Starting from Scratch by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online

waiting for. She’d scored, Elisha thought. “The Life and Times of James ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok,” he read aloud. “Thanks, Lise.”
    She paused to kiss his cheek. “You’ve very welcome. Hey, if I can’t get good books for the people I love, what’s the point of working at a publishing house?” She looked around. By now, they should have numbered four, not three. “Where’s the other lovely member of the family?” Elisha asked her brother.
    â€œRight here,” Andrea answered. She walked in, her hands deep in the pockets of the jeans that had a tendency to reside on her hips rather than in the vicinity of her waist. “Hi.” She brushed a kiss against Elisha’s cheek, her eyes on the remaining two packages on the table. “Anything for me?”
    â€œSorry, these are for the mailman,” Elisha told her, picking the packages up and holding them to her. Then she laughed and thrust them toward her niece. “Since he’s not here, I guess you can have them.”
    But before Andrea had a chance to open even the first gift, her father asked, “Did you finish your homework, Andrea?”
    The older girl’s hand dropped from her gift. She held them against her with her other hand, her eyes communing with her shoes rather than looking up at her father. “Almost.”
    â€œHow many pages in an almost?” Henry asked in a voice that held the echo of endless patience. With Andrea, he found that he had to be. And at times, even that didn’t work. He knew she had a paper due in English the next day, a paper she’d been putting off writing for over three weeks now, ever since she’d gotten the assignment.
    â€œTwo.”
    He was familiar with the game. “Two pages to go, or two pages done?”
    She didn’t stick out her lower lip, but Andrea looked petulant. Fifteen was the age for it, Elisha thought. Again, while she didn’t envy her brother, she did admire him.
    â€œTwo done.” And then the girl, a carbon copy of her late mother with her delicate features and her long, silky blond hair, sighed dramatically as she went on the offensive. “I just don’t get it,” she lamented. “Why do we have to study Shakespeare anyway? Nobody talks like that anymore.”
    It was a familiar complaint. Not one that she had made herself, Elisha thought, but that was because she had fallen in love with the beauty of the written word only a little after she’d climbed out of her first crib. She’d taught herself how to read. Her mother had called her precocious. The real reason was that Elisha had been impatient. Too impatient to wait for her mother to read to her. So she’d learned how to sound things out on her own, asking any nearby adult to help her when she needed it. She was reading by four.
    â€œThey did once,” Elisha pointed out. “And who knows, maybe no one’ll talk like you do now in another hundred years.”
    The expression on Andrea’s face was the last word in skepticism. “Yeah, right.”
    Now, there was a challenge if she’d ever heard one. “Nobody says groovy anymore or talks about the cat’s pajamas,” Elisha said.
    On the sofa, her finger marking her place, Beth looked up and laughed at the expression. “Cats don’t have pajamas.”
    Unless they’re in cartoons, Elisha thought. “That’s what they said in the forties.”
    Beth’s face became solemn and thoughtful. She looked a great deal like Henry when she pondered things. “Cats had pajamas in the forties?” the girl asked.
    Elisha did her best to keep a straight face. “It was a more innocent, less complicated time.”
    â€œSounds boring,” Andrea said. “Just like this play I have to do my report on.”
    Her interest piqued, Elisha asked, “Which play are you doing?”
    â€œRomeo and Juliet.”
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