Rowing in Eden by Elizabeth Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

hayseeds like us!” Peg looked up from the can of tuna fish she was opening and she grinned at Ginny Weston. Sometimes it seemed to Franny that Ginny Weston was her mother’s best friend, though Peg never had told Ginny to stop referring to her as Mrs. Wahl. Mrs. Wahl. Still, Franny had never seen Peg cry in front of her regular friends, but she had overheard numerous teary sessions between Ginny and her mother.
    Which struck Franny as sad.
    Also sad: the way that Peg forgot she was no longer the maker of lunches, and, so, regularly fixed large bowls of food—tuna salad, just now—that later she would have to throw out.
    â€œFran.” Peg wagged a celery stalk Franny’s way. “Stand up straight!” she said; and, then, “Not that straight!”
    Rosamund, passing out of the kitchen, gave Franny a sympathetic wink. It was nice having the big girls home. The family seemed more like a family again. During the past school year, Brick often had said he had eaten a big lunch at the Top Hat and thought he would skip dinner. Peg came home from the Hobby Shack later and later; she had started working on enamels that fall, making everybody cuff links for Christmas, and more and more often Franny had ended up eating TV-dinners, alone.
    The record that Rosamund now started on the turntable of the living room stereo: “You Were Only Fooling (While I Was Falling in Love).” Some old, old thing by an old, old group called the InkSpots. Antiquated falsettos and twinkly guitar strained into the kitchen. Martie sang along as she tended to her omelet on the stove.
    â€œGinny, did you see the picture where this Turner is the model?” From its spot behind a magnet on the refrigerator, Peg Wahl removed a newspaper advertisement (handsome, tuxedoed male assists his female equivalent in exiting a Lincoln Continental offered for sale by a Miami car dealer).
    â€œIsn’t he handsome?” Peg said.
    Ginny Weston winked at Rosamund as the girl returned to the kitchen. “Be still, my heart!”
    â€œBut what’s the deal, Roz?” Martie set her elbows on the countertop of the kitchen’s island, then walked her feet up the cupboards across the way until she had made a kind of arch with her torso. “If his dad’s place is so great, why hasn’t he invited you there?”
    â€œMartie!” Peg said, but Rosamund just laughed—a tinkling laugh that demonstrated how far above being insulted by Martie she was.
    â€œI’m sure Martie didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Franny said.
    Martie looked injured. “Did I say something wrong?”
    Rosamund smiled at Peg and Franny while the diplomatic Ginny gathered coffee cup and saucer and exited the scene. “Martie probably doesn’t know I met Turner just before school let out,” Rosamund said. “It’s not like I’d rush off for a weekend with him whether it was at his father’s hotel or—wherever.”
    â€œOf course not!” Peg said.
    Steam from Martie’s omelet pan rose with a hiss as Martie dashed the pan into the sink and protested, “I suppose you’re implying I would?”
    â€œFlower lady’s on her way to the door,” Ginny Weston called from the back hall. Peg shook her head at Martie, then grabbed the old Hopalong Cassidy mug in which she kept change.
    â€œFlower lady, here!” a tiny, ancient voice cried. “Flowers!”
    Franny was more than willing to follow Peg to the front hall, to shift moods. Though the flower lady drove a light green Pontiac on her trips around Pynch Lake, her stooped arrival at the door with her flower basket on her arm always made Franny feel as if she lived in some far-off, gentler days of tinkers and peddlers.
    Peg picked out four of the old woman’s tiny bundles—bachelor buttons, pinks, coreopsis, black-eyed Susans. “That’ll be forty cents, right?”
    The flower lady nodded