Secret Star Read Online Free PDF Page A

are not real fond of dark, cramped, damp places is like crawling into hell. Then they had to scrape out all the gunk that had come down from the gutters, and scour slime off the bottom and sides, then rinse the cistern out with water hauled from the hand pump in the backyard. Then they dipped out the dirty rinse water because they couldn’t just run it off through the spigots because the electric pump wasn’t working. And cleaning the cistern while it wasn’t being used had sounded like such a good idea.
    â€œYou got any more torture for us?” Tess asked Daddy when she and Kamo were finished with the stinking cistern.
    â€œSure. I got a list long as my arm.”
    She and Kamo went around and ripped the ratty plastic off the doors and windows. Then they cleaned out the accumulation of winter trash in the shed. Then they went up on the roof and admired their clean gutters and looked for loose shingles and nailed on some new ones. All that time Kam didn’t ask about Tess’s Rojahin father, and she sensed that he was not going to, not when they were working. So as far as she was concerned they could just keep working, and they did, right until dark. When Daddy finally called them in for supper, she was so tired she felt silly.
    Daddy had creamy beeswax candles from the crossroads church stuck in mayo-jar lids for light. “No dessert,” he said cheerfully after the Mathises and guest had devoured half a loaf of bread and a big box of fish sticks. Daddy was in a happy mood. “No sorbet, and no strolling violinists either, but who needs ’em? Give us some music, Tess!”
    In front of Kamo? But why not. The rebel in Tess tried never to care what other people thought. She put the flats of her fingers on the table and started drumming.
    In her head she had been working out a rhythm arrangement for “Secret Star,” and it had been simmering and stewing and brewing in her all day, and when she started drumming it was like starting a nuclear reaction. Fusion. She leaned into a light-speed double-stroke roll and kicked out for things to bang with both feet, she was slapping out eighths with one hand and triplets with the other, popping snare chops against a table leg, drumming till her chair shook, every muscle rocking. Kam looked stunned. In the candlelight his eye shone as big as a half-dollar, and who could blame him.
    Daddy was laughing. “Groove it, Tess!”
    Suddenly she felt like a clown and discovered that she did care what Kam thought after all. Hot-faced, she stopped.
    â€œKeep going!” Kam exclaimed, but she shook her head.
    â€œYou take drum lessons?” He leaned over the table toward her.
    â€œA little,” she mumbled. “In school.”
    â€œYou drummed for bands?”
    She shook her head, got up and headed out to the black backyard where there was more work waiting.
    Benson Mathis sat in his wheelchair and watched as Kam got up and followed Tess out the door. Benson Mathis sighed.
    Tess has a secret .
    The way she and this Kamo guy accepted each other without talking made him feel like they had met before Kam came to the house, like Kam might be hanging around for reasons other than work and food. Not surprising. Tess was one heck of a good-looking girl. Didn’t think it of herself, but she was. Big and strong and gorgeous, like a cream-colored ’59 Cadillac Eldorado. Of course, he was biased. His daughter—stepdaughter—wasn’t just the main thing that kept him going; she was the only thing. All he had left of the woman who had been the love of his life.
    And pretty soon, just like her mother had done, Tess was going to leave him. Not for some guy, necessarily, but one way or another she was going to leave. Look at the way she had gone and got herself that job.
    She’s growing up .
    This Kamo guy, now, he was too old for her. Too old and been around too much. That didn’t bother Benson Mathis, because he knew