Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

had made with his thumbs. He held the frog’s face up close to his own and studied the speckles on its cheeks, the twin globes of its frightened eyes. “We dissected them in biology class when I was in eighth grade,” Joe said, the remembered tang of formaldehyde stinging his nose.

“Cool.” Rusty looked at Joe with envy. “I’ll bet the girls screamed a lot.”

“I went to an all-boys school,” Joe said.

“All boys?” Rusty looked as if he were weighing the pros and cons of such a place. “No girls at all?”

“The lunchroom ladies.”

Rusty snorted. “They don’t count.”

“I do remember one French teacher …” Joe made an hourglass in the air.

Rusty grinned. “But no real girls?”

“Nary a one.”

Rusty turned the frog this way and that, upside down, and then set it free. It sat on the bank, getting its bearings for a moment, before leaping into the rushes that grew along the water’s edge. “I don’t think I’d like that too much,” Rusty said. “Sounds boring.”

“It was,” Joe said.

They both realized, suddenly, that except for the one brief reference to his father, this was the first time Joe had spoken to Rusty of his past.

“I don’t remember a single thing I learned from picking a frog to pieces,” Joe said.

And for the rest of the afternoon, they scoured the banks for amphibians, scrutinized them gently, and then went home empty-handed.

Joe had not asked Angela about her absent husband. He had quickly learned that the people who lived in Belle Haven did not like to be questioned even though they were, as a rule, a talkative bunch. And despite the fact that he had been schooled among rude young men—perhaps because of this—Joe knew without thinking about it that to speak casually of Angela’s husband would be like speaking casually of the newly dead. Angela herself was the one who brought it up.

“Has Rusty told you anything about his father?” she asked Joe at the end of summer while they sat together in Angela’s living room, waiting for Rusty to come home with a Sunday trout. It was the only supper that the Kitchen did not serve—Sunday supper—and Angela’s only chance to sit down to a proper meal with Dolly, Rusty, and, quite often now, Joe.

“No, not really.”

She lit a cigarette, killed the match. “Has anyone?”

“No, Angela.” Joe liked to say her name. He had decided that the women in Belle Haven had the nicest names he’d ever heard—Rachel, Angela, May, Coral, Ophelia, Anne, Helen, June. “And you don’t need to tell me anything either,” he said.

“Well, maybe I do,” she said. She smoked her cigarette for a moment, never moving it far from her lips. “You may eventually hear something or other, and you need to know what’s really true and what you may hear from Rusty.”

“The two aren’t the same?”

“Not like I wish they were.” She sighed, went into the kitchen to fetch some more iced tea.

“It was the strangest thing,” she said, coming back. “Buddy was a really good boy. Buddy … that was his name. Still is, I guess. He had beautiful manners. Never got into any trouble. Got along with his folks. But so … so exciting, too. I’d never met anyone quite like him. I saw him for the first time at a corn festival in Randall, where he lived. We were both sixteen. We were watching a tractor pull, and I got splashed with mud. He ran and found a wet cloth somewhere and helped me get the worst of it off. And then we began to see each other the way young kids do, at movies, ball games. He played the harmonica. Looked a lot like Jimmy Dean. I was in love with him and him with me before we turned seventeen, and it was the real thing. Didn’t matter how old we were. Not then.” Angela took a long swallow of tea and put her bare feet up on the coffee table. Joe sat with his back bowed, his head hanging, his elbows on his thighs. It was how he listened, now that he had learned how.

“We got married, right after high school, even though everyone wanted us to wait a while, especially Buddy’s folks. Buddy was good with cars, so he took a job at a garage in Randall. I sold stuff door-to-door. Makeup, mostly. Had to get all painted up and walk around in high heels.” She made a face. “I’d drive Buddy to work and then take the truck around Randall, Fainsville, Jupiter. But the outfit I worked for didn’t like the idea of an old pickup, so I had to park it somewhere and do each block on foot.” Angela held a foot in the air, turned it one way and then the other. “By the time I got home at night my feet looked just awful. God, they hurt.” She took another drink of tea.

“Then I got pregnant with Rusty when I was still only eighteen and after about a month I got fired, which saved me the trouble of quitting. I kept having to stop to throw up in somebody’s petunias. And my feet got much worse. It wasn’t working out at all. After that we couldn’t afford to pay rent on our own place, and Buddy’s parents didn’t have any room, so we moved in with my mother. She was still living down by the school at the time, in the house where I grew up.” She glanced over at Joe, smashed her cigarette in a tray as big as a football.

“Before you have kids, you just can’t know what it’s going to be like to have a baby come along and change everything. Everyone told us what was coming, but hearing about it didn’t do a thing to prepare us—not for the joy or the hurt. And Buddy was so excited about having a kid, always walking around with a big smile on his face. He didn’t seem to mind living with his mother-in-law. He watched me get big