Free Baby by Patricia MacLachlan

widened. He grinned at us.
    Sophie grinned too. And then, suddenly, Sophie stopped and stared.
    Mares’ tails. Mares’ tails, and walking in the sand by the water, the wind taking her hat, and the man’s whisper in her ear. Mares’ tails and the face
.
    Papa stood next to a small gravestone with the name WILLIAM engraved on it. He didn’t see Sophie. But, just before the minister began to speak Sophie dropped my hand and walked up to Papa. He turned and stared down at her. She smiled at him. She held out her hand.
    Rock.
    Paper.
    Scissors.

ANOTHER YEARLING FAVORITE BY P ATRICIA M AC L ACHLAN
    JOURNEY
    Journey is eleven the summer his mother leaves him and his sister, Cat, with their grandparents. He is sad and angry, and spends the summer looking for the clues that will explain why she left.
    Journey searches photographs for answers. He hunts for family resemblances in Grandma’s albums. Looking for happier times, he tries to put together the torn pieces of the pictures his mother shredded before her departure. And he also searches the photographs his grandfather takes as the older man attempts to provide Journey with a past. In the process, the boy learns to look and finds that, for him, the camera is a means of finding things his naked eye has missed—things like the inevitability of his mother’s departure and the love that still binds his family.
    An American Library
Association Notable Book
for Children
    An American Library
Association Best Book for
Young Adults
    “Vintage MacLachlan: uniquely memorable people; a funny, pungent, compact, and wonderfully wise story.”—
Kirkus Reviews
, Pointer

Mama named me Journey. Journey, as if somehow she wished her restlessness on me. But it was Mama who would be gone the year that I was eleven—before spring crashed onto our hillside with explosions of mountain laurel, before summer came with the soft slap of the screen door, breathless nights, and mildew on the books. I should have known, but I didn’t. My older sister Cat knew. Grandma knew, but Grandma kept it to herself. Grandfather knew and said so
.
    Mama stood in the barn, her suitcase at her feet
.
    “I’ll send money,” she said. “For Cat and Journey.”
    “That’s not good enough, Liddie,” said Grandfather
.
    “I’ll be back, Journey,” my mother said softly
.
    But I looked up and saw the way the light trembled in her hair, making her look like an angel, someone not earthbound. Even in that moment she was gone
.
    “No, son,” Grandfather said to me, his voice loud in the barn. “She won’t be back.”
    And that was when I hit him
.

Chapter One

           M Y GRANDFATHER is belly down in the meadow with his camera, taking a close-up of a cow pie. He has, in the weeks since Mama left, taken many photographs—one of our least trustworthy cow, Mary Louise, standing up to her hocks in meadow muck; one of my grandmother in the pantry, reading a book while bees, drawn to her currant wine, surround her head in a small halo; and many of himself, taken with the self-timer device he’s not yet figured out. The pictures of himself fascinate him. They line the back of the barn wall in a series of my grandfatherin flight, dressed in overalls, caught in the moment of entering the picture, or leaving it; some with grand dimwitted smiles, his hair flying; one of a long, work-worn hand stretched out gracefully, the only part of him able to make it into the frame before the camera clicks.
    Cat gave him the camera in one of her fits of cleanliness.
    “I’ve given up the camera,” she yelled, her head underneath the bed, unearthing her life. “I’ve given up the flute and most everything else. Including meat,” she said pointedly. “I have spent the entire afternoon looking into the eyes of a cow, and have become a vegetarian.”
    “Which cow?” asked my grandmother, not kidding.
    Cat gave her a quick look. Grandfather picked up Cat’s camera and peered through the lens.
    “You tired of