Read As Simple as It Seems for Free Online Page B

a million times. When something tragic like that happens in a small town, it never quite goes away.
    The Allens moved away soon after the accident, and it wasn’t long before the rumors started up aboutthe house being haunted. People claimed to have seen Tracy’s ghost sitting in the window, and some even said they’d heard her crying and calling out for help in the middle of the night.
    It was because of Tracy Allen that I refused to take swimming lessons when I was little.
    â€œSwimming is fun, Verbie,” my mother told me, “and besides, it’s not safe for a person not to know how to swim. You’re six years old now. Plenty old enough to learn how to swim.”
    But Tracy Allen had learned how to swim, and look what had happened to her.
    In spite of my protests, my mother insisted that I take lessons at the community pool. I spent the first three classes clinging to her legs sobbing. Eventually, after much coaxing by both the swim instructor and my mother, I was persuaded to get into the shallow end of the pool, where after a good deal more coaxing I finally managed to master the dog paddle well enough to take me, kicking and spluttering, from one side of the pool to the other. By that time the other kids in the class, Annie among them, had moved into the deep end to learn how to tread water in preparation for the deep-water test, but I dug in my heels. Although I was no longer afraid of getting into thepool, and could not only dog paddle but also float on my back, the thought of being in water over my head threw me into such a panic that I think everyone just decided to be satisfied with what I had already achieved and leave it at that.
    Â 
    As I pedaled home in my nightgown that summer afternoon after spying on the new neighbors moving into the Allen house, I wondered what kind of people threw stones at innocent dogs who were only trying to be friendly. Flatlanders, that’s who. If they hated Clydesdale so much, why didn’t they turn around and go back where they’d come from?
    Jack beat me home and was back in his favorite spot under the clothesline when I arrived. Inside, my dad was napping on the couch, with the newspaper over his face. There was a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich waiting for me on the counter, and next to it a note from my mother saying that she’d gone into town for an emergency band practice.
    My mother played in the Clydesdale Band. It wasn’t much of a claim to fame, since anybody who knew how to play an instrument even halfway decently was allowed to be in the band. She sat in the middle, in between the clarinets and the flutes and right behind the trombones.It was easy to spot her, not only because of her size but also because she was the only one in the band who played the spoons. When she played at home she used our regular everyday silverware, but on concert nights she always used a pair of silver soup spoons, holding them together back to back, making them click in time to the music by tapping them against a little padded block of wood that my father had wired onto an old snare drum stand.
    Clydesdale was very proud of its band, but nobody had much time to practice, so the music always sounded a little rough around the edges. That didn’t stop people from coming to the concerts, though. Not just summer people either—town people came too. Everybody brought blankets or lawn chairs to sit on and cans of Off! to keep the mosquitoes and no-see-ums from biting. If it was raining, people would park in front of the post office and along both sides of the road. Then they’d sit in their cars with the windows cracked open, honking at the end of each number instead of applauding.
    The summer concerts were on Wednesday nights, and sometimes the band would get together earlier in the day to run the numbers a couple of times, but this was a Sunday, so I had a feeling the reason my motherhad called it an emergency practice was because