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but Hannah said we’d have just enough time to milk before her weekly quilting club meeting. All through milking, I thought longingly about diving off Nadine’s dock into that cold water. I’d go over there after Hannah left for her meeting. I was sure if I could get Nadine swimming, and laughing, I could coax out the old Nadine.
    On the way to the house, I checked the bowl I’d left for the cat and saw it’d been licked clean. She’d found the milk after all.
    At supper, I was as hungry as a pack of jackals, but I left some chicken and biscuit on my plate.
    “Boy, am I full,” I said, patting my stomach. “Can’t eat another bite.”
    Hannah kept right on eating.
    “I don’t suppose that cat has anything to do with you leaving food on your plate all of a sudden?” she said.
    I sighed. Fooling Hannah was harder than teaching a frog to play a fiddle.
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and Hannah smiled.
    “You can give her some of my chicken, too,” she said. She had a soft heart, that Hannah. It was that soft heart that had made her give our trip money to the Trombleys. But I also knew that soft heart had made her take
me
in, too.
    Hannah went off to her weekly quilting club meeting while I washed the dishes. I turned on the radio to hear
Fibber McGee and Molly
, but instead President Truman was talking about sending more troops into Korea, so I turned it off and took the bowl of chicken out to leave for the cat.
    The night air was so chilly I changed my mind about swimming. Nadine wouldn’t go in, with it being this cold, and I didn’t feel much like it anymore, either. I stood looking up into the starry night and listened to the bullfrogs sing from the lake.
    Overhead, the Milky Way looked like a river flowing through the dark sky, and the stars hung so low and bright it seemed I could catch them on my tongue, like snow-flakes. I wrapped one of Hannah’s quilts around me and sat on the porch in the starlight, hoping to get a glimpse of the cat. I fell asleep without seeing her, but the bowl was empty in the morning.

chapter 7

    Sundays were a day of rest, so in the summer, after chores and milking, and two long (and I mean
loooong
) hours of church and Sunday school, I’d always spent the whole afternoon with Nadine. Mostly we swam, but sometimes we wrote and put on plays, or took picnics up Black Hill, or rode Dolly and played cowboys and Indians. Sometimes we stopped by the town ball field and watched the old-timers play.
    “I can’t believe you’re not allowed to play baseball or cards on Sunday,” Nadine said. “I’m glad I’m not a Presbyterian.”
    I hated having to dress up for church (I was sure God wouldn’t mind if I wore my overalls, but Hannah didn’t see it that way), and it was awfully dull sitting through Reverend Miller’s sermons, but when Nadine described her church—first Communion, confession, and how she had togive up her favorite things, like candy and ice cream, for Lent—well, I thought I was getting off easy being a Presbyterian. And the best thing about church was that the Wright brothers weren’t there. I figured even God would keel over if the Wright brothers ever showed up.
    The old Nadine had liked baseball, even though she wasn’t very good at it, but the new Nadine acted as if it bored her, so I didn’t linger long at the ball field, even though I wanted to. I loved baseball. I was the best player at school, and always got picked captain when we were choosing teams, and Hannah and I listened to Red Sox games on the radio. Sometimes Nadine would toss a ball with me, but I mostly ended up chasing after it. Nadine threw, well, like a girl.
    We could always count on Raleigh being at the ball field too, seeing as how both teams let him be their batboy, and like always, he came running over to me.
    “Blue True,” he said.
    “Why’s he call you that?” Nadine asked.
    “I think he’s trying to say
true-blue
,” I answered. I hadn’t told her about the Wright