Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson Read Free Book Online Page B

or two nights a week, working the rest of the time. I’d gotten used to the phone ringing late at night or early in the morning. I’d gotten used to hearing the faint hum of the garage door opening and closing at four a.m. as he headed into the office early, someone’s last hope at a second chance.
    “What are you working on?” I asked, after he’d been typing in silence for a few minutes.
    “A brief,” he said, glancing up at me. “I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now. Would have had it done sooner, but…” He let the sentence trail off, and I knew what he meant. A few weeks ago—three to be exact—we’d found out what was wrong with him, which had derailed everything for a while.
    “That doesn’t sound so brief,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, and was rewarded when my dad smiled.
    “Nice,” he said approvingly. My father loved puns, the more groan-inducing the better, and I was the only one who tolerated them—and, for that matter, tried to respond in kind. “I just…” He looked at the screen, shaking his head. “I just want to get this right. It looks like it might be my legacy.”
    I nodded, looking down at the scratches on the wood table, totally unsure how to respond to that. We all knew what was happening with my dad, but we hadn’t really talked about it since my birthday, and I had no idea what to say.
    “Well,” my dad said more quietly, after a pause. “Back to it.” He started typing again, and even though I’d intended to leave and start unpacking, it suddenly felt wrong to just leave my dad working alone on his last case. So I sat next to him, the silence punctuated only by the tapping of the keyboard, until we heard the crunching of the car’s tires on the gravel, and my mother’s voice, calling for us to come to dinner.
    The bathroom wasn’t big enough.
    This became massively apparent when we all ended up trying to get ready for bed—what Warren called his “evening ablutions,”—at the same time.
    “You didn’t leave me any space,” I said. I nudged past Gelsey, who was brushing her teeth with excruciating slowness, to look in the medicine cabinet. It had been filled with Warren’s contact paraphernalia, Gelsey’s retainer case and lip balms, and too many tubes of toothpaste to make any logical sense.
    “You should have gotten here sooner,” Warren said from the doorway, making the already-small space seem smaller. “Can you hurry?” he asked Gelsey, who just gave him a toothpaste-filled smile and started brushing even more slowly, which I wouldn’t have believed was possible without seeing it.
    “I didn’t know that I would have to claim cabinet space,” I snapped, as I shoved some of his boxes of contacts to the side, trying to make room for my face wash and makeup remover.
    Gelsey finally finished brushing her teeth and rinsed off her toothbrush, placing it carefully in the holder. “You can keep stuff in the shower if you want,” she said with a shrug as she pulled back the striped forest-green shower curtain that had been there forever. “I’m sure there’s some room—” Gelsey stopped talking abruptly, and started to scream.
    I saw why a second later—there was a huge spider crouched in the corner of the tub. It looked like a daddy longlegs, which, I’d learned long ago on some nature walk, were actually not dangerous. But that didn’t mean that I necessarily wanted to see a spider the size of my head just hanging out in our tub. I took step back, and bumped into Warren, who was also scrambling out of the way.
    “Daddy!” Gelsey shrieked, bolting for the door.
    When my father appeared a few moments later, my mother behind him, the three of us were huddled around the doorway, and I was keeping my eyes on the spider in case he decided to make a break for it.
    “Spider,” Warren said, pointing toward the tub. “Pholcidae.” My father nodded and took a step into the bathroom.
    “Are you going to kill it?” Gelsey asked from