Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,57

asked lightly as I headed for the closet.

“Granly’s letters,” Abbie said. “Most of them to and from Grandpa.”

I froze at the closet door and turned to stare at my sister.

“Wh-what?” I stammered. “Why are you looking at them?”

“Listen,” Abbie said brusquely as she slapped one of the letters into a pile, then scooped up another from a box sitting at her hip. “Mom has abdicated. We both know this quilt project of hers is not about getting all nostalgic about us as babies. It’s about avoiding thinking about Granly!”

“Well,” I murmured, “I think it’s a little of both . . . .”

“Whatever,” Abbie said. “You have a date with Josh, Hannah is off getting hickeys or whatever with Fasthands. And I’m here. So I might as well go through Granly’s things myself. I mean, isn’t that the point of us being here all summer?”

I felt terrible.

“Listen,” I said, sinking to the floor just outside her circle of paper piles. “You shouldn’t have to do that by yourself. Do you want me to say something to Mom? Or I could—”

Abbie held up her hand to stop me.

“You know what?” she said. Her face and voice softened. “I actually kind of like it.”

She picked up the letter that she’d just slapped down, and smoothed it out on her leg, as if apologizing to it for the rough treatment. Then she read from it. With her head bowed and her hair spilling forward, I couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded a little different—slower and more lilting. Less like Abbie and more like Granly.

“ ‘Dear Artie,’ ” Abbie read. That’s what everyone had called Grandpa, though his real name had been Arthur. “ ‘It feels funny to be so looking forward to the summer when last summer was so beastly. But my New Year’s resolution was to look forward, not back, and I have been better at keeping at that than I have been at studying for my statistics exam. I really don’t believe stats have anything to do with library science, and no (boring) thing you can say will convince me otherwise. By the way, you did catch what I said about last summer, didn’t you, Artie? Now what, or whom, do you think is the reason for that?’ ”

As Abbie read, I put my hand over my mouth without realizing it. I could just hear my grandmother saying those words, even if they were in my sister’s voice.

But then again I couldn’t. Because that had been a Granly I never knew, the Granly who was young, writing a love letter to her boyfriend when she was supposed to be studying. And that “beastly” summer. What was that about?

“You know what I think she’s talking about? That summer?” Abbie said as if she’d seen the question in my eyes. “I think they broke up.”

“But we never heard about that!” I whispered, glancing at the door.

“Well, obviously it all worked out in the end,” Abbie said with a laugh. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how someone’s story can change? Maybe when Granly wrote that letter, that was their story, that they had come close to saying good-bye to each other forever.”

“Which would have meant no Mom,” I whispered, shaking my head in wonder. “No us.”

“Yeah, and once they were married, who knows if they ever thought about it again. Maybe when your big picture is in place, all those bumps in the road along the way get sort of smoothed over.”

I thought about that.

“Do you ever feel like,” I asked, “right now, it’s nothing but bumps?”

“Oh, yeah,” Abbie said, nodding in recognition. “Why do you think I love to swim so much? There’re no bumps in water.”

Abbie replaced Granly’s letter in its pile and smoothed it out carefully.

“Anyway, I think you should read these letters . . . sometime. Mom, too. When you’re ready.”

I picked another letter up, holding the dry, crackly-feeling paper between my thumb and forefinger.

“I . . . I might be ready.”

Abbie shook her head.

“I know you’re not,” she said. “But that’s okay. I am. I don’t know why I am, but I am. So I’m going to get them all organized for you in little folders, which I know Hannah will approve of, and we can take them home with us. And when you’re ready—they will be too.”

I teetered over the piles of paper to give Abbie a thank-you hug.

“Aren’t we huggy,” Abbie said, pushing me away with a grin. “You’re clearly getting some action.”

“Shut up!” I whispered, glancing