Fifteenth Summer (19 page)

“We are,” Josh said. “Just not Lake Michigan. We’re going to Wex Pond. Well, to be specific, we’re getting into a boat on Wex Pond. My parents’ landlord has a little rowboat there, and he said we can use it whenever we want.”

Wex Pond is what Bluepointers called the Albert R. Wechsler Reservoir, because that was a pretty fancy name for what was really just a big bowl of water surrounded by farmland, some crooked trees, and a few docks.

I propped the oar on its end next to me and looked at it dubiously.

“I think you’ve got the advantage here,” I said dryly. “Is this thing gonna give me blisters?”

“How about we just try it,” Josh proposed. “I packed us a mayo-free lunch and everything. If you don’t like it, we can go back to the beach. I promise.”

I couldn’t help but smile and nod my consent. It was so easy to be adventurous with Josh. I think I would have even agreed to go fishing with him, even though that would have driven my dad crazy.

“Let me just water the plants,” I said, laying the oars down in the gravel and leading him to the backyard.

“Oh, yeah. How’s the garden?” Josh asked. He walked over to check it out while I unwound the hose from its reel on the back of the house.

“Wow!” he said.

“I know!” I said, proudly pulling a couple weeds from around the lettuce plants. “I mean, about half of the radishes croaked, and one of my cucumber vines is looking pretty puny, but everything else is getting
huge
.”

It was a little embarrassing how proud I was of my garden. The tomato plants got visibly bigger and fluffier every day. The pale-green romaine leaves were looking less delicate and translucent. They stood straight up. And most of the other plants had started sprouting trumpet-shaped yellow flowers.

“Hey, look!” Josh said, bending over to peer closely at the biggest tomato plant.

I crouched next to him to squint at the fuzzy branch. Then I gasped.

One cluster of little yellow blossoms had been replaced by tiny tomatoes! They were as green as Granny Smith apples and just as hard, but they were unmistakably tomatoes. Each had a little cap of pointy leaves that made it look like a gift-wrapped present.

“That was so fast!” I exclaimed. I did a quick inspection of the other plants and shrieked again when I found a collection of little cucumbers, curled under the big, flat leaves like shy caterpillars.

I jumped up and down with my garden hose, accidentally spraying Josh a little bit.

“Sorry!” I said. “I just can’t believe I actually grew something. I mean, all I did was stick them in the ground and water them, but still! Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty cool,” Josh said with a crooked smile and a hint of a tease in his voice.

“Okay, I know it’s dorky,” I said. “But I don’t care. I’m super-proud of my little vegetables, and I will not be inviting you over for salad when they’re ready.”

“No!” Josh said, rushing over to put his arms around me. “Salad vegetables are the only ones I like. Please?”

“I’ll consider it,” I said. I finished spraying the soil. The July heat was getting so bad that the dirt caked right back up by late afternoon. I put the hose back and grabbed my jar of cayenne pepper from the windowsill. After giving the plants a quick sprinkle, I led Josh inside.

My mom was at the kitchen table, pinning pink and pinker squares together in a complicated pattern.

“Hi, Josh,” she said warmly. Even though I still thought her baby clothes quilt was a little weird, I was happy to hear a normal warmth in her voice again, instead of that forced perkiness that had been there when we’d first arrived in June.

“I’m just going to get my bag from the bedroom,” I told Josh, slipping into the hall.

When I got there, Abbie was sitting on the floor with her legs stretched out to the sides. On the rug between them were various piles of papers. They were in all different sizes, colors, and states of wrinkliness, but they all looked old.

“What’re those?” I asked lightly as I headed for the closet.

“Granly’s letters,” Abbie said. “Most of them to and from Grandpa.”

I froze at the closet door and turned to stare at my sister.

“Wh-what?” I stammered. “Why are you looking at them?”

“Listen,” Abbie said brusquely as she slapped one of the letters
into a pile, then scooped up another from a box sitting at her hip. “Mom has abdicated. We both know this quilt project of hers is not about getting all nostalgic about us as babies. It’s about
avoiding
thinking about Granly!”

“Well,” I murmured, “I think it’s a little of both . . . .”

“Whatever,” Abbie said. “You have a date with Josh, Hannah is off getting hickeys or whatever with Fasthands. And
I’m
here. So I might as well go through Granly’s things myself. I mean, isn’t that the point of us being here all summer?”

I felt terrible.

“Listen,” I said, sinking to the floor just outside her circle of paper piles. “You shouldn’t have to do that by yourself. Do you want me to say something to Mom? Or I could—”

Abbie held up her hand to stop me.

“You know what?” she said. Her face and voice softened. “I actually kind of like it.”

She picked up the letter that she’d just slapped down, and smoothed it out on her leg, as if apologizing to it for the rough treatment. Then she read from it. With her head bowed and her hair spilling forward, I couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded a little different—slower and more lilting. Less like Abbie and more like Granly.

“ ‘Dear Artie,’ ” Abbie read. That’s what everyone had called Grandpa, though his real name had been Arthur. “ ‘It feels funny to be so looking forward to the summer when
last
summer was so beastly. But my New Year’s resolution was to look forward, not back, and I have been better at keeping at that than I have been at studying for my statistics exam. I really don’t believe stats have
anything to do with library science, and no (boring) thing you can say will convince me otherwise. By the way, you did catch what I said about last summer, didn’t you, Artie? Now what, or whom, do you think is the reason for
that
?’ ”

As Abbie read, I put my hand over my mouth without realizing it. I could just
hear
my grandmother saying those words, even if they were in my sister’s voice.

But then again I couldn’t. Because that had been a Granly I never knew, the Granly who was young, writing a love letter to her boyfriend when she was supposed to be studying. And that “beastly” summer. What was
that
about?

“You know what I think she’s talking about? That summer?” Abbie said as if she’d seen the question in my eyes. “I think they broke up.”

“But we never heard about that!” I whispered, glancing at the door.

“Well, obviously it all worked out in the end,” Abbie said with a laugh. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how someone’s story can change? Maybe when Granly wrote that letter,
that
was their story, that they had come close to saying good-bye to each other forever.”

“Which would have meant no Mom,” I whispered, shaking my head in wonder. “No us.”

“Yeah, and once they were married, who knows if they ever thought about it again. Maybe when your big picture is in place, all those bumps in the road along the way get sort of smoothed over.”

I thought about that.

“Do you ever feel like,” I asked, “right now, it’s nothing but bumps?”

“Oh, yeah,” Abbie said, nodding in recognition. “Why do you think I love to swim so much? There’re no bumps in water.”

Abbie replaced Granly’s letter in its pile and smoothed it out carefully.

“Anyway, I think you should read these letters . . . sometime. Mom, too. When you’re ready.”

I picked another letter up, holding the dry, crackly-feeling paper between my thumb and forefinger.

“I . . . I might be ready.”

Abbie shook her head.

“I know you’re not,” she said. “But that’s okay. I am. I don’t know why I am, but I am. So I’m going to get them all
organized
for you in little folders, which I know Hannah will approve of, and we can take them home with us. And when you’re ready—they will be too.”

I teetered over the piles of paper to give Abbie a thank-you hug.

“Aren’t
we
huggy,” Abbie said, pushing me away with a grin. “You’re clearly getting some action.”

“Shut up!” I whispered, glancing again at the bedroom door as I got to my feet. “You’re so gross.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But I also know what I’m talking about.”

I laughed as I checked myself in the mirror. I’d worn my hair half-down as a concession to Josh, with only the front sections pulled back into a big tortoiseshell clip. But there was nothing I could do about my freckles, other than smear them with tons of sunscreen and hope no more popped out after my day in the sun. I grabbed my bag, blew my sister a kiss, and met Josh out front.

B
y the time we arrived at Wex Pond, which was about a two-mile walk from Sparrow Road, we were both hot and sweaty.

Josh led me to the end of one of the rickety, rocking docks. There, bouncing against the timbers, was a shabby once-white rowboat that looked barely big enough for the two of us. The interior of the boat was blackened with dirt and a little puddle of water. There was one seat in the center that hardly looked big enough for two backsides.

“Isn’t it great?” Josh said, jumping easily into the boat and holding out his hands so I could hand him the oars and our bags.

“Um, do you want an honest answer?” I said as I shuffled my feet out of their flip-flops.

“Of course not,” Josh said with a smile. He got a sly look in his eyes as he pulled a nylon picnic blanket out of his bag. He spread it out on the bottom of the boat. Then he produced a little pillow and tucked it into the back of the boat (or maybe it was the front, I couldn’t quite tell).

“I was lying about you having to row,” Josh said. “You get to sit there while I row you around. You can pretend you’re Daisy Buchanan.”

My mouth dropped open. “Seriously?”

“Well, you like playing Gatsby, don’t you?” Josh held out a hand to help me climb into the boat. “And, conveniently, my English class read that book this year. If I get tired of rowing, I’ll peel you a grape.”

I burst out laughing.

“I’m not
that
much of a princess, you know,” I said. “I’m a waitress! And I’m pretty good with a garden rake.”

“All the more reason you deserve to relax,” Josh said. “If you want something to do, think of another installment for
Diablo and the Mels
. The same bit’s been on the specials board for the past three days.”

“No pressure or anything,” I said as I sank into the little waterproof nest he’d made me. “Besides, it’s a good bit, right? ‘B. smites that low tipper.’ I should leave it up longer as a cautionary tale.”

Josh laughed, which made me smile—it always did. And he was right. Even though I could feel the cold of the puddle beneath the blanket, and it smelled kind of moldy down there, lounging while he rowed me around the pond
did
make me feel kind of like a princess.

My perch also gave me a great view of Josh’s arms flexing as he leaned forward and back, pulling at the oars.

“Do you need me to be your coxswain,” I said. I imitated Tori’s cute, squeaky voice and pointed. “A little to the right,
Joshie
.”

“Har-har,” Josh said, a little out of breath with the rowing. “By the way, you don’t say ‘right’; you say ‘starboard.’ ”

“Oh,” I said. I watched him take a few more pulls on the oars.

“What do you like about rowing?” I asked.

Josh cocked his head to think for a moment.

“I like the efficiency of it,” he said. “One stroke can take you a whole boat-length down the river. And I like how a whole row of guys can all be communicating with each other, matching each other’s rhythm, putting extra muscle into it, sprinting for the win, all without saying a word.”

I nodded slowly, imagining the steady, strong back-and-forth motion of a queue of boys, all with shaggy hair fluttering in the breeze, save one.

That communication without words but through breath and rhythm and some sort of telepathy . . . it fascinated me.

Sometimes I felt that Josh and I had that kind of silent way of speaking to each other, with our eyes and our gestures.

And of course with kissing.

Everything seemed to make me think about kissing lately. But I didn’t want
Josh
to know that (even though I had a feeling that he felt much the same way). So I grabbed my bag and rooted around in it until I found
Someone New
, an Allison Katzinger novel that I was rereading after finding my own left-behind copy on Granly’s bookshelf.

“You brought a book?” Josh squawked.

“Of course,” I said, blinking at him. “What, you don’t have one?”

“Do you just bring a book with you everywhere you go?” Josh said. He looked like he was trying to decide if this was maddening or cute.

“Um, pretty much, yeah,” I said. “I mean, if I still had my e-reader, I might not have brought it onto a
boat
. Then again, I probably would have. That’s kind of why I don’t have an e-reader anymore.”

I sighed, remembering my little electronic tablet fondly.

“Anyway, I thought you wanted me to relax,” I said, giving his leg a nudge with bare toes.

“That
is
what I said, isn’t it?” Josh said. He angled the oars so
they backchurned the water, slowing the boat down. He kept on working the oars until we’d pretty much stopped.

Then he grinned at me.

“Wouldn’t want you to get seasick.”

“Oh, really?” I said. “Well, fine!”

I tossed my book back into my bag, pulled myself up, and plopped down on the seat next to him. Grabbing the oar out of his right hand, I said, “Teach me to row.”

“Yeah?” Josh said, squinting at me.

“Yeah! You make it sound so magical. I want to try it.”

“Okay,” Josh instructed, “flatten your oar while you’re pulling back, then turn it just as you hit the water, like you’re scooping ice cream. I’ll count, and you go with that rhythm, okay?”