Glory Girl Read online

  “Yes, I’m almost over the mountain.

  Yes, I’m going home at last.

  Yes, I see the golden valley.

  I am almost to the pass.”

  Anna was no longer listening to the music. The footsteps behind her were slow and reluctant, the way Uncle Newt’s would be, Anna thought. Anybody else would have walked right over and looked in the auditorium to see who was singing.

  The footsteps stopped, and Anna turned her head.

  The Last Good-bye

  UNCLE NEWT WAS STANDING in the shadows by George Washington, dwarfed by the huge white statue. A baseball cap was in his hands. He was turning it around, smiling awkwardly.

  Anna got up—she was smiling too—and walked toward him. They stepped back against the wall, farther away from the loud music. Anna said, “I was wondering if I was ever going to see you again.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  “I knew it was you when the door opened.”

  “Did you?”

  There was a pause, and then Anna said in a rush, “The whole family’s so proud of you. It’s just—well, you’re all we talk about these days.”

  “Well …” There was another pause. Uncle Newt glanced behind him at the door.

  Anna went on in a rush. “They just want to thank you. That’s all. And Dad wants you to sing with the family. He says you’ve got the best voice of any of the Glorys. And Mom wants you to live with us. She says—”

  He shook his head, interrupting her.

  She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m babbling. I just wanted to see you so much, and now that you’re here—well, I feel like I’ve got to say everything at once.”

  “You got time.”

  “No, you’ll disappear again.”

  Anna watched the way he grinned, and she knew it was true. She said, “Then just let me say that everybody is grateful and that I am so happy to see you again.” She smiled up at him. “I hope you feel proud.”

  “You know what it’s like?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, all my life I been running away. If something’s hard or if it don’t feel right, I just had one answer—run away. Anyway, this is one time in my life when I didn’t.” He squinted as if he had said more than he wanted to. He turned his baseball cap in his hands. “Anyway, it’s something to look back on.”

  “For us too.”

  There was a pause, and then Uncle Newt said, “Well, I just wanted to drop by for a minute. I figured you’d be back here by yourself, getting ready to sell records. I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye.”

  “You’re going?”

  He nodded.

  “Where, Uncle Newt? Will we see you again?”

  “You remember George Oatis?”

  “No.”

  “Him and me grew up together. It’s his car I was driving the night of the accident. Anyway, it’s too many people around here for us, and Oats says he knows a man who can get us jobs out West.”

  “You mean, like cowboys?”

  Uncle Newt put his baseball cap on his head, grinned and ducked in embarrassment. “We probably sound like two fools to you.”

  “No.”

  “We sound like fools to ourselves. I don’t guess we’ll bust broncos or anything.”

  “I just hope you’ll be happy, and I’m really glad I got to know you.”

  “That goes double for me.”

  Anna started to reach out to him, to shake his hand, but something about the way he was standing stopped her. “Listen,” she said suddenly, “do you need money? I’ve got a hundred and twenty-eight dollars over there in the box. I’d be glad to give it to you. The whole family would.”

  “No.”

  “They’d be honored if you took it, really.”

  “No!” He lifted his hands. “No, thank you.” He lowered his hands, palms down, as if he were pressing something back into a box. “I want to leave things between me and your family just exactly where they’re at. If that makes any sense.” He took a step toward the door. “Now, you take care of yourself, you hear?”

  “I will. You too.”

  At the door he shifted his weight and paused. Without looking at her, he said, “You’re the best of the bunch—you know that?”

  The way he said it, as if it were the first compliment he had ever given anybody, took her breath. She said in a rush, “I’m not, but thank you for saying it.”

  He turned his head and looked directly at her. “It’s true. Any one of them—your mom, Bubba, any one of them would give me money now. Would be glad to. But you would have done it before, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “See, I knew that. I could tell. You’ve got a generous, kind way about you, and don’t you ever lose it.” She couldn’t answer. “Well, you tell the family I said so long.”

  “I will, Uncle Newt.”

  He touched the brim of his baseball cap and went out the door. It swung shut slowly behind him.

  Anna stood for a moment in the empty entrance hall. She waited, listening for the sound of Uncle Newt’s car driving away. When the sound faded, she turned to go back into the auditorium.

  As she turned she glanced up at George Washington. He seemed to be watching her with his bright blue eyes. She stepped closer.

  Whoever had made the plaster statue had left the eyes blank, but someone had ballpoint-penned in some blue pupils. Suddenly she liked the statue. She looked up at it again. She put one hand on the cold plaster. There were probably a hundred statues like this in George Washington High Schools all over the country. And yet this one had, just by waiting, gotten a personality.

  Smiling slightly, she turned to the auditorium. As she took the last seat, she heard her father saying, “We’re going to take a short break now—doctor’s orders—and while we do, at the back of the auditorium, one of the Glory girls, our little Anna, will be waiting to help you with your purchases. Stand up, darling, so they can see where you’re at.”

  Anna got up. For the first time in her life she stood up smiling. She waved her hand and then stepped back out the auditorium door and sat at her table.

  She straightened the stacks of records and cassette tapes. Her uncle’s words, “You’re the best of the bunch,” still echoed in her mind, making her feel better each time she heard them. “You’ve got a generous, kind way about you.” It was as if he had given her the first two positive pieces of a large and complicated puzzle. Like George Washington, she was at last getting a personality. Her smile broadened as the first people came out of the auditorium. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Tonight before we sing our closing theme song, I’d like to say a special word about my brother, Newt. It was him that saved our lives. He put his life on the line again and again, for each one of us, and I wanted Newt to be with us tonight, singing here on the stage, part of the Glory family at last. It couldn’t be. So tonight I want to go on record as saying this. Wherever you are, Newt, whatever you’re doing, anytime you want to, come on home and—

  “Sing with the Glorys

  Yes, come sing

  With the Glorys

  If you sing

  With the Glorys

  Then you’ll never,

  Never,

  Never!

  Sing a-lone!

  “Good night, everybody, and may God bless you and keep you until we meet again.”

  A Biography of Betsy Byars

  Betsy Byars (b. 1928) is an award-winning author of more than sixty books for children and young adults, including The Summer of the Swans (1970), which earned the prestigious Newbery Medal. Byars also received the National Book Award for The Night Swimmers (1980) and an Edgar Award for Wanted . . . Mud Blossom (1991), among many other accolades. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and she has fans all over the world.

  Byars was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father, George, was a manager at a cotton mill and her mother, Nan, was a homemaker. As a child, Be
tsy showed no strong interest in writing but had a deep love of animals and sense of adventure. She and her friends ran a backyard zoo that starred “trained cicadas,” box turtles, leeches, and other animals they found in nearby woods. She also claims to have ridden the world’s first skateboard, after neighborhood kids took the wheels off a roller skate and nailed them to a plank of wood.

  After high school, Byars began studying mathematics at Furman University, but she soon switched to English and transferred to Queens College in Charlotte, where she began writing. She also met Edward Ford Byars, an engineering graduate student from Clemson University, whom she would marry after she graduated in 1950.

  Between 1951 and 1956 Byars had three daughters—Laurie, Betsy, and Nan. While raising her family, Byars began submitting stories to magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Look. Her success in publishing warm, funny stories in national magazines led her to consider writing a book. Her son, Guy, was born in 1959, the same year she finished her first manuscript. After several rejections, Clementine (1962), a children’s story about a dragon made out of a sock, was published.

  Following Clementine, Byars released a string of popular children’s and young adult titles including The Summer of the Swans, which earned her the Newbery Medal. She continued to build on her early success through the following decades with award-winning titles such as The Eighteenth Emergency (1973), The Night Swimmers, the popular Bingo Brown series, and the Blossom Family series. Many of Byars’s stories describe children and young adults with quirky families who are trying to find their own way in the world. Others address problems young people have with school, bullies, romance, or the loss of close family members. Byars has also collaborated with daughters Betsy and Laurie on children’s titles such as My Dog, My Hero (2000).

  Aside from writing, Byars continues to live adventurously. Her husband, Ed, has been a pilot since his student days, and Byars obtained her own pilot’s license in 1983. The couple lives on an airstrip in Seneca, South Carolina. Their home is built over a hangar and the two pilots can taxi out and take off almost from their front yard.

  Byars (bottom left) at age five, with her mother and her older sister, Nancy.

  A teenage Byars (left) and her sister, Nancy, on the dock of their father’s boat, which he named NanaBet for Betsy and Nancy.

  Byars at age twenty, hanging out with friends at Queens College in 1948.

  Byars and her new husband, Ed, coming up the aisle on their wedding day in June 1950.

  Byars and Ed with their daughters Laurie and Betsy in 1955. The family lived for two years in one of these barracks apartments while Ed got a degree at the University of Illinois and Byars started writing.

  Byars with her children Nan and Guy, circa 1958.

  Byars with Ed and their four children in Marfa, Texas, in July 1968. The whole family gathered to cheer for Ed, who was flying in a ten-day national contest.

  Byars at the Newbery Award dinner in 1971, where she won the Newbery Medal for The Summer of the Swans.

  Byars with Laurie, Betsy, Nan, Guy, and Ed at her daughter Betsy’s wedding on December 17, 1977.

  Byars in 1983 in South Carolina with her Yellow Bird, the plane in which she got her pilot’s license.

  Byars and her husband in their J-3 Cub, which they flew from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in March 1987, just like the characters in Byars’s novel Coast to Coast.

  Byars speaking at Waterstone’s Booksellers in Newcastle, England, in the late 1990s.

  Byars and Ed in front of their house in Seneca, South Carolina, where they have lived since the mid-1990s.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1983 by Betsy Byars

  cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  978-1-4532-9422-2

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY BETSY BYARS

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