The Great Escape (Wynette, Texas #7)(77)

“I like reading aloud,” she said. “That way, I can learn at the same time as you.”

“I already know all this stuff.”

That was total crap. He knew even less than she did, although she was learning more every day.

With the help of the island librarian, she’d located a few books on transracial child rearing only to discover they focused primarily on whether or not it was right for white families to adopt black children. Hardly helpful. Most of the rest of what she’d been able to discover didn’t go much further than an explanation of hair care, something Toby was handling just fine for himself. Not one of them answered her most fundamental question—how was a pale white woman like herself supposed to instill a sense of racial pride and identity in this golden-brown child?

She was working on instinct.

He slung one leg over the chair arm, waiting for her to begin. So far, he’d finished short, kid-friendly biographies of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, along with the story of the Negro Baseball League. He’d rebelled when she’d found a book about the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, so she’d begun reading it aloud to herself. Within a few pages, he’d forgotten his prejudice against “books about girls,” and when she’d reached the end of the first chapter, he’d pestered her to keep going.

Even though she was tired from a day that had begun too early, she read for nearly an hour. When she finally closed the book, Toby started picking at his big toe. “Did you get another movie for us to watch this weekend?”

“When We Were Kings.” She made a face. “It’s about boxing, a famous match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.”

He forgot about his toe as his face lit up. “Really?”

“I know. Disgusting. Let’s watch The Princess Diaries instead.”

“No way!”

He grinned at her—a real grin—and one more loop in the snarl of negative feelings that resided inside her loosened its grip. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—he smiled at her the same way he did at Lucy.

“Don’t take any crap from him,” Lucy had advised. “At the same time, look for chances to touch him. He’ll pull away. Do it, anyway.”

Bree had tried resting her hand on his shoulder when he was sitting at the kitchen table, but it felt forced, and as Lucy had predicted, he wiggled away, so she’d stopped. She wasn’t giving up the rest, however. An uncharacteristic stubbornness had taken hold of her. He was going to learn about the heritage he’d received from his father whether he wanted to or not.

He dropped his feet to the floor and scratched his ankle with his toe. “You don’t have to watch the movie with me. You can go work on your painting or something.”

Right now, that “something” included waiting for a dozen nonreturnable glass bumblebee Christmas ornaments to arrive. Every time she thought about the Internet order she’d placed over the library computer she felt sick. She was getting more customers every day, but who knew if any of them would want to buy Christmas ornaments in the summer?

“We always watch movies together,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess you should probably watch. Being white and everything, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

She did her best to imitate Lucy’s sarcastic looks. “Like you know so much, Mr. Brown Man.”

He liked being called a man, and he grinned. She smiled back at him, and he kept smiling until he realized what he was doing and exchanged the smile for a scowl. “Me and Big Mike are going horseback riding tomorrow.”

She still couldn’t believe Mike had befriended Toby out of the goodness of his heart. On the other hand, he’d kept his word, and the only times he’d spoken to her since they’d all gone to church two weeks earlier had been during a few brief telephone exchanges when he’d made arrangements to pick Toby up.

Toby scowled at her. “If you weren’t so mean to him, he’d let you go with us.”

“I can’t get away from the farm stand.”

“You could get away if you wanted to. Lucy would watch it for you.”

Toby had been calling Lucy by her real name ever since he’d overheard Bree call her that, but since daughters of past presidents weren’t on his twelve-year-old radar screen, he’d only commented that he’d known all along Viper couldn’t be her real name.

Bree’s growing friendship with Lucy meant even more to her than the help Lucy offered. She watched the farm stand so Bree could have a break. Together, they’d figured out how to reattach the big wooden doors on the storage shed that jutted off the back of the farm stand. Now she could lock up at night instead of having to haul her goods back and forth from the house. Bree also appreciated Lucy’s lack of judgment as she watched Bree try to deal with Toby.

Toby slouched farther into the wicker chair. “Mike told me to see if it was okay for him to take me to church again this week, but I don’t want to go. Church is boring.”

Bree had loved the service at the Episcopal church and yearned to go back, but she didn’t want to run into Mike. She toyed with the cover of the Sojourner Truth book. “Maybe we need to find a church that’s not boring.”

“All church is boring.”

“You don’t know that for sure. I’ve been thinking we should try a new church.”