Read Online Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk - Free Book Online Page B

“Ahoy, mateys,” and thrusting and parrying with a wooden spoon until my mother shooed him out the door into the sunshine. Henry, too.
    â€œStay near,” she called after them.
    â€œWe’ll take them out to prune trees,” my father said, pulling on his coat, my grandfather with him. Christmas season was nearly upon us, and it was time to start shaping the small spruces we grew for selling. My father did the pruning while my grandfather sat in the truck with a dog or two and supervised the operation. The year before, my father had let the boys practice on a crooked spruce, and they’d shaped it into an excellent toothpick. This year, the boys were again in charge of gathering what fell in the rows and bundling the best of it for wreaths.
    The house settled a little with them gone.
    We tidied up the breakfast things and began our Saturday chores, my mother ironing in the kitchen, the air charged with the smell of hot clean cotton, the sound of the iron striking the board. My grandmother sat at one end of the big tiger-oak table, mending socks and patching elbows.
    I pared apples for pies, doing my best to make one long, curling ribbon from each apple. Whenever I fed the peels to the horses, they didn’t seem to appreciate my efforts, but I liked things pretty if they could be.
    Aunt Lily, restless without work or church, did her best to taint our Saturdays so we were as miserable as she was.
    â€œIt would be quicker if you weren’t trying to do that,” she told me, picking up a long peel at one end and bouncing the coil until it broke.
    I almost offered to share the chore with her, but Aunt Lily didn’t have much of a knack for housework.
    â€œDid you send in Toby’s film?” I asked her.
    She lifted her chin sharply. “Of course I did, Annabelle. Supervising the mail is a great duty. Once it is in my hands, it gets sorted and sent with no nonsense whatsoever.”
    â€œOh, I know,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything.”
    Aunt Lily gave a little nod. “You shall have the photographs in no time at all,” she said. “Though I’m not sure why that man has our camera or any right to what is ours, all that expensive film. Sending it in, getting it back, and so on and so forth. Making more work for us to do, and for what?”
    My mother shook her head at the “ours.” She had won the camera and everything that went with it. “I’m going to visit Ruth,” she said to me. “Do you want to come along?”
    Well, I didn’t. The very thought of it scared me. But “Yes,” I said, “I do.”
    And when the ironing and the paring and the washing up were done, I put on my jacket and hat and went with my mother out the door.

    Ruth lay in her bed, the covers tucked up across her thin chest. She wore a black silk eye patch. Green-and-yellow bruising seeped from beneath it and across her cheek. Beyond that, she was as pale as February.
    â€œHi, Ruth,” I said after our mothers had spent a little time fussing over her and then settled themselves in the sitting room for a talk. “Does it hurt?”
    Ruth nodded slowly. She had not yet said anything but “Thank you, ma’am,” when my mother gave her a twist of wax paper filled with molasses drops.
    â€œAre you coming back to school soon?”
    Ruth started to shake her head but then stopped. “My parents won’t let me go back there,” she said, looking away from me. “I have to go to a school in Sewickley now.”
    I was stunned. “All that way into the city?”
    â€œMy father works there, Annabelle. We only live out here because my grandpa left us this house when he died. We never meant to stay so long, but it was nice here. Quiet.” She looked back at me and I could see that she was crying. “But we’re going to sell the house and move to the city now.”
    I had spent years growing up with Ruth,