Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry Read Free Book Online Page A

a little bit faster. Maybe he’d done something wrong or committed a crime? Or maybe he’d witnessed a crime, and they were covering it up. That’s how it would go if this were a movie. I glanced up at my notebook on the music stand. The trickiest part of the composition was coming up. When it was done, I rosined my bow again and flipped pages to the second violin part. Was it against the law for an American to help a Soviet soldier? Could it be like treason or aiding and comforting an enemy? Or maybe it was a crime not to help. Germans had a Good Samaritan law that said you had to stop and give aid if you saw an accident on the road. I couldn’t just let him drown, but now what?
    When I came to the slow part of my piece, I worked on my vibrato. Maybe tomorrow we could get his side of the story—if he made it through the night. I had to find a few minutes at least to get together some food, but what if Mom decided to stay up for Dad? Then they’d get to talking about whatever was on her mind. They might stay up late and watch the news and the Johnny Carson show. I’d never get anything done.
    I switched back to the opening of Pachelbel’s Canon and practiced it even slower than the music called for. I projected my sleepiest thoughts into the living room. It worked. After ten minutes, Mom tapped on my door and said, “I’m going to turn in now, Jody. Your cake is in the fridge. Don’t stay up too late, sweetie.”
    “Okay, Mom, good night.”
    Mission accomplished! I wrapped my violin and bow in a spare pillowcase and slid them under my bed. I tiptoed down the hall and got the box of MREs that we kept in the bottom cupboard for emergencies. There was room for maybe six ready-to-eat meals plus the oranges in my violin case.
    What else would he need? I went into the bathroom and rolled up half a roll of toilet paper as small as possible. There was a spare toothbrush in the back of the drawer, and Mom bought Band-Aids in bulk for my brothers, so I snagged a handful plus the sliver of soap that was in the soap dish. I set out a fresh bar so no one would miss it.
    What else would a guy with a broken leg want? Duh, something for pain. I got out the bottle of Tylenol, but what he really needed was the Tylenol with codeine that Mom kept locked up. I got the key out of the hiding place in the kitchen and unlocked her rolltop desk. The pain medicine was in the drawer on the right, but my hand froze over a stack of house ads.
    Mom must have picked them up from the base housing office. I turned on the desk lamp. Houses, real houses, with yards. I flipped through pages and pages of ads. They were all colors, three bedrooms mostly, with garages and gardens. One of them had four bedrooms, and toward the end of the stack there was one with a tree house in the backyard. I would have committed murder to have a tree house of myown when I was seven. That one was in Killeen, Texas. It sounded familiar; there must be an army base nearby.
    I took the ad with the tree house over to the bookshelf and got out our American road atlas. I had just found the Texas page when I heard Dad’s boots in the stairwell outside. Rats! I dropped the atlas, yanked open the drawer, and grabbed the prescription bottle with the painkillers. I twisted off the cap and dumped the pills into my hand. There were more than a dozen left. I’d better only take seven.
    Dad put his key in the lock. I dropped the pills into the top of my left sock, put the rest back into the bottle, and slid the drawer shut just as Dad came in. Shoot, he’d hear me close the rolltop desk. I grabbed a handful of the house pages and ran to sit on the sofa.
    “Hey, Jo, thanks for waiting up for me.” Dad set his briefcase on the coffee table and collapsed onto the other end of the sofa. He looked terrible. He groaned as he bent over to unlace his boots. “What a long day. Is your mom asleep?”
    I nodded. Dad tugged off his polished black boots and pushed them under the coffee table