Free A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck Page A

gingerbread porches and a tower as tall as a silo.
    The Pickle had gas in it now, but Dad never thought to drive. We ran all the way, kicking through the leaves of the sleeping town. At the Shellabargers’, the porch light lit the yard.
    A car was piled up at the foot of the front steps. It had swerved off the road, jumped the ditch, bounced off the mounting block, and plowed a furrow across the lawn. A car door was off and over in a flowerbed. The frame wasway out of whack. The car was scrap iron now and hadn’t been worth much even before it tried to climb the Shellabargers’ front steps. An old DeSoto, with mud flaps and a pair of squirrel tails. One-eyed as I recalled it, with a slipping clutch and a Hollywood muffler. The taillights were still on, but the driver was long gone.
    We hit the porch steps at a gallop. Miss Flora Shellabarger swung open the tall front doors.
    Phyllis was on a settee in the big, shadowy front room. She had an ice pack on her head and both eyes were already black. Her skirt was ripped, and her sock hop socks weren’t so fresh now. She looked pale and washed out, even with lipstick on. The minute she saw Mother and Dad, she felt a lot worse and fell back, clutching her head carefully.
    Mother and Dad moved up on her. They checked her over and felt her head under the ice pack. They lifted her chin and examined her black eyes. She looked like a somewhat dazed muskrat, in barrettes.
    Mother looked long and hard at her. “Sock hop?” Mother said. Phyllis shrank, though only a little.
    Mrs. Dowdel and Miss Cora Shellabarger barged in behind us. They’d fallen back in the dash across town. Mrs. Dowdel could have kept up, but Miss Cora was wearing yarn house slippers, with pompoms.
    Mrs. Dowdel filled up every space, even this vast room. She lifted her nose, and her specs gleamed. “What’s thatsmell?” she inquired. Miss Flora stiffened. There were a lot of smells. It was the eighty-year-old house of a couple of eighty-year-old women.
    “Smells like a brewery,” Mrs. Dowdel observed. “I wouldn’t say no to a Miller High Life myself, after that sprint across town.”
    “Well, I never!” Miss Flora yanked her bathrobe ties tight. “Mrs. Dowdel, I’ll have you to know Papa was teetotal and Mama was a founding member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I myself turned down a perfectly good offer of marriage from a man because he drank.”
    “Orville Butz,” Mrs. Dowdel recalled.
    “Never you mind who it was,” Miss Flora snapped, cutting short the local history. “Liquor never crossed our threshold. This is a Methodist home.”
    Miss Flora was a lot feistier than Miss Cora, but Mrs. Dowdel waved her away. “I’m talkin’ about that girl right there.” She pointed past us at Phyllis, growing smaller on the settee. “She’s had one too many.”
    *  *  *
    Silence fell hard. The mantelpiece clock ticked off several slow seconds.
    Then Mother turned on me, of all people. “Bob, go straight home,” she said. “In our haste, we’ve forgotten about Ruth Ann left all alone. Cut right along in case she wakes up.”
    I held my ground. I wanted to know what would happen next. I was all ears.
    “Bob, go now,” Mother said. So I had to, which I didn’t think was fair. Ruth Ann was sawing logs and slept like one. Anyway, they were just trying to get rid of me. Dad pointed out the door.
    But in the long run, it didn’t matter. I heard all about it. Who didn’t? Grade school kids, hermits, the hard-of-hearing. Everybody. As a rule, Miss Cora and Miss Flora would have been the last to know. But this had happened on their doorstep and knocked them out of bed.
    No story moves faster than the one about the bad boy and the preacher’s daughter. You could pick up six or eight versions at the Dairy Queen alone. But where to begin? Might as well start with the car, the one-eyed DeSoto.
    When he had it towed, Police Chief C. P. Snokes noted that it wasn’t registered to anybody.