How We Started by Luanne Rice Read Free Book Online

talk about the parade made me feel mean and bitter.
    â€œGood for the parade,” I said in a high, mocking voice.
    â€œIt wasn’t that great,” Dar said, eyes on me.
    â€œYeah, it was,” Harrison said.
    The four of us were sitting on our porch. It was pouring rain, and Harrison’s parents had dropped him off in Chilmark for the day. We’d already draped sheets over the wicker furniture, making tents to make believe we were explorers at the South Pole. Then we tipped the trestle table upside down, opened the extensions, and pretended it was a plane. Dar was the pilot, and we flew to the Yukon.
    As the rain started letting up, we’d worn out our imaginations. Mom and Granny had served us lemonade and were in the kitchen shucking corn and talking about dinner. Delia kept describing the parade and fireworks, with Harrison going on about some teenage girls dressed like mermaids with fake green tails and everything.
    â€œYou really didn’t miss that much,” Dar said. “They were fake mermaids. We know the real ones live in the waves off Squibnocket.”
    â€œBut they were so pretty!” Delia said.
    â€œRory’s prettier,” Harrison said.
    â€œYeah, sure,” I said.
    â€œYou are!” he said.
    â€œIt’s true,” Dar said. “Let’s have a parade just for Rory!”
    The rain had stopped. My sisters and Harrison ran around, getting things together. I still felt weak from the chicken pox, and I have to admit, I was sulking. Who cared about a pretend parade when I’d missed the real one? The feeling of being on Granny’s lap, thinking of Dad, had stayed with me, the deep melancholy of losing more than one summer’s fireworks and the chance to see some phony mermaids.
    Now sitting on the porch, I heard tin cans banging and wheels creaking. Around the corner of my grandmother’s big old summerhouse came the parade: Dar wearing Granny’s old-fashioned skirted black bathing costume, Delia draped in kelp and green seaweed freshly gathered from the beach out front, and Harrison wearing a tinfoil crown carrying a pitchfork in homage to Poseidon.
    My sisters beat wooden spoons on upside-down coffee cans, and they’d harnessed Harrison’s big waist with old rope, with which he pulled our small boat trailer across the yard.
    â€œMermaid girl, mermaid girl, Rory is the ocean’s pearl,” Dar chanted.
    â€œRory, Rory, morning glory,” Delia said, running over to hand me a bouquet of Granny’s flowers.
    â€œClimb on,” Harrison said, thumping his pitchfork against the trailer. “The parade is starting.”
    I felt myself starting to smile. That rusty old trailer was heavy. We used it twice a year to launch our twelve-foot sailboat in the salt pond, and one of the tires was flat, but Harrison was massive, and he pulled it behind him as if it weighed nothing.
    My sisters adorned me with more seaweed, and Dar put Granny’s apple-green silk robe around my shoulders. It shimmered in the clearing light, the way I thought a mermaid’s tail might. They helped me onto the boat trailer, and I gripped the metal frame.
    â€œPrincess of the ocean, dutchess of the sea,” Dar cried, as she and Delia began banging the coffee cans again.
    â€œHere she comes,” Harrison bellowed. “Miss Martha’s Vineyard!”
    Called by the commotion, my mother and grandmother came to stand on the porch, watching our little parade. I sat tall on that rickety old trailer as Harrison hauled me around the yard, feeling as graceful as a mermaid, as beautiful as a chicken-pox-ridden ten-year-old could feel.
    My sisters beat their drums, our olds—our mother, grandmother, and, I had to believe, the spirit of our missing father—cheered us on, and no one that day was sad, and no one that day was drunk, and I wasn’t engaged to the wrong man, and I was Miss Martha’s Vineyard.

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