Summer's End by Kathleen Gilles Seidel Read Free Book Online Page A

negotiated between the group of parents who wanted an elaborate graduation ceremony for the kindergartners and those who wanted to serve cupcakes and juice and be done with it. She talked sense into the people who thought that the fifth-grade Valentine’s party should include boy-girl dancing. She silently, tactfully got year-books into the hands of kids whose parents couldn’t afford them. Everyone who knew her admired her, but in truth, she was too busy to have close friends.
    Of course, with her mother only twenty miles away, she hadn’t needed close friends.
    â€œBut Mother’s only been dead for a year. What can Dad be thinking of?”
    â€œIt’s almost been a year and a half,” Giles said gently. “She died in November.”
    Phoebe knew when her mother had died. She knew it to the minute.
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    She had been pregnant with Thomas, her fourth child, when her mother died.
    That’s what she kept thinking about during those days at her mother’s bedside. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen when you were pregnant. You were supposed to be worrying about your baby, not about your mother.
    It had started with a sore throat. Phoebe had seen her on Sunday, and Eleanor had mentioned feeling raspy. ButEleanor was stalwart about illness, she made little of her discomfort, and Phoebe forgot about it. Tuesday morning she called her parents about something else, and she could tell that her father was concerned.
    She had him put her mother back on the line. “Are you turning into the sort of old lady whose daughter has to take her to the doctor?” Phoebe did not think of her mother as old.
    â€œI hate doctors,” Eleanor groused. “They make you wait forever.”
    Eleanor was not a complainer. She really must not feel well. “I think you ought to go, Mother. I can come over this afternoon if you want.” Phoebe wasn’t joking anymore.
    â€œDon’t be silly. The weather looks horrible. There’s supposed to be ice tomorrow. There’s no point in you driving twenty miles through an ice storm just so you can wait forever too.”
    â€œBut that’s tomorrow. You should go today.”
    â€œI shall. I shall.”
    Eleanor went to the doctor. He gave her an antibiotic. She should have felt better in twenty-four hours. She didn’t.
    The ice storm came as predicted. A thin layer of cold air had settled near the ground, but the clouds were warmer. So when the rain fell late Wednesday, it froze as it landed, glazing everything with a glittering icy sheath.
    Thursday morning Eleanor was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. “We can monitor the antibiotics better here,” the doctor said.
    Phoebe went to see her mother immediately. She drove a big Ford station wagon, and its weight and good tires kept her on the road, but other cars were sliding into ditches, getting stuck at the bottoms of hills. Sharp rays ofsunlight glittered off the ice-encased power lines and the twisted points of the barbed-wire fences. The piles of unraked leaves had frozen into stiff mats, and tree limbs hung dangerously low, burdened by the weight of the ice.
    Phoebe ached for the green woods of Minnesota, where the needles from the tamarack trees rustled underfoot all summer long.
    Her mother did not get better.
    On Friday she and Giles decided that the whole family should spend the weekend in Lipton. It would be safer, more convenient. “I’m sure Mother will be out of the hospital by Monday, Tuesday at the latest,” she said.
    Phoebe was making a deal with God. If we skip all our weekend activities, if Ellie misses the movie with her friends, if Alex doesn’t go to tae kwan do, and if Claire misses tumbling, and Giles and I don’t go to the Reynolds lecture Sunday afternoon, then Mother will be well on Monday .
    That wasn’t the kind of God Phoebe believed in, but she didn’t know what else to do to make her mother