Читать книгу Children of Liberty - Paullina Simons - Страница 19

Four steaming August Saturdays blew by in a whirlwind, and by the end of the month, after trolley cars of bananas and barrels of lemonade, with four clipboards and some much-needed help from the humid weather, Ben had his 5,000 signatures and his heart in a mangled twist. He had already begun feebly insisting that what he needed was not 5,000 but 10,000, so he could keep on coming indefinitely to Lawrence. But on the last Saturday, Pippa, who usually didn’t venture out, was unfortunately one of the people into whose hands Ben thrust a glass of lemonade and a pen. She signed first, then she saw her cousin’s daughter, in a borrowed dress too short for her, her hair up only by the loosest of definitions, and her sleeves inexplicably three-quarter length, though no acceptable dresses were made with three-quarter sleeves anymore. Moreover, Pippa saw Gina as she really was—relaxed, laughing, the way no fifteen-year-old girl was supposed to act on the street with men many years her senior.

“I’m in trouble, you two,” Gina whispered, as Pippa’s plump, moist hand went around her forearm. “Goodbye!”

All of these conclusions about Gina’s impropriety in dress and demeanor Pippa revealed not only to Gina when they got home but to Mimoo and Salvo later that evening. She saved it, actually saved it, for when Salvo returned from the quarry.

“So this is how Verity has been looking after you?” Salvo bellowed.

“Don’t blame Verity for this! It’s nothing!”

“This is not nothing, Gina!” shouted Mimoo. “But this isn’t Verity’s fault, Salvo, it’s your sister’s! Verity is not her keeper.”

“She actually is her keeper, Mimoo! We let Gina out on Saturday afternoons because we thought she was organizing donations at the mission—with Verity!”

“We did that first,” Gina defended herself. “We did it quick. There haven’t been that many. Mostly toys. It’s not so hard, Salvo.”

“This is despicable and inappropriate.”

“What was most inappropriate,” said Pippa, fanning herself, sitting down, sweating, “was their banter, as if they were old friends!”

“Do Verity’s parents know this is what their devout Catholic daughter has been up to?” asked Mimoo.

“No one was up to anything, Mimoo!” Gina desperately didn’t want her new friend to get into trouble.

They went around like this, with Gina sticking up for Verity and pretending they were simply on a busy street in the middle of an afternoon in plain view of the whole town. No one in the house believed her, except for her mother—but only because Mimoo finally became too exhausted to fight. When Angela came home late from being out with friends, she defended Gina like a trooper, calling them all ridiculous, old-fashioned, stuck in the last century, and blowing all manner of things out of proportion.

“All right, Salvo, stop the puffery,” Gina said. “You see? I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Like Angela said. I was standing on a street corner—”

“Exactly!” yelled Salvo.

“Asking for signatures for a canal in Central America.”

“For what?”

“A canal!”

“Is that what they call it nowadays?”

“Mimoo!”

“It’s a ploy,” Salvo said. “It’s a ruse.”

“Salvo, you are crazy. Ben is going to be an engineer. He is going to build the greatest man-made wonder of the world. It’s incredible, Salvo …”

“You’re swallowing his lies hook, line and sinker, sister.”

“They’re not lies, Salvo. He’s going to build banana plantations in Costa Rica.”

“Banana plantations in Costa Rica? You said a canal in Panama?”

“How are the bananas going to get here, Mimoo?”

“Salvo is right, child,” Mimoo said. “I don’t like bananas and will not eat them.”

Gina wanted to yell in frustration at the unfairness of it all. They were pacing around the tiny living room. “Will you eat sugar?” she said, not hiding her impatience. “Coconuts? Chocolate? Ben will grow that too. And ship it here.”

“Gia, those two men are laughing at you right now,” said Salvo. “Have you looked at a map? They don’t need a canal to ship it here.”

“Now who’s the one being laughed at, Salvo?” said Gina. “They need one to ship it to Italy. To China. To France. In other words, to the rest of the world.”