he’d felt a little zip inside, and he knew that she was going to be something really special in his life. He didn’t know how he knew, but since his sister, Natalie, died, he’d had a number of these moments where things just happened and he knew to pay attention to them.

On instinct, he’d offered her his friendship, and she’d accepted. When it came time for her to leave, he’d walked her back to Miss B’s big house on River Road, then walked himself the rest of the way to his home on the opposite side of town. He went into the backyard, where his mother was working in her garden. Since Natalie died, she spent most of her time out there alone.

When his mother asked him what he’d caught, he’d told her honestly that he’d been dropping his line in a place where he figured he wasn’t going to catch much of anything. It was hard to explain to anyone why he wanted to be around the river, but his mother seemed to understand without him telling her that that was
where he felt closest to Natalie, because it was quiet there and he could be alone with his thoughts. He figured that was pretty much why she spent so much time tending her garden. Then he told her about the girls teasing Dallas and how he’d thrown all but a few of his bait worms at them.

“You threw a bucket of worms at Brooke Madison?” His confession had stopped his mother in her tracks on her way into the house from the garden.

“She was being really mean to this other girl, calling her names and getting the other girls to tease, too,” Grant said defensively. He wanted to add,
Like the way some kids used to tease Natalie when we took her to the library or the park after she lost her hair
, but he couldn’t get those words out.

“I’ve raised you better than that.” Shirley Wyler had poured herself a glass of water and took a few long sips.

“Mom, if you’d have heard them, you’d have thrown the worms, too.”

“Well, I can’t yell at you for coming to the aid of someone who needed your help.” She smoothed down his hair where it had been sticking up. “Any idea who the girl was? Is she new in town?”

“Her name is Dallas.”

“Berry’s grandniece?”

He nodded.

His mother took another sip of water, then poured the rest into the sink.

“That girl’s had a real hard time these past few weeks. You know what it’s like when you lose someone in your family.” Her voice dropped and her eyes misted. “And to be sent away from home before she’s
really had a chance to deal with it … well, who knows what her mother was thinking? I’d give anything for one more day—hell, one more hour—with Nat, but I guess we’re all cut differently. Anyway, it’s good that Berry was there to take in the girl and her brother.”

“She looked really sad, Mom.”

“I’m sure she is sad. I’m proud of you for sticking up for her, but tossing the worms … We should probably talk about that part. But the rest of it … you did the right thing.”

Grant had wanted to tell her something else, about how looking into Dallas’s eyes had made his heart beat a little faster, but he held his tongue. Maybe she’d make too much of it. One of the reasons why you didn’t tell your mom everything was that you didn’t know who she was going to repeat it to. But on her way back outside to her garden, she’d stopped in the doorway and turned to look over her shoulder.

“You know, you’ve probably made a friend for life, Grant,” his mother told him.