"Yeah, really.
Granddad lives in books. Gram was a librarian. That's how they met. He was
stealing from the research section and she caught him. Wrestled him to the
ground and... Let Gram tell you. She tells it a lot better. Or wait until
Granddad gets home from his fishing trip, and he'll tell you and act it
out."
"I love
books." She pushed off with both feet and hit the control that got the
moped's pitiful little motor humming again.
Right about then,
pity for my long-misplaced cousin turned to active like. We had a couple things
in common, besides being dumped on Gram by relatives who couldn't find any use
for us.
"I had lots of
books. Mom and Dad got tons of books everywhere we went and sent them home. We
added a new room on our house to hold all the books. They wouldn't let
me keep any. They sold every last one." The growling break in her
voice when she said they gave me a good idea how Doni felt about the
Hallidays.
Okay, maybe it was
immature of me, but I liked her a little more, knowing she really despised
them. It meant Doni was with us all the way. She wouldn't be calling her
Halliday relatives, begging them to take her out of this weird little town any
time soon.
Don't get me wrong. I
despised them, too. Anybody who would take a kid's books away was the lowest of
the low. But the anger put Doni more squarely with us and against them. And
since I had so little in the way of family, I was a greedy kind of kid who
wanted to hold onto the ones I had as tightly as I could.
Then I thought of
something.
"You know, Aunt
Lenore used to send crates of books to Gram all the time. Chances are good a
lot of them were duplicates of the books your folks sent home."
Doni stopped her moped again and stared at me, her face glowing, her eyes shining like crystals, full of tears. I liked that feeling, of knowing I had made her feel that good, given her that kind of hope. I decided right then, I was going to be Doni's protector, as well as the big sister Gram asked me to be.
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