Summer Harbor Read Online Free PDF

him?”
    “Grainger pretty much lived with the MacKenzies. Mack’s parents.”
    “Mack and Grainger then, they were good friends?”
    “Best friends.”
    “Of yours, I mean.”
    Kiley handed Will back the photograph. One word, and it all would come out. All she had to say was yes. She fell back on her first description. “We were playmates. Pals.”
    He handed back the photograph. “I’ve got some postcards to mail. Okay if I go now?”
    Kiley held the picture in her lap but did not look at it. “Sure. We’ll go to the beach when you get back.”
    “Mom?” Will was standing now, hitching up his cargo-style shorts.
    “Yeah?”
    “What did he do? Grainger, after his mother left?”
    “At first he just sort of hid from everyone.”
    “Did you go get him?”
    “We tried.”
    “And?”
    Kiley hadn’t thought of that day in years, but now she remembered with astounding clarity that day when she and Mack hiked the four miles to the old Sunderland house the Egans rented. Grainger’s family moved from place to place, and he was living that year on remote French’s Cove.
    The house lay below the slope of the weedy pasture they had reached by cutting through the woods, out of view except for the black-capped white chimney. It was so desperately poor. That their friend could live in this appalling squalor was something neither one could articulate. Looking down on the house from the top of the pasture, Mack and Kiley linked arms. In a coastal community, it wasn’t unusual to see houses with cluttered yards: Boston Whaler hulls upside-down, lobster pots stacked like children’s blocks, and their accompanying markers like bulbous lances beside them. That was to be expected of a working fisherman’s yard. But here were the random leavings of an unsuccessful life. Rusted boat trailers and piles of tangled fishnet, empty cable reels and junk cars with open hoods, among which the house squatted like a derelict in a doorway. Bare earth surrounded the place; no garden or even pretty weeds grew near it. A crippled-looking television antenna canted off to one side of the chimney. The front door gaped open, no screen door to protect the house from flies. The screenless windows were also wide open, like blind eyes peering out over the ruin of the yard. A tattered curtain fluttered out of one of them. The house looked abandoned, not just by Mrs. Egan, but by humanity.
    They both agreed that Grainger would die if he knew they had seen where he lived.
    Without another word, the pair ducked back into the woods, between them a pledge never to speak of this. It was the first secret Kiley remembered ever having between them, their first secret excluding Grainger.
    “We tried to find him, but we couldn’t. He showed up on his own a day later.”
    “His mother never came back?”
    “No.”
    Will hitched his shorts again and stared out at the seascape before them, at the utter peacefulness of the softly undulating water and the silent movement of sailboats on the horizon. “That sucks.”
     
    After Will had gone to mail his postcards, Kiley remained on the porch, rocking slowly, thinking back to their promising with linked pinkies to never let Grainger know they’d seen the squalor he lived in. Grainger was so proud. Mack so compassionate. Even at ten, Mack understood that Grainger would disappear from their lives if he knew they pitied him. But they loved him too, and never once thought of him as less equal. In fact, as his adversity provided him with a maturity beyond their years, they turned to him as their nominal leader.
    Winter after winter, from the summer she first met the boys, Kiley marked time from September to June. Waiting for that day when school ended and the station wagon was packed, and Hawke’s Cove was not six months away but only a couple of hundred miles, then just hours, finally, minutes.
    The tempo of her rocking increased again as that old sense of anticipation arose. Kiley hadn’t let it surface the