Free Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

crazy about fixing up that broken-down old wreck of a house. She loved being needed by her father. Half the time they were supposed to be working they were just yakking away. She was learning, she related glowingly at recess, to “understand” her father. It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood any more than the safe at the Millsburg First National was sitting around begging him to crack it. Parents were what they were; it wasn’t up to you to try to puzzle them out. There was something weird about a grown man wanting to be friends with his own child. He ought to have friends his own age and let her have hers.
    Jess’s feelings about Leslie’s father poked up like a canker sore. You keep biting it, and it gets bigger andworse instead of better. You spend a lot of time trying to keep your teeth away from it. Then sure as Christmas you forget the silly thing and chomp right down on it. Lord, that man got in his way. It even poisoned what time he did have with Leslie. She’d be sitting there bubbling away at recess, and it would be almost like the old times; then without warning, she’d say, “Bill thinks so and so.” Chomp. Right down on the old sore.
    Finally, finally she noticed. It took her until February, and for a girl as smart as Leslie that was a long, long time.
    â€œWhy don’t you like Bill?”
    â€œWho said I didn’t?”
    â€œJess Aarons. How stupid do you think I am?”
    Pretty stupid—sometimes. But what he actually said was, “What makes you think I don’t like him?”
    â€œWell, you never come to the house any more. At first I thought it was something I’d done. But it’s not that. You still talk to me at school. Lots of times I see you in the field, playing with P.T., but you don’t even come near the door.”
    â€œYou’re always busy.” He was uncomfortablyaware of how much he sounded like Brenda when he said this.
    â€œWell, for spaghetti sauce! You could offer to help, you know.”
    It was like all the lights coming back on after an electrical storm. Lord, who was the stupid one?
    Still, it took him a few days to feel comfortable around Leslie’s father. Part of the problem was he didn’t know what to call him. “Hey,” he’d say, and both Leslie and her father would turn around. “Uh, Mr. Burke?”
    â€œI wish you’d call me Bill, Jess.”
    â€œYeah.” He fumbled around with the name for a couple more days, but it came more easily with practice. It also helped to know some things that Bill for all his brains and books didn’t know. Jess found he was really useful to him, not a nuisance to be tolerated or set out on the porch like P.T.
    â€œYou’re amazing,” Bill would say. “Where did you learn that, Jess?” Jess never quite knew how he knew things, so he’d shrug and let Bill and Leslie praise him to each other—though the work itself was praise enough.
    First they ripped out the boards that covered the ancient fireplace, coming upon the rusty bricks like prospectors upon the mother lode. Next they got the old wallpaper off the living-room wall—all five garish layers of it. Sometimes as they lovingly patched and painted, they listened to Bill’s records or sang, Leslie and Jess teaching Bill some of Miss Edmunds’ songs and Bill teaching them some he knew. At other times they would talk. Jess listened wonderingly as Bill explained things that were going on in the world. If Momma could hear him, she’d swear he was another Walter Cronkite instead of “some hippie.” All the Burkes were smart. Not smart, maybe, about fixing things or growing things, but smart in a way Jess had never known real live people to be. Like one day while they were working, Judy came down and read out loud to them, mostly poetry and some of it in Italian which, of course, Jess couldn’t understand,