Also Known As Harper - Softcover

ANN HAYWOOD LEAL volunteers at her local soup kitchen, and this novel grew out of her concern for the very real issue of homelessness in our own back yards. Ann is an elementary school teacher in Waterford, Connecticut.

“Hey, Hem.” I moved a couple of boxes aside so he could come in. “You don’t believe in letting a person settle themselves in before you get to bothering them, now, do you?”

But I patted the corner of the bed. Hemingway’s company wasn’t so bad. He had a way about him that made all the tired go out of a person.

“Mama says we got to move pretty quick here,” he said, eyeing all my boxes.

“Not just yet.” I straightened up a stack of poems on my bed. “She just wants us to get a head start, is all.”

“Thing is...” He bit at a hangnail on his thumb and I knew what was coming. Hem always got fidgety when he was thinking about Daddy. “How’s he going to find us?”

I pulled his thumb away from his mouth. “He’ll find us if the time comes.”

I knew how badly Hem wanted Daddy to come walking back up our front steps, and I wanted that for him, I really did. But I wasn’t so sure I wanted that for me.

He got up and took a good look out my bedroom window. “It’s almost time to go out, Harper Lee.”

“You know I’m not going to go out to the porch,” I reminded him.

He leaned forward as if he was going to tell me a good secret. “But I’m thinking I might wait on the driveway path today, right out front, you know? Just so as he can see me better.”

But deep down, I think Hemingway knew as well as I did, when Daddy had made his way down that driveway path a whole year ago, he had never figured on coming back.