All the Way Home

All the Way Home Read Online Free PDF

Book: All the Way Home Read Online Free PDF
Author: Patricia Reilly Giff
her head.
    Mrs. Warnicki wore an orange-ice summer skirt that rode up over her round knees, and there was a round spot of rouge on each cheek. She looked excited to see Mariel. She took the box of brownies, smiling, and put them on the middle of the table with a pile of other bakery boxes.
    “Thoughtful,” she said. “Very thoughtful.” She glanced at the other kids racing around. Already the boys looked hot and sweaty. Their butch cuts were growing in after the summer and their hair stuck up in little points. Mrs. Warnicki turned back to Mariel. “Maybe you could just help me open everything and set it all up.”
    Mariel smiled, too. Everyone said Mrs. Warnicki was wonderful. And now she wouldn’t have to stand against the schoolyard fence watching, pretending she was having the best time in the world.
    She took her time with the boxes, putting cookies and small cakes on plates with white doilies. Mrs. Warnickitalked the whole time. “Get to see the Dodgers this summer?”
    Mariel nodded. She had been to Ebbets Field every chance she could. Sometimes she went with Loretta and they paid at the gate. The rest of the time she had watched from the grate outside of center field where kids could see but didn’t have to pay.
    A picture of Loretta came into her head, Loretta rooting through drawers looking for something, talking over her shoulder. “No more bums. No one will say the Dodgers are a joke. We’re going to show them all.”
    “Loretta says they’re going to win the pennant this year,” she told Mrs. Warnicki.
    “Bet she’s right.” Mrs. Warnicki poured lemonade into a cloudy glass pitcher.
    Mariel was down to the last cookie. She put it on the plate and moved a few others around. If only the summer had gone on and on.
    Mrs. Warnicki put her hand on Mariel’s shoulder. “I’m going to try to make this a great school year,” she said. “Different, you know?”
    Mariel nodded, glancing at Mrs. Warnicki’s red cheeks.
    “Little things.” Mrs. Warnicki rubbed at her face. “Too much rouge?”
    “Well …”
    Mrs. Warnicki began again. “No composition like ‘What I Did on My Summer Vacation.’ Maybe somethingLike …” She rubbed at her other cheek. “ ‘If I Could Do One Brave Thing.’ ”
    Mariel could think of so many brave things to do, so many things she wouldn’t dare do, it almost made her dizzy.
Brave Mariel saves someone’s life. Brave Mariel rescues a drowning baby. Brave Mariel …
     … finds out about her mother
.
    She looked down at the plate of cookies.
Her mother
.
    She had asked Loretta once. Loretta had shaken her head, looking sad, so sad. “I never saw her, honey. You had been in the hospital for months when I started to work. I tried to find out, but no one knew.” Loretta had swooped down to hug her. “Love you, Mariel, love you more than anything. Won’t I do?”
    Mariel knew her mother must have been at the hospital. Even in that fuzzy time, the machine breathing for her, she remembered the red sweater, the clinking bracelet.
When the wind blows …
    She stared at the cookies, thinking of polio. Once she had been able to walk nice and easy with regular legs, and then something had happened—a virus, someone had told her, attacking the nerves that made her muscles move. It made her think of an army of terrible insects marching around inside her legs, eating a piece of this and a piece of that, messing with the On and Off buttons. She shuddered. Loretta had told her that President Roosevelt had spent two years in bed just trying to move his big toe. Mariel wiggled her owntoes in her shoes. The army of insects had never gotten that far.
    Mrs. Warnicki must have said something, or maybe it was just the yelling of the other kids that made Mariel look up. And there was Ambrose the cop again. With him was a mess of a boy, ice cream all over the front of his shirt. It looked as if he had slept in his clothes instead of having them ironed for Mrs. Warnicki’s
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