OCR Text |
Show Moon - 39 found me and took me to the school nurse, who cleaned me up and put on a special bandage that held the edges of the cut together. "That's no way for a little girl to behave," she scolded. "Throwing and fights. You ought to be ashamed." Every day I hoped the boy would come up to me and say he was sorry. I thought I needed him, for he was my only link to the other children, who seemed to know something I didn't. They shared a secret that allowed them to smile knowingly, to whisper among themselves, to laugh at things that made no sense at all. When I came home from school, I'd go over to the framed photo on the table next to where the bed came down and say, "Is Daddy coming home for supper tonight?" And my mother would say, "No, not yet. But soon." I believed in his homecoming with the same anticipation of joy I'd felt about the woman in the flowers. If I asked often enough, if I looked at his picture hard enough, he'd be here, and we'd be happy, for what I remembered was not the mud green helmet or the rattlesnake boots, but the riding on his shoulders like a queen on a horse. I wrote him letters, page after page of unintelligible curlicues. And I'd begun to draw, not just scribbling, but things I studied, like the pigeons outside our window, the thin tree outside, the colors of sunlight on glass, the memory of yellow flowers. At night, my mother and I huddled together on the sofa, a large crocheted afghan around us both. She made up stories about Little Bo-Peep, who loved her sheep so much she did brave and wonderful things to save them from whatever form of danger my mother thought of-bolts of lightning, freezing winters when the wind blew night and day, wolves, of course, and bad men who |