Family Reunion by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online Page A

Annette back too, but I wasn't ready to say so. Especially to Joanna. I had planned to e-mail Marley and Bev and Kelsey, but I didn't stay online. I went downstairs and joined Angus for a few repetitions of the rain dance.
    He was now taping the sound track of his videotape onto a cassette tape for his battery-operated radio. This was not a happy thought. A portable rain dance could quite easily become yet more portable public humiliation. I went down to the dock and sat with Daddy. It was drizzling now, but still hot out, and getting rained on in the heat is kind of fun. “When is Annette coming back?”
    “She's about ten miles away, but I think her pace is slowing. She can probably hear the rain dance from where she is.” My father smiled at me. “I was proud of you last night, sweetie. Angus was a bum, but you kept your head.”
    “No, I didn't. I fell asleep. It was DeWitt who kept his head.”
    “Nice kid,” my father observed.
    I had spent four weeks puttering around with DeWitt and hadn't really seen him. But after we found Angus, DeWittput his arm around my shoulder and left it there, not a touch, but a weight. “I'm the hero,” he told me contentedly. “I always wanted to be the hero.”
    I studied him. Thin cheeks and sharp, aggressive chin, brown eyes beneath heavy brows, a grin that spread his narrow cheeks so that they fit his wide forehead after all. He smelled of coconut from his suntan oil. I usually showered off my oils and lotions before I went to bed, but DeWitt hadn't, and although I had seen him in a bathing suit plenty of times, the thought passed through my mind that he would be wearing less in the shower, and all of a sudden I was out of breath and had to step away.
    “He is nice,” I agreed with Dad.
    Rain dance music filled the air. Angus had climbed up onto the roof of the boathouse, where he was appealing to the gods of Vermont for water to combat a drought we were not having in the first place. The gods of Vermont must have found this irritating, because during a particularly frenzied period of stomping, Angus went through the roof. “Aaaaaagh!” he screamed. “My leg is broken!”
    Daddy and I came running. He had actually gone only partway through the roof. Daddy grabbed the ladder that hangs lengthwise inside the boathouse. DeWitt told me once that it's to save people with in winter when they fall through the ice and you need to distribute your own weight safely on the thin ice from which you will rescue them, soyou slide out on the ladder and pull your drowning victim out of the frigid water. I didn't want to try it.
    I was extremely jealous of Angus. All my life I have wanted a cast so I could be on crutches and hobble weakly and have my books carried by other people and be an object of attention and get funny signatures all up and down my plaster. The only consolation was that it was still summer. With any luck, Angus would have the cast off before school started and would thus gain no benefit from having gone through the boathouse roof.
    However, once Daddy (on the roof) and I (inside the boathouse on the ladder) had pushed him all the way through, like Winnie-the-Pooh being shoved through Rabbit's hole by Christopher Robin, it turned out that all Angus needed was a Band-Aid.
    “It rained, though,” said Angus proudly.
    “It was already raining!” hollered Daddy.
    Angus felt this was a mere detail, hardly worth notice. We looked up to find Annette standing there, looking at us. “I don't want to know,” she said. It wasn't a voice we'd heard her use before. Angus asked for permission to visit his bomb shelter for a few hours. It was granted. He probably could have gotten permission to live there permanently.
    Daddy and Annette went inside the house. You could tell that they had serious things to discuss, and that you did not want to be part of it until you absolutely had to be. With excellenttiming, as if he'd been watching through his binoculars, DeWitt rowed over to