Promise Me A Rainbow Read Online Free PDF Page B

and red shoes. Her voice was whispery soft, and the room was dark behind her.
    Fritz pushed the hood off her head. She should have done that sooner. She shouldn’t be standing inside with a dumb hood on her head. Ms. Holben didn’t seem to notice, and Fritz searched her pocket for Joe’s card. That was something else she should have done. She should have found the card before she knocked at the door.
    It was in her jeans pocket, and it took her a moment to locate it. She kept glancing at Ms. Holben, expecting her to say something, but she didn’t. She just waited, and Fritz liked her for that, for waiting and not asking a lot of questions, as if Fritz didn’t know where she was or what she was doing there. She handed Ms. Holben the card, wishing she’d put it in another pocket so it wouldn’t be so bent now.
    Ms. Holben stepped out into the hall to read it, holding it under the light in the ceiling. Fritz was relieved to see that while her face was still sad, she wasn’t crying.
    “D’Amaro Brothers Construction,” Ms. Holben said, her voice puzzled. Joe had been right. Ms. Holben didn’t understand, and Fritz had forgotten all about giving an explanation.
    “My name is Mary Frances D’Amaro. You bought the gnomes,” Fritz said in a rush. “We want to buy them back. Sometime when it stops raining and we get the money,” she added, because she felt she owed Ms. Holben the truth. She waited, and it seemed to Fritz that they were both waiting.
    “You want to buy it back,” Ms. Holben said finally, looking again at the wrinkled card. “You and the D’Amaro Brothers.”
    “Me and Joe,” Fritz said. That wasn’t exactly the truth. She wasn’t sure whether Joe really wanted to buy back the gnomes or not. She was sure about Della and Charlie, though. Della liked money better than gnomes, and Charlie didn’t care about either, only computers.
    “You were here earlier, weren’t you?”
    Fritz didn’t want to say. If she said yes, Ms. Holben would be reminded that she’d heard all about Jonathan and Ellen Jessup, the very thing Joe said had made her upset.
    “Yes,” she said anyway, because she was supposed to tell the truth, and she couldn’t see any way out of it.
    “Are you by yourself?”
    Fritz nodded. “Could I . . . see Daisy and Eric?” she said before Ms. Holben asked any more questions.
    Ms. Holben stood back. “Come in. What did you say your name was again?” She turned on a lamp behind her.
    Fritz looked around the room. It was a nice room, she decided. Just big enough, with not much furniture. She could dance in this room, turn a cartwheel and not break anything if she aimed herself just right. Her room at home was too small, too crowded because she had to share with Della. She couldn’t walk without bumping into things, and Della hated having her underfoot no matter how quiet and tiny she tried to be. She knew that Joe wanted a bigger place for them, but that was somewhere “down the road,” down the same road as buying back the gnomes.
    “Mary Frances,” Fritz said. “But I like Fritz. Everybody calls me that. Except the sisters. They call me Mary Frances.”
    “Fritz,” Ms. Holben repeated. “Is that because you couldn’t say Mary Frances when you were little?”
    She looked at Ms. Holben in surprise, wondering how she had guessed that. “Yes. Joe says all I did was spit, and Fritz is what it sounded like.”
    “I’m Catherine, but I guess the lady at The Purple Box already told you.”
    “No,” she said. “But I heard Jonathan.”
    “Jonathan?”
    “On the stairs. You don’t like him to call you Katie,” Fritz reminded her.
    Ms. Holben smiled slightly. “Oh, yes. Jonathan.”
    Fritz looked at her gravely. Joe had been right about the card and the explanation; he was probably right about not bothering Ms. Holben, too. She stood in the middle of the room, waiting for Ms. Holben to show her the gnomes and wondering if she really could call her by her first name.