Free A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck Page B

That meant it was the Burdicks’. Anything missing throughout the county from a handsaw to a corncrib ended up at the Burdicks’. Besides, everybody knew the driver was Roscoe Burdick, blue-and-green-eyed Roscoe Burdick, who’d welcomed me to town by half drowning me, then hanging me out to dry in the Dowdel privy.
That
Roscoe Burdick.
    He was at the wheel and drunk as a skunk when he lost control of the DeSoto on homecoming night and plowed that furrow up to the Shellabarger porch steps. Phyllis flew out, lighting headfirst on that first concrete step.
    But how she happened to be there and not at the sock hop made for a longer story.
    First of all, Roscoe Burdick had sideburns down to here and shirts unbuttoned down to there. He seemed to know all the verses of the song “Ready Teddy,” and he owned a pair of blue suede shoes. He was about as Elvis as Phyllis would ever get.
    Waynetta Blalock had always thought she had Roscoe pretty well sewed up. She’d told the whole high school that she could make something out of him, Burdick or not. Waynetta’s mother naturally wouldn’t let a Burdick on the porch. But that only made Roscoe more interesting to Waynetta. Her plan was to graduate and then start to look seriously at silver patterns.
    But from that night before school started when Roscoe saw Phyllis strolling past the Dairy Queen, it was a whole new ballgame.
    Of course he was pushing twenty, but that’s the age Phyllis thought she was, in her head. She’d been sneaking out with him all fall.
    They’d been spotted at a tractor pull as far away as Rantoul. In fact on homecoming sock hop night he’d taken her over to the Decatur Drive-in to see an Elvis double feature,
Loving You
and
King Creole.
We’d been peppered with clues all fall, but Mother and Dad didn’t pick up on them since Phyllis was only fourteen.
    Waynetta had, of course. She’d been sitting home withnobody to sneak out with and getting ready to blow her top. So in time I guess she
would
have blacked both Phyllis’s eyes if the porch steps hadn’t done it for her.
    On Sunday Mother meant to drag Phyllis out of bed and make her go to church to show her shameful face to the world. But Phyllis threw up right at her. Oh boy, was she sick, all day. “I thought it was root beer,” she groaned, but got no sympathy.
    “If I believed this would teach you a lesson, young lady,” Mother said, “I’d be happier than I am.”
    I was sent up with Sunday dinner on a tray: liver and onions, pickled beets, and vinegar slaw. Their smell and the stomach-pink walls of Phyllis’s room were a bad combination. She was sick all over again.
    I edged the tray onto her bed, just trying to be helpful.
    “I’ll never eat again,” she said from deep in her damp pillow. “Take it away.”
    “Where’ll I put it?”
    “Don’t make me tell you.”
    “Mother and Dad say we may have to leave town, thanks to you,” I pointed out to her. “They say we haven’t set a good example for the community and all eyes are upon us. Also, liquor was involved.”
    “I thought it was root beer,” Phyllis moaned.
    “You said that,” I answered.
    “If those two old biddies, those Shellabarger sisters,would just keep their traps shut, we could forget all about it,” Phyllis said. “But they won’t.”
    “Also, liquor was involved,” I reminded.
    “And that old battle-ax Mrs. Dowdel is everywhere I turn,” Phyllis griped. “She’s all over me like . . . like . . .”
    “White on rice,” I said.
    “Like what?” Phyllis groaned.
    “White on rice. It’s one of her sayings.”
    “I hate this podunk town,” Phyllis said. “I can’t tell you how much. And Mother and Dad are prejudiced against Roscoe. Everybody is. Nobody understands him.”
    “Everybody understands he cut and ran when he piled up the car and left you knocked cuckoo on the Shellabarger steps,” I remarked.
    “He’s sensitive.” Phyllis gagged, reaching for the basin. “All he needs is