Whippoorwill Read Online Free PDF

rubber-banded to her forearm, and sometimes it stayed in her pocket, but it was always with her. It was where she kept her reminders and her shopping lists, plus a garden design layout that she had been working on for more than a year. She wanted a garden of daylilies, just daylilies, but varieties of every color ever created. She lived in a doublewide with Mr. Cummings, who was a long-distance trucker, and her plot wasn’t big enough to garden. Still, she had dreams about the garden, and I liked sitting with her in the early morning, her door open to whatever weather had arrived the night before.
    â€œThere you are,” she said when I arrived. “Just about gave up on you. You’re running late this morning.”
    She was drinking tea. She had her memory pad flattened on the table in front of her.
    â€œThe bus was late. We almost didn’t make it.”
    â€œWas Lenny hung?”
    I shrugged and sat down on the turned-over five-gallon bucket she used as a footstool. I dropped my backpack between my feet and let myself settle. It always felt good to be in Mrs. Cummings’s office.
    â€œWell, he probably was. The town ought to fire him, and I don’t say that lightly. Employment is hard enough to come by, don’t I know.”
    â€œHe was okay,” I said.
    She shook her head.
    â€œPink Charmer,” she said, lifting the memory book to show me the addition she had made to her garden design. “I just saw it in one of my catalogs. It’s a beauty.”
    â€œPink, obviously, right?”
    She nodded.
    â€œPink Charmer, then the blue one I like,” she said, and bent close to read her handwriting. “Blue Summer Daylily.”
    â€œPretty.”
    She sighed and closed the book. She didn’t say anything for a second.
    â€œGosh, you look more and more like your mom every day,” she said. “I mean it. Spitting image and all that. You must see it yourself.”
    â€œI guess,” I said. “We don’t have that many pictures of her around.”
    â€œTrust me,” she said.
    First bell rang. It rang loud and hard.
    â€œUp and at ’em,” she said when the bell died off.
    She put her memory book under the rubber band against her forearm. She dug in her pocket and shook a few Tic Tacs into her palm, then she held them out to me, offering.
    â€œI’m okay,” I said, “unless you’re telling me I need them.”
    She laughed and shook her head. Then she slapped the mints in her mouth, and her hand cupped against her lips made a small popping sound.
    Â 
    When I came home at four, the spring light made me step out on the porch as I peeled a clementine. If you’ve never spent a winter in northern New England, then you don’t know what spring fever feels like. You spend all winter waiting for a little warmth, a little sunlight, and when it returns, it’s overpowering. But the warmth also melts the ice and snow, and whatever you left outside in December is still there, waiting, like a snapshot of your life. Everything is dirty and cruddy. I slipped my hip up on the porch railing and looked around our yard. Seriously, it wasn’t much better than the Stewarts’ next door. We had a broken umbrella-shaped clothesline and a cement three-step staircase broken off and resting on its side and a coffin-shaped bathtub filled with beanpoles and garden junk. Weeds poked up everywhere, not growing, but giving the place a graveyard air. The whole thing looked ridiculous, looked like whippoorwills lived here, and I hated thinking how accurate that was. I put a tiny piece of the clemintine peel under my front lip. It tasted bitter and harsh, but I wanted that, wanted to taste the light in the fruit, and I leaned out a little and put my face back into the sun. Then I took a big bite out of a fruit section, and it tasted like spring, and like summer later on, and I had a warm, floaty moment until I heard Wally