Read Last Summer for Free Online

back to the toolshed at the edge of the Patterson property. She went inside and a few minutes later emerged with a large, empty clay pot in her arms. Again without acknowledging Meg, she went back inside the house. Meg heard the door closing firmly behind her.
    Suddenly, Meg felt sad, and embarrassed, and very alone, sitting on that rusty old swing. There originally had been two swings, but somewhere along the line the chains on the other swing had broken. For over a year the useless swing had sat right where it had fallen, until Meg’s mother got tired of asking Meg’s father to either reattach it or take it to the dump. Finally, Mrs. Giroux had hauled away the broken swing herself. That was back when Mr. Giroux still lived with them and Petey was still a baby. Petey was a toddler when her father had left them. Or had her mother really thrown him out? Meg couldn’t remember clearly the sequence of events or the messy details that had led to her father’s final and for-good exit. Not that she missed him. Much. Not that she cared. Not usually. Now, if he had been anything like Rosie’s dad ...
    The thought of Mr. Patterson, upright and kind, so vastly different from her own father, filled Meg with sadness. For as long as she lived she would remember the day her mother had made her apologize to Rosie; it was just after Rosie had left school a few weeks before the end of the term. And Meg had so wanted to apologize, so very much, but those moments when she stood in the Pattersons’ living room in front of Mr. and Mrs. Patterson and the girl who had always been her best friend, her cheeks red and burning with shame, well, those moments had been the most awful moments in her entire life. She barely remembered what she had said exactly, and she thought that when she had stopped talking Rosie had mumbled something like “Okay,” but she couldn’t be sure. What she did remember very clearly was coming home and sobbing for hours alone in her room, a chair propped up under the doorknob so her mother couldn’t come in. Not that she had tried.
    Anyway, even if Rosie had accepted her apology, Meg didn’t think Rosie really believed that she was sorry. Ever since then Rosie had been avoiding her, once even running back into her house when Meg came out of her own. Mrs. Patterson had frowned and glared the whole time Meg and her mother had been in that living room, and Meg was 100 percent certain Mrs. Patterson hated her now. Which was also awful because Meg had loved spending time at her house. She was a really good cook and was always so calm and happy, or at least she acted that way, and she let Meg try on some of her jewelry and the awesome clothes she had made for herself. And last year, for Meg’s fourteenth birthday, Mrs. Patterson had made something special for her, too, a really cool top with a faux necklace sewn on the front. Rosie had thought it was too flashy, but that was because her idea of fashion was a comfy flannel shirt and also because she didn’t read Teen Vogue and InStyle like Meg did. Not that she had a subscription to either magazine, but an older girl down the street did and was cool about giving each issue to Meg when she had finished reading it. Sometimes a page or two had been torn out but, as Meg had heard her mother mutter on occasion, “beggars can’t be choosers.”
    Well, she certainly didn’t consider herself a beggar, but she understood what her mother meant. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” was another way you could put it. Her mother was full of sayings like that. She said she had gotten them all from her parents. Meg had never really known her maternal grandparents. They both had died before she was two. She had seen pictures, of course, but looking at the pictures didn’t tell her much about Harold and Eileen Donaldson, other than that they seemed pretty stern. But maybe they just hadn’t liked having their picture taken. Her mother didn’t like having her picture taken,