Free The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice Page B

pictures,” I told him, and imagined it was a collection of photographs from all the places they’d been while sailing the world catching fish.
    His mama begged him to take it, holding it between their bodies. Like a tiny drop of glue she hoped would keep them connected.
    She kept talking to him, and when it seemed she finally knew that what she was saying would make no difference, she put the envelope back into her purse, stepped close to Frankie, and hugged him. And he let her. But he didn’t put his armsaround her. Instead, his arms lay flat at his sides.
    She hugged him real hard.
    And by the way she held so tight to him, it looked to me like she was very sorry.
    But then Frankie moved away from her. He started back toward the shop.
    â€œWhat’s he doing?” I asked Luis. I felt a panic inside.
    Luis shook his head. “This is just like Frankie. I’ve been telling him that she would come back someday. I said, ‘She won’t have you staying with me forever, you know.’” He sighed, and I could picture the two of them standing together on the jetty, Luis talking, telling him about his mother. Frankie, not wanting to care if she ever came back.
    His mama leaned against the taxi like it was the only thing holding her up, like her legs had stopped working. Tears ran down from her black-asphalt eyes.
    And that’s when my stomach went tight, and my breath stopped, and a very bad feeling cameover me. Because it was plain to see that he had made up his mind.
    I watched Frankie walk away from his mama that morning. And with each step he took, I knew he was carving a deeper hole into his heart.

THE PART OF MARISOL THAT SHINES
    I ’ve got another recipe for you, Groovy, became Luis’s favorite seven words. Every time I stopped in the Swallow on my way home from school, he was handing me a piece of paper with a different secret passed down from his Aunt Regina. Fried ice cream, tortilla soup, stuffed green chilies; you name it.
    Don’t get me wrong, I was thankful to have the recipes, and I taped each one carefully into my cooking notebook and all, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything like formal training.
    There was nothing in Luis’s recipes about the things I wanted to know, like the exact proper amount of time to cool a cake straight from the oven before thinking of frosting it.
    Even Ms. Dixon-Green, our school librarian, couldn’t find the answer.
    â€œI’ll look into ordering a cooking reference book,” she told me. “But it could take a while.”
    Every day at lunch recess, I’d wander into the library and make my way to her desk. “You found out anything yet?” I’d ask her, like my very life suddenly depended on knowing the correct number of minutes to cool a cake.
    She never did.
    One day she handed me an empty cake-mix box. “It’s about ten minutes before removing the cake from the pan, and then it says to cool completely before frosting,” she said. “According to Betty Crocker, at least.” She pointed to the directions listed on the back of the box.
    â€œI know what the box says,” I told her, as if I hadn’t already memorized what Betty Crocker’sinstructions were for cake baking. “But the skin of the cake is tender for a long time. I wish they’d tell us how long completely cool is.”
    Ms. Dixon-Green sighed and looked again at the directions. “That’s true,” she said. “I hate it when the frosting pulls up little bits of the cake.”
    I stopped going to the library at lunchtime after that.
    I decided maybe it was more of a heat-and-cooling scientific thing, and made plans to ask Miss Johnson instead.
    When the case of strawberries came in to the Swallow from the fruit market, Luis delivered them to my house himself.
    â€œCan’t wait to try one,” he said. Which is exactly the kind of thing Luis would say.
    â€œThanks. I’ll