Animal, the Vegetable, and John D Jones Read online

  Clara closed her eyes. The bed was no longer rising and falling like the sea. The sound of the surf no longer beat in her brain. Her fingers relaxed their grip on the sides of the bed.

  “I think I’ll see if Clara would like some hot tea,” Delores said. She smiled. “I know I am being ridiculous, but as the only mother present, I—”

  “I’ll do it,” John D said. He got quickly to his feet.

  “Thank you, John D.”

  John D went and stood in the doorway and looked at Clara with his pale eyes. She was back, safe and unharmed, shaken—and yet somehow she seemed more secure. He, on the other hand, was not. His emotions, new and crude and oversize as the beginning of a carving, made a lump in his chest.

  He could have written a chapter about it, he thought. “Ways to Avoid Misery.” And the first rule would be “Don’t care about anybody.” But for some reason his book no longer seemed important. He doubted he would finish it.

  He put his hands in his pockets, cleared his throat, and said, “Clara, Mom wants to know if you’d like some hot tea.”

  There was no answer.

  “Clara?”

  He hesitated to make sure she was asleep. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, as if he were making a date. Then, with an embarrassed smile to the empty hall, he returned to the living room.

  “Clara’s asleep,” he said.

  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, Betsy 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.

  Text copyright © 1982 by Betsy Byars

  Illustrations copyright © 1982 by Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  978-1-4532-9423-9

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY BETSY BYARS

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