A Place to Call Home Read Online Free PDF

school bus by the lopsided mailbox in front of that awful sinkhole with its junk and garbage-filled gully and rusty trailer.
    But there was another reason, too: my older cousins, Arlan and Harold Delaney. They were already in high school, old enough to drive, and if they caught Roanie by the Hollow’s mailbox, they’d take a whack at the mailbox with a baseball bat. When they could catch him, they took a whack at Roanie, too.
    I missed the bus one morning in May. I was in a mood, an
ill
mood as usual, as Mama called it, because I’d spilled awhole pot of hot grits on my skirt while I was helping her make breakfast. It was thundering and pouring rain outside, weather that made my curly hair explode in fuzz. I knew I looked like cotton candy with a face. Mama braided my hair four different ways and finally slicked it down with hair gel. “Now I look like a greasy Brillo pad,” I sobbed, and hid in my bathroom.
    So I missed the bus.
    Grandpa was the only one who could stand me when I was being a brat, so he drove me, Hop, and Evan to school. I sat glumly beside him in the front bucket seat of his Trans Am. That was Grandpa. He didn’t drive an old-man car, he drove the latest-model black Pontiac Trans Am with mag wheels and an air scoop on the hood.
    So there we went, skimming between the forest on either side of Soap Falls Road, rain drenching everything around us, Grandpa humming along with a Tammy Wynette song on the radio, me wrapped in a pink plastic raincoat and a pink scarf protecting my hair, Hop and Evan wedged together in the Trans Am’s small backseat. We rounded the curve at Sullivan’s Hollow and saw Arlan and Harold’s souped-up truck speed off.
    I shrieked. “They got Roanie again!”
    “Those skinny-assed shitbirds,” Grandpa said under his breath.
    Roanie was hanging on to the mailbox in that downpour. He had no raincoat, no umbrella, no
nothing
except a plastic garbage bag pulled tight around his shoulders like a cape. His books were scattered in the weeds, and the way he and the mailbox leaned, it wasn’t clear which one was going to fall down first.
    But as soon as he saw another car he turned, staggered, fell, got up, and ran down the Hollow’s mud-slicked driveway. The last I glimpsed of him he was wobbling into the woods on the next hill.
    “
Grandpa
,” I begged. “Grandpa,
please
stop.”
    Grandpa pulled off to one side.
    “Aw, come on, Claire,” Hop protested from the backseat. “You can’t catch him.”
    “He’ll smell up the car,” Evan said.
    “Grandpa,” I said again. “Nothing could stink worse than Hop’s sausage breath.”
    Grandpa studied me with his head tilted. “Roanie’s your fish, Claire. If you want to reel him in, you’ll have to get out in the rain and do it yourself.”
    I guess he was testing me to see what I was made of. Vanity or valor. I gave Grandpa a level look. “I’m already fuzzy and greasy. Might as well get wet, too.”
    I pushed my door open. “Hold on, sweet pea,” Grandpa said, but I was already out. I trudged down the muddy road. “Roanie!” I yelled. Rain whipped water into my face. I slipped on the mud and sat down hard. “Roanie, come here! We’ll give you a ride to school! It’s okay! I swear!”
    Grandpa stood beside me, cupping his hands to his mouth. He could have yodeled Moses down from the mountain. “Cooome ooon, Roooanie!”
    Silence. Stillness. We called for ten minutes.
    I
knew
Roanie was watching us from somewhere in the dripping green forest on a ridge above the Hollow. I could feel his gaze in the goosebumps on the back of my neck. But he wasn’t coming back.
    “All right,” Grandpa said wearily. “We can’t get that cat out of his tree.” He gently pulled me to my feet. All my pent-up misery curled out in small, choking sobs. I was muddy, I was soaked, and I was still better off than Roanie. “He thinks we’re jinxed,” I cried as Grandpa guided me back to the car. “Every time he has anything to do with