Free A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry Page A

refinishing."
    She got to her feet awkwardly, and, standing, said, "Look!" She smoothed the shirt over her middle so we could see how round she was. "It isn't due until July. Can you believe that? It's incredible how big I am, but I'm sure July is right. Do you know how you figure out your due date? It's really easy. You add seven days to the date that your last period started, and—"
    I started talking quickly to Will, because I could see how embarrassed he was by the conversation. Maria and Molly went in the house, and Ben put
down the hoe. He showed Will and me how he had hauled rocks from the field to make a small wall beside the driveway, and the work he'd been doing on the roof. We wandered around for a long time, talking about what needed to be done to the old house; Will explained how things had been when he was a child, and Ben thought of how to make them that way again. We stood, finally, by a bare patch of earth beside the kitchen door, and Will described the flowers that had been there once, how his grandmother had emptied her dishwater there, over the flowers, and they had grown bigger and healthier than the other plants.

    "Of course!" said Ben. "It probably had little scraped-off bits of food, organic stuff, in it. She was mulching the flowers without even realizing it. That's cool; that's really cool. We should try that. I bet we could grow herbs there; Maria's dying to have an herb garden. 'Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,'" he sang, off-key.
    Will looked somewhat nonplused by Ben, Maria, the whole thing. But he liked them; I could tell. And he was happy about the house; I could tell that, too.
    Maria made iced tea for everyone, and we went inside. The house was furnished with odds and ends of things, most of them with the paint partly removed. Maria was busy refinishing everything.
There was an old spinning wheel, and she said she was going to learn to spin. The cradle, which was almost finished. A rocking chair, partly done, with a pile of sandpaper on the seat. Ben's typewriter and books stood on a desk made from an old door balanced on two sawhorses. Will sat down in the only real chair, a big comfortable one with its stuffing popping out like milkweed from the pods in fall.

    "Hope no one has hay fever," laughed Maria as Will sat down. "Every time anyone sits in that chair, feathers and dust fly all over the room. But I'm going to reupholster it after the baby's born."
    Ben groaned. "She's gone mad, really mad," he teased. "I live in constant fear that some morning I'll wake up and find that she's sanded and scrubbed and peeled and painted me in the night!"
    Maria leaned over and examined his bare foot. "Come to think of it," she mused, "that's not a bad idea. You could use a little work." Then she leaned her head for a moment against his blue-jeaned leg, and he rumpled the top of her hair with his hand.
    I didn't say much. I was very happy, being there. The sun had gotten lower in the sky, and as it came through the windows it fell on Maria as she sat there on the floor leaning against Ben, in gold patterns on her shoulders and the thick braid of hair. I was making a photograph in my mind.
    But Molly chattered on and on. It was good to hear her; all the tenseness and anger were gone. She and Ben and Maria talked about what the inside of the house needed: hanging plants in the sunny windows; fresh white paint on the old plaster walls; just the right kind of curtains. "I'll weave them myself!" Maria exclaimed; Ben sighed, smiled, and stroked her head.

    On the way home, Molly lagged behind Will and me. She was gathering wild flowers, one of each kind. She said she'd press them, and Will told her he would help her to identify each one, that he had a book she could use.
    "You know," I said slowly to Will, as we walked back through the field together, "I wish I were more like Molly. I mean, I wish I knew the right things to say to people. Sometimes I seem to just
sit
there."
    "Meg," Will said, and he