Autumn Street by Lois Lowry Read Free Book Online Page A

and was moving to the Chinese Checkers table. "I'll be the white marbles tonight, I think. She can't write, anyway." She began arranging her starpoint meticulously.
    "What do you mean?" I stood up belligerently and faced Grandmother.
    "Just what I said, miss. Now take off that frown and arrange your marbles."
    "She can too," I said.
    And the room was suddenly, startlingly silent. Jessica looked up at me with a kind of fearful admiration. Mama stopped writing, bit her lip, and said nothing. The clock on the staircase landing chimed once. Seven-thirty. I glared at Grandmother.
    "Watch your tongue, Elizabeth Jane," she said, through brittle lips. "Tatie cannot write. Nor can she read. She has never been to school. You are not to torment her with that silly book anymore. Now
sit down. We are waiting to begin this game."
    Jess moved to her place around the star and began arranging the red marbles silently. I watched her for a moment and then turned and left the room.
    Tatie was in the kitchen, humming as she put away the silverware. She looked at me, grinned, and said, "You better watch out your face don't freeze that way, you might scare somebody."
    I put the autograph book on the table, turned to a blank pink page, and handed her my pencil. "Just write your name," I commanded. "You don't have to write a poem or anything."
    But her face went as stony and stubborn as mine. "I told you this afternoon," she said, "I don't care nothing about writing in that book."
    I grabbed her hand, still damp from the dishtowel, put the pencil into it, and begged. "Please. Just your name is all. I really need it, Tatie."
    She wiped her hands slowly on the white apron of her black evening uniform, watching me. Then she leaned to the book with the pencil, smoothed the page flat, and made the beginning of a mark: a careful, curling line at the side of the pink page, before she put the pencil down. "I can't," she said, with angry, challenging dignity.
    "You can
too,
" I said defiantly, putting the pencil again into her hand and clasping my own hand around
hers. I forced her hand to the page and guided it into a
T,
and then an
A.
"See? I told you you could. You make me so mad, not wanting to write in my hook!" I muttered, through clenched teeth, pressing her hand into an unresisting
T
, an
I
, and an
E.
"Now cross the
T
's."
    "What?" She looked at me in bewilderment.
    "Cross your
T
's," I ordered, tears hot behind my eyes. "You always have to cross your
T
's. Here." And I took her hand once more, more gently, as gently as she had often taken mine, and guided it to the top of the uncrossed
T
's. She drew the lines herself.
    Then she looked at the pink page, at the huge, wavy signature, and chuckled. "Well, that don't look too bad," she said.
    "Thank you," I whispered, and ran from the kitchen.
    In the library the Chinese Checkers game was proceeding without me, in silence. Grandmother and Jess were carefully tending their marbles in little groupings across the board, and over them, with his blue marbles, Grandfather was jumping in direct, well-plotted lines, toward his win.
    I held out the autograph book, open to the pink page. "She can too," I said.
    "Sit down," said Grandmother, "and put that book away until your manners improve."
    I held the book closer, insolently, in front of her smooth, unrouged, tight-lipped face, and waved it back and forth. "She can too can too can too" I cried over and over, stamping my feet on the thick, muffling carpet. The tears came and fell onto the star-shaped board, onto the marbles; my nose dripped onto my upper lip and I screamed at my grandmother, who sat stiffly immobile, "Say she can! Say it! Say she can!" until my mother rose from the mahogany desk and swiftly, silently, holding me close to her, carried me out of the library and up the long staircase to my bed.

8
    O NE WEEKEND LATE in June, Charles took me into the pantry, behind the door, where Tatie couldn't see us, and showed me that he had a knife. It wasn't