The Truth about Mary Rose by Marilyn Sachs Read Free Book Online Page A

I didn’t say anything.
    “All right, Mary Rose,” Pam said. “If that’s what you want, it’s OK with me.”
    I knew it wasn’t OK with her. I couldn’t stand that it wasn’t OK with her. Maybe I’d never find that box, I told myself, although I knew I would. But maybe it would take weeks before I did, and anything could happen in the meantime.
    “OK, Pam,” I said, “I promise.”
    Then we compared the two empty lemon halves, and decided hers was the neatest. Mine still had pieces of white along the inside walls while hers was perfectly smooth. We made a little lemon cradle for the baby mouse, and I made him a yellow bunting with purple peace signs, and Pam made him a macramé rug for his room, and we never mentioned Mary Rose for the rest of the weekend.
     
Chapter 6
     
    I lost another day looking for Mary Rose’s box because of Manny.
    Sunday night, after I got back from Pam’s, I went to bed at nine. I thought I would get up early next morning, and get started down in the basement. It must have been around 1 A . M ., I woke up and was on my way to the bathroom when I heard my parents talking. They were still using my grandmother’s bedroom while she slept downstairs in the little room next to the kitchen.
    “He said no,” my mother was saying. “So I said, ‘How about going swimming with Ray?’ ‘No!’ he said. ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘maybe you and I could go down to the planetarium tomorrow, and Mary Rose could stay with Grandma for the afternoon.' 'I’ve been there a few times already,' he said. 'I don’t feel like going again.' Honestly, Luis, I’ve never seen him like this. You know, I told you before we left Lincoln that Manny would be all right, but that Ray would have a rough time adjusting. Was I ever wrong!”
    “You can’t figure these things,” said my father. “Ray had so many friends in Lincoln. Everybody knew him. Look at that party his baseball club gave him, and all those telephone calls! The day we moved, anytime I looked at him, I thought he was going to start crying.”
    “That’s right,” said my mother, “but it didn’t take two or three days after we got here, and he was off again—playing ball with the two Reilly boys up the block, and going swimming with that crowd of kids from around the corner, and joining the Y.”
    “It’s good, it’s good!” said my father. “I’m happy to know that he can get along wherever he goes. And Mary Rose?”
    “Oh, her!” I stayed very quiet, held my breath, and flattened myself even flatter against the wall. My mother laughed. “You really weren’t worried about her, were you?”
    My father laughed too. “I guess not. How can anybody worry about Mary Rose?”
    “I do worry about the way she keeps sneaking around listening in to things you say when you don’t know she’s there. I wish I could break her of that. It’s gotten worse since we came here, and I just don’t understand what makes her do it.”
    “Well,” said my father, “she has to have something wrong with her, doesn’t she?”
    “I guess so,” said my mother. “She is really a darling, isn’t she?”
    Which is one of the reasons why I listen. Because like I say, you never know the truth unless you listen. My mother will never tell me face to face that she thinks I am just about perfect, except for this one fault. Neither will my father.
    It was a real windfall that night. They went on and on, laughing and saying how pretty I was, and smart, and funny, and just about perfect in every way, and wasn’t it a good thing I was asleep, and couldn’t hear them because I’d get a swelled head. Well, I’d heard them talk this way about me before—lots of times—and I didn’t have a swelled head. I’d heard them talking about my brothers too. They really liked us. I guess my mother liked Manny the best, and my father liked me the best, and they both worried about Ray the most—so that we all came out even.
    But tonight they were worrying