Liberty Street by Dianne Warren Read Free Book Online Page B

mother, standing in the hallway with her hands on her hips, looking right at Frances’s door.
    â€œGet back in bed right now and go to sleep,” she says, so Frances gives up.
    T HE NEXT DAY , her mother shows her the new clothes she bought in Yellowhead—a skirt and bolero jacket (“All the rage, according to the lady in the shop”), a sweater set, and a new pair of high-heeled shoes. (“Pumps, they’re called. Who knows where I’ll wear them.”) She has a present for Frances: a package of underwear, seven pairs, each a different colour and eachwith the day of the week embroidered near the waistband. Today is Thursday, the day Frances was born, but she puts on Monday because Monday is pink, and also Monday’s child is fair of face. Thursday’s child has far to go, whatever that means. Who would ever want to be born on Thursday?
    After supper that evening, while her mother is having a bath and Frances is alone with her father, he tells her that Alice hadn’t really been missing, that she’d just gone on a little shopping trip, and she’d meant to leave a note but had forgotten, and Frances is not to worry anymore, or talk to anyone about it, especially not about Nashville.
    â€œDo you understand me, Frances?” he asks.
    Frances nods.
    â€œTell me you understand,” her father says. “Out loud.”
    â€œNo one is going anywhere and I’m to forget about it and not talk.”
    â€œYou can talk,” her father says. “Just not about . . . well, you know.”
    Then her mother comes out of the bathroom and sits down beside her on the wagon-wheel couch, and when Basie goes to the kitchen for a glass of water, Alice says to Frances, “Stop looking at me like that. It’s not like I did something wrong, is it?”
    Frances isn’t sure.
    When her father comes back, they watch Country Hoedown , which is set inside a barn. Frances wants to know if the barn is in Nashville, and her mother says no, it’s a fake barn set up in a TV studio in Canada.
    Maybe there is no real Nashville, Frances thinks. Maybe it’s just a place on television or the radio. When the Singin’ Swingin’ Eight come on TV, her mother grabs her and theydo-si-do around the living room. She didn’t realize her mother knew about square dancing, but it’s fun.
    The shopping trip is not mentioned again. It disappears just like the cowboy hats, the ones Frances has never been able to find. Too bad. They would have come in handy for the do-si-do.
    F RANCES ’ S FATHER HAS a brother in England. His name is Vince, and there’s lots of excitement when Vince says he’s coming to Canada for Christmas. When they pick him up at the train station in Yellowhead, he tells Basie he sounds like a proper Canadian now and then he turns to Frances and says, “Give us a speech, luv, so I can hear what you sound like.” But she’s too shy to say anything. On the way home, Uncle Vince keeps whistling his admiration of Frances’s mother’s blue-and-white Fairlane—“You don’t see cars like this in England”—and also they learn that he is not just staying for Christmas, he’s moving here. To help with the farm, he says, until he can buy his own place nearby. Frances’s father says, “Well, that’s just great news, Vince,” but her mother does not look entirely happy (although she looks happy enough later, when Vince unpacks and gets out a box of canned fish and pies from Marks & Spencer, and for Frances there’s a rag doll that he calls a golliwog). They have steak-and-kidney pie for supper, and when it’s bedtime, Uncle Vince sleeps on the top bunk in Frances’s bedroom. He groans in his sleep. Frances tells her mother he sounds like a bear.
    After New Year’s, when Vince has been there for two weeks, Frances overhears her mother say to her father that the house isn’t big