GA Milestones EOG Practice Test 1

The Bell Above the Door

¹Hana had a key to Isaac's Bait & Tackle before she had a key to her own house. Her grandfather had pressed it into her palm the summer she turned nine, as if he were handing over something far more important than a brass key on a red string. Now, four years later, she turned it in the lock for what would probably be the last time, and the door groaned the way it always had.

²The bell above the door rang once. It was an old ship's bell, its brass worn to the color of weak tea by forty years of hands reaching up to ring it. "It rings for the ones who come back," her grandfather liked to tell customers, and most of them laughed, but Hana never had. Today a paper tag dangled from its cord. In her grandfather's tidy capitals it said NOT FOR SALE.

³Everything else was for sale. The rods were bundled in a corner, the coolers stood empty, and a stack of flattened boxes leaned against the counter. Her grandfather stood behind it, wrapping coffee mugs in newspaper and humming. His back had been troubling him on the dock stairs all winter, and he moved more slowly than he used to. "How can you just hum?" Hana asked. He set down a mug and smiled at her. "I've had forty years of mornings here, Hana, and nobody can pack those up or sell them."

⁴She didn't answer. She was thinking of the dock behind the shop and of the summer she was seven, when the wake of a passing boat had slapped over the boards and knocked her flat, soaking her to the skin. For weeks afterward she would not walk past the first piling.

⁵Her grandfather never told her to be brave. Instead he sat her on an overturned bucket at the foot of the dock and taught her knots: the bowline, the clove hitch, the cleat hitch that held the skiffs against the tide. "A good knot holds tight," he said, guiding her small fingers, "but you can always untie it when it's time. That's how you know it's a good one." Each day she tied her practice knot a little farther out on the dock, and each time she walked back, he lifted her up to ring the bell.

⁶By August she was sitting at the very end of the dock with her feet in the water, and the bell had rung so many times that the neighbors complained.

⁷"Hana?" Her grandfather's voice pulled her back. She realized she was holding the knot board, the square of plywood where he had nailed a sample of every knot he knew. She had pulled it out from under the counter without remembering that she had reached for it. Across the room his hands stopped over the framed photograph of the shop's opening day, and he turned so that she could not see his face.

⁸When he turned back, his face was calm again. He took the knot board from her, wrapped it in newspaper as if it were any other piece of junk, and set it in a box marked DONATE. Then he climbed the stepladder, lifted the bell from its hook, and set it in her arms. "The woman who bought the place is named Farrah Lindqvist," he said. "She's keeping it a bait shop. She has two boys who don't know a single knot." He tapped the tag. "This one, though, was never for sale. It goes with you."

⁹"Places don't belong to us," he said when she started to argue. "We belong to them for a while, and then we let go. Like a good knot."

¹⁰Hana looked down at the bell for a long moment. Then she pulled the DONATE box toward her, unwrapped the knot board, and propped it against the register, where Farrah Lindqvist would see it first. On the bell's cord she tied a clove hitch, snug but easy to loosen, and slung the bell over her shoulder. At the door she paused under the empty hook and reached up anyway, out of habit, touching the place where the bell had been.