The Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars

leave him. When he lay dying in the hospital, he was telling us who we weren’t to speak to and who we weren’t to do business with. His dying words were against Jeep Johnson at the used-car lot.”
    “Good for Uncle Bert.”
    “And that nice little Gretchen Wyant who you turned the hose on, and her wearing a silk dress her brother had sent her from Taiwan!”
    “That nice little Gretchen Wyant was lucky all she got was water on her silk dress.”
    “Sara!”
    “Well, do you know what that nice little Gretchen Wyant did? I was standing in the bushes by the spigot, turning off the hose, and this nice little Gretchen Wyant didn’t see me—all she saw was Charlie at the fence—and she said, ‘How’s the retard today?” only she made it sound even uglier, ’How’s the reeeeetard,’ like that. Nothing ever made me so mad. The best sight of my whole life was nice little Gretchen Wyant standing there in her wet Taiwan silk dress with her mouth hanging open.”
    “Here come the police,” Mary said quickly. “But they’re stopping next door.”
    “Signal to them,” Aunt Willie said.
    Before Mary could move to the door, Aunt Willie was past her and out on the porch. “Here we are. This is the house.” She turned and said over her shoulder to Sara, “Now, God willing, we’ll get some action.”

Chapter Thirteen
    S ara sat in the living room wearing her cut-off blue jeans, an old shirt with Property of State Prison stamped on the back which Wanda had brought her from the beach, and her puce tennis shoes. She was sitting in the doorway, leaning back against the door with her arms wrapped around her knees, listening to Aunt Willie, who was making a telephone call in the hall.
    “It’s no use calling,” Sara said against her knees. This was the first summer her knees had not been skinned a dozen times, but she could still see the white scars from other summers. Since Aunt Willie did not answer, she said again, “It’s no use calling. He won’t come.”
    “You don’t know your father,” Aunt Willie said.
    “That is the truth.”
    “Not like I do. When he hears that Charlie is missing, he will ...” Her voice trailed off as she prepared to dial the telephone.
    Sara had a strange feeling when she thought of her father. It was the way she felt about people she didn’t know well, like the time Miss Marshall, her English teacher, had given her a ride home from school, and Sara had felt uneasy the whole way home, even though she saw Miss Marshall every day.
    Her father’s remoteness had begun, she thought, with Charlie’s illness. There was a picture in the family photograph album of her father laughing and throwing Sara into the air and a picture of her father holding her on his shoulders and a picture of her father sitting on the front steps with Wanda on one knee and Sara on the other. All these pictures of a happy father and his adoring daughters had been taken before Charlie’s illness and Sara’s mother’s death. Afterward there weren’t any family pictures at all, happy or sad.
    When Sara looked at those early pictures, she remembered a laughing man with black curly hair and a broken tooth who had lived with them for a few short golden years and then had gone away. There was no connection at all between this laughing man in the photograph album and the gray sober man who worked in Ohio and came home to West Virginia on occasional weekends, who sat in the living room and watched baseball or football on television and never started a conversation on his own.
    Sara listened while Aunt Willie explained to the operator that the call she was making was an emergency. “That’s why I’m not direct dialing,” she said, “because I’m so upset I’ll get the wrong numbers.”
    “He won’t come,” Sara whispered against her knee.
    As the operator put through the call and Aunt Willie waited, she turned to Sara, nodded emphatically, and said, “He’ll come, you’ll see.”
    Sara got up, walked