The Door Into Summer

But I did look at her. Knobby knees, stringy, shooting up fast, not yet filled out, she was not as pretty as she had been as a baby girl. The shorts and T-shirt she was wearing, combined with peeling sunburn, scratches, bruises, and an understandable amount of dirt, did not add up to feminine glamour. She was a matchstick sketch of the woman she would become, her coltish gawkiness relieved only by her enormous solemn eyes and the pixie beauty of her thin smudged features.

She looked adorable.

I said, “And I’m awful glad to be here, Ricky.”

Trying awkwardly to manage Pete with one arm, she reached with her other hand for a bulging pocket in her shorts. “I’m surprised too. I just this minute got a letter from you-they dragged me away from mail call; I haven’t even had a chance to open it. Does it say that you’re coming today?” She got it out, creased and mussed from being crammed into a pocket too small.

“No, it doesn’t, Ricky. It says I’m going away. But after I mailed it, I decided I just had to come say good-by in person.”

She looked bleak and dropped her eyes. “You’re going away?”

“Yes. I’ll explain, Ricky, but it’s rather long. Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you about it.” So we sat on opposite sides of the picnic table under the ponderosas and I talked. Pete lay on the table between us, making a library lion of himself with his forepaws on the creased letter, and sang a low song like bees buzzing in deep clover, while he narrowed his eyes in contentment.

I was much relieved to find that she already knew that Miles had married Belle-I hadn’t relished having to break that to her. She glanced up, dropped her eyes at once, and said with no expression at all, “Yes, I know. Daddy wrote me about it.”

“Oh. I see.”

She suddenly looked grim and not at all a child. “I’m not going back there, Danny. I won’t go back there.”

“But-Look here, Rikki-tikki-tavi, I know how you feel. I certainly don’t want you to go back there-I’d take you away myself if I could. But how can you help going back? He’s your daddy and you are only eleven.”

“I don’t have to go back. He’s not my real daddy. My grandmother is coming to get me.”

“What? When’s she coming?”

“Tomorrow. She has to drive up from Brawley. I wrote her about it and asked her if I could come live with her because I wouldn’t live with Daddy any more with her there.” She managed to put more contempt into one pronoun than an adult could have squeezed out of profanity. “Grandma wrote back and said that I didn’t have to live there if I didn’t want to because he had never adopted me and she was my `guardian of record.'” She looked up anxiously. “That’s right, isn’t it? They can’t make me?”

I felt an overpowering flood of relief. The one thing I had not been able to figure out, a problem that had worried me for months, was how to keep Ricky from being subjected to the poisonous influence of Belle for-well, two years; it had seemed certain that it would be about two years. “If he never adopted you, Ricky, I’m certain that your grandmother can make it stick if you are both firm about it.” Then I frowned and chewed my lip. “But you may have some trouble tomorrow. They may object to letting you go with her.”

“How can they stop me? I’ll just get in the car and go.”

“It’s not that simple, Ricky. These people who run the camp, they have to follow rules. Your daddy-Miles, I mean-Miles turned you over to them; they won’t be willing to turn you back over to anyone but him.”

She stuck out her lower lip. “I won’t go. I’m going with Grandma.”

“Yes. But maybe I can tell you how to make it easy. If I were you, I wouldn’t tell them that I’m leaving camp; I’d just tell them that your grandmother wants to take you for a ride-then don’t come back.”

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