Swim to Me by Betsy Carter Read Free Book Online Page B

an appointment.
    Sincerely,
    Thelma Foote
    Director
    As hard as she had wished for this, it had never occurred to her that it would really happen. Now what was she supposed to do? She had no money, no way of getting to Florida, and besides, how could she abandon West? Still, she called up the Greyhound bus company just to find out how much the fare would be to Weeki Wachee Springs.
    â€œWow, there’s a first,” said the man on the other end. “Lemme see.”
    The man seemed to be talking to himself as he read the names of cities on the map. “Orlando, St. Petersburg, Gainesville. Ah, here we go, Tampa. Round-trip, New York to Tampa, fifty dollars. One way, thirty bucks.”
    Delores barely had the composure to thank him. Thirty dollars? Might as well be three hundred dollars. Three thousand dollars. She could never lay her hands on that kind of money. She thought abouther father and how he was wily that way, always having enough money to buy the clothes he wanted or take himself off to a Yankees game. It was odd, him being gone for so long and still not a word from him. She missed the familiarity of him.
    She went into her mother’s bedroom and opened the closet. His clothes were still hanging on the left side, same as if he were still there. She touched the sleeve of one of his white shirts, gone a little yellow with time. Maybe he had left some money in his pockets. Sticking her hand inside each of his trouser pockets, she came up empty, except for a half-full box of Sen-Sen. Suddenly, she could smell the sharp licorice candy. It was his smell. She pushed the pants to one side and started to go through his shirt pockets. Behind the pants were some shelves where her parents kept things like suitcases and hats. She’d often snooped into those shelves hoping to discover a secret, something in the house that she didn’t know was there. She’d never found anything, and it had been years since the last time she’d looked.
    She moved aside the suitcase and her mother’s collection of hats. There was a box filled with old papers, official-looking envelopes with glassine oblongs where the address was meant to be. She found her mother’s fox stole with the pointy face and beady eyes of an animal in flight.
    Tucked into the back corner of the shelf was something purple, something she never remembered having seen before. She pulled it from the shelf. It was a bag, a heavy purple bag with gold piping and the faded words SEAGRAM’S CROWN ROYAL written across it. Delores took the bag from the shelf and wiped the dust from it. Then she sat on her mother’s bed and pulled open the yellow string. The bag was filled with silver coins that were thick and heavy. She shook them out of the bag, and they made a jingly sound before rolling across the bed and falling on their faces. She studied themall: the bald eagles, a man who looked like President Eisenhower, a woman whom she took to be Lady Liberty. They were silver dollars from as far back as 1898 and there had to be close to two hundred of them. This had to be her father’s sack. If her mother knew there was a bag of coins in her closet, she would have already spent every one of them.
    For nearly sixteen years she’d seen her father every day and night and knew what little she knew of him. Now in his absence, she saw a whole other side of him. She imagined him holding one of the coins in his hands, maybe flipping it in the air a time or two and enjoying the weight of it, and how it felt smooth and cool as he closed his fist around it. It got her wondering why he hadn’t taken the coins with him when he’d left. Had he forgotten they were there? Or maybe he’d left them, knowing that someday she’d find them and this would be his parting gift to her and her brother.
    She’d take what she needed, plus a little more, and figure out how to leave the remainder of it for West. Delores went into her bedroom and