Seventeenth Summer Read Online Free PDF

grimace as if any movement might bring the iron too close. “He was a drip though. He used to wear real baggy pants and always got to school late and had to be sent to the office for tardy slips.”
    I tried to think of something to counteract that slur. It wouldn’t do to have the family think that Jack had dull connections before they even knew him—it’s important that the family like a boy—but nothing came to my mind quickly enough.
    In the green clumps of marguerite daisies along the garden path, round knobby heads stuck up with the green sheaths half open, showing the white silk petals underneath. Mom pushed back the kitchen curtains to look at them, commenting absently that next spring we would plant only a few rows of vegetables and have the rest of the garden all in flowers. Lorraine looked at Margaret and she looked at me and we all smiled, because every summer, for as long as we could remember, my mother had said that.
    Then Margaret glanced at her wrist watch and gave a little gasp, though she had known all the time that it was late, gulped down the rest of her coffee, and rushed out, leaving the front door half open, calling back, “Be sure to have something good for supper because I’m going to be real hungry!” Lorraine went upstairs to get dressed and Mom finished her coffee and a last piece of toast before clearing the breakfast things away.
    Though I don’t know just what I expected, I was vaguely disappointed that this was just like any other morning. The sun was bright on the kitchen floor, the coffee was steaming as always, and my mother looked just as calm and shiny clean as she always did. Maybe, I thought, I was wrong about last night and maybe everything is just the same. Maybe it wasn’t—well, what I thought it was.
    But all morning, puttering with the housework, I was really waiting for Jack to stop round on his bakery route, and mymind was far from finger marks on the white woodwork and dustcloths that smelled of oily furniture polish. But by eleven o’clock he had not come. And by eleven o’clock, with the beds all made and the housework done, I knew this was not an ordinary day; I knew definitely that everything was not the same.
    We had had scrambled eggs and toast and tea for lunch, just the three of us, my mother and little sister and I, sitting at the end of the kitchen table. “Just a pick-up snack,” Mom had said. “Whatever you can find in the icebox.” At twelve o’clock I began to get a queer restless feeling, as if I wanted to sit drumming my fingers on the table top, and I could hear the big clock in the dining room very plainly as it ticked.
    Perhaps, I kept thinking, Jack will call me now, while he is home for lunch; but by one o’clock I had decided that probably he didn’t like to call when his mother and father were around—some boys are like that—and maybe he would stop off at McKnight’s on his way back to the bakery and call me from there. Or perhaps he would even come over for a few minutes—my mind made up a series of pleasant little excuses for him as the time went by.
    But by the time two o’clock came and I had put away the lunch dishes, the house had grown quiet and the trees were beginning to turn their shadows eastward on the lawn; that excited feeling of waiting seemed to turn hard and make an aching throb in my throat. I had been so sure he would come.
    Kitty was in the garage making bright, tinkering noises, trying to straighten out a dent in her bicycle fender with a claw hammer, and she said, “Sure, I’d like to walk to the lake with you,” when I asked her. “Wasn’t doing much anyhow.”
    There were men working on the road that goes along the wide breakwater with the lighthouse on the end. One of them was leaning his chest on a pneumatic drill, pressing it hard into the gravel road and it made a loud rut-ta-tutting that echoed in the stillness of the afternoon, spitting up dirt and sprays of gravel as it dug. We stood to watch for