Alida's Song Page 5

  “Thank you, Grandma.”

  “For what?” She smiled, the moonlight showing her cheeks.

  “For … for dancing with me … for helping me.” He sighed. “For the best night in my whole life, thank you.”

  “Oh,” she said, “it was not so much as that. You will have many more nights and many more dances.”

  And he did. He worked all that summer and each Saturday Olaf handed him eighteen dollars and he would take the truck to town and dance and sometimes walk in the moonlight with a girl and talk of his dreams or their dreams and he fell in love, or thought he did, or wanted to think he did, with Helen, and he felt his heart would break when she moved to the Twin Cities and they swore eternal this and eternal that and he never saw her again. Never heard from her again. And he grew up and away and met other Helens and other Bettys and found larger jobs and then, finally, the army. He left the army and worked many jobs. He married and had a family. And he never knew until after his grandmother had passed on, never knew that she had planned the whole summer.

  Planned it because he was in trouble with his life, and she saved him just as she had when he was five years old, when his mother was drunk and wild in Chicago during the Second World War and his grandmother took him in to live with her when she was cooking for a work crew building roads up into Canada; planned on helping him to grow, to change, to find the world and himself. Planned the job with Olaf and Gunnar. Much later, when he was older still and not much wiser he would find that Olaf and Gunnar had not needed a person to work with them on the farm, that indeed they could not have afforded it; that they lived on much less than they had paid him and that each Saturday his grandmother had handed Olaf eighteen dollars to give to the boy so that her grandson would think he was working for pay.

  He found all this in a small cigar box full of letters in her basement. He came across the box after she was gone, in a letter to her sister, when he, the boy, was old enough to have grandchildren of his own, and he sat with the letters and cried and remembered the dance and the night and the summer and thought that even now, with her gone so many years, even now she was still there, still holding his hand on the dance floor, still guiding him, still helping him.

  Published by

  Dell Yearling

  an imprint of

  Random House Children's Books

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1999 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-51216-1

  April 2001

  v3.0

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Homecoming

  Chapter - One

  Chapter - Two

  Chapter - Three

  Chapter - Four

  Chapter - Five

  Chapter - Six

  Chapter - Seven

  Chapter - Eight

  Copyright