Free Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page B

Here, they’re frame and you don’t see all the subdivisions where whole blocks of houses are built by the same developer—door to left, door to right, door to left . . . all down the street.
    A yellow two-story will overshadow a rambler. Picket fence around one, unmowed grass at another. Abby’s aunt Jayne lived on a dead-end street at the top of a hill, with a steep driveway and a vegetable garden in the front yard.
    “Here we are!” she said as she brought the van to a stop at the top of the drive and yanked the emergency brake. “Shangri-la Jayne.” And Spirit, the dog, took that as his cue to leap about thefront seat as though demons possessed him. When Jayne went around and opened the door for him, he promptly leaped out and peed a steady stream around an azalea bush, then faced the car again, tail wagging like a windshield wiper, as Abby and I crawled out and reached for our bags.
    There were two old beat-up bikes in the garage, both fitted with large wire baskets front and back. Jayne explained that sometimes—to save gas—she did her marketing or deliveries by bike if the orders were small enough but that the bikes were ours for the summer. And then we were sitting in Jayne’s kitchen, a canary chirping at us from an antique-looking birdcage in the next room. Jayne treated us to peach-mango tea and her walnut bars, and I wiggled my bare toes in pleasure.
    *  *  *
    “What do you think?” Abby asked as we unpacked later, standing between a single bed with its faded patchwork quilt and a metal army cot. There was a blind on one window but not the other, tie-dyed curtains at both; a seashell lamp on the bedside table; and a dream catcher, some Mardi Gras masks, and a few scattered watercolors on the walls.
    “I think it will be a blast!” I told her, because Jayne herself looked like an expatriate from a sixties commune. She had an angular face devoid of makeup, deep-set gray eyes beneath her graying bangs, and a girlish smile, as though life still were capable of surprising her. She wore a kerchief around her head, tied in back beneath her hair, and a baggy cotton jumper over a tee. It was going to be two months with a housemother whose smilealone gave you the sense that she was up for whatever mischief you might think of next.
    We helped unwrap dinner—little parcels of food from a farmer’s market—and after dinner Abby and I rode the bikes all around the university neighborhood on miles and miles of bike trails along both sides of the Willamette River, with a bike bridge to cross over now and then.
    “I love it here!” I called to Abby, feeling a remarkably cool breeze after such a warm day. “The weather’s perfect!”
    “You wouldn’t think so if you were here the rest of the year,” she called back over her shoulder. “This is the sunny season. The rest of the year, it’s like England.”
    I could do with a little England, I thought. I could live with these one-of-a-kind houses, with the bikes and the breeze.
    “When were you here last?” I asked, watching Abby’s bare legs make slow revolutions on the pedals.
    “I come every summer for a short while. Last time I came for the whole deal, I was twelve.”
    “Was Jayne ever married?”
    “Yeah. They divorced when I was small. I hardly remember him. Now she says she’s too busy to fall in love.”
    That evening we sat around the wood-burning stove in the living room, and I marveled that it could get cold enough to light a fire. Jayne poured each of us a cup of wine in Japanese teacups and told us about the koi pond she was planning to dig in her backyard if she could figure a way to keep the raccoons out.
    She chattered on about the plants she would need and the fish she would buy, and when my head began to dip and jerk, and the teacup felt weightless in my hand, I snapped to and saw Jayne smiling at me.
    “Okay, girls, off to bed. Quilts in the chest beneath the window. Who gets the cot?”
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    There were no