Seventeenth Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

a while. The rest of the men were working slowly, swinging their pickaxes in wide, in lazy arcs, or just leaning on the yellow, wooden trestles with the red danger flags fluttering, put there to turn the slow afternoon traffic away from the shallow gap in the road. Beyond them the lake was very blue. You could just barely see the strip of green and the thin fingers of smoke that was Oshkosh on the opposite shore.
    Just behind me, inside the breakwater, was the Big Hole where the smaller sailing boats were tied. I knew if I looked I could see it. But I didn’t want to—not yet. There is that funny fascinating suspense in waiting, like wiggling a very loose tooth with your tongue. And besides it wouldn’t do to have Kitty know what I really came out for. She is a good scout but—well, I just didn’t want her to know, that’s all.
    So we went over to watch the children swimming and splashing first, and then I pushed Kitty in a swing until she saidshe was beginning to feel dizzy, and we walked all the way to the refreshment stand at the other end of the park for an icecream cone and a bag of popcorn. By the time we had walked back she had chocolate ice cream dribbled down the front of her shirt and her chin was shiny from the butter off my popcorn and both of us were ready to go home.
    Just as I had planned we took the long way, back through the park, and we had to pass the Big Hole on our way.
    The afternoon sun was sparkling and glinting on the tip of each small, quick wave so that the whole stretch of water in the harbor seemed to be giggling in the sunlight. There was a long row of small green and white sailboats tied to the shore, nodding up and down as the water licked the anchoring piles. They all had single, slim masts jabbing upward and gray canvas stretched neatly over their cockpits and, to me, they all looked exactly the same! I couldn’t even tell which one was Jack’s! I felt suddenly so relieved that I could have laughed out loud just standing there, looking at the boats dancing at the ends of their short ropes and the blue water shining in the sun. I don’t know just what I
had
expected to see—one boat standing off by itself, looking different from the rest or a sign on one of them saying, “This is the boat that Angie Morrow fell in love in!” or something equally as silly. But whatever it was, it wasn’t there at all!
    Just then a horn honked close behind us and Kitty and I bothjumped in fright and turned to look. There was Swede. He pulled up alongside us and leaning out the car window, said, “Hi-yah, Angie. Want a ride home?”
    It was annoying that he should come along just then. In the first place I hadn’t wanted him to see me staring at the boat, and besides I could just hear him saying later, “Hey, Jack, that Angie don’t look so good in the daytime! I saw her this afternoon out looking at the boat and she didn’t look so good as at night.”
    I had on old slacks and I knew my nose was shiny, but Swede was smiling at me with his funny warm grin so there was nothing to do but say, “Hello, there. You scared me, honking that way. This is my sister Kitty, Swede.” They nodded to each other and she bent down in an embarrassed little-girl sort of way, pretending to take a stone out of her shoe and softly whistling a breathy tune with no particular melody.
    “Been looking at the boat?” Swede asked. I nodded. “Nice little job, isn’t she? Did you have fun last night, Angie?”
    Now is my chance to find out, I thought. Swede is sure to know if anyone does! “Oh, I had a wonderful time,” I told him, and then added casually, very offhand, “Did Jack have fun?”
    “Yeh, I guess he did.”
    “Don’t you
know?
”
    “No, he didn’t say nothing.”
    “Did you see him today?”
    “Sure.”
    “Well, what did he say?”
    “Nothing much. At least nothing—about you.”
    So he hadn’t said anything! After last night and the way he’d looked and my wearing his sweater, and after