Watermelon Summer (18 page)

 

    "And watermelon," Jacob added with a smile that lit
up his whole face.  Usually, he was so guarded around Kat's sharp
tongue that he barely looked at her, but now the two were in
cahoots.  "You get Kat and Drew ready.  I'll meet you there
with the snacks."

 

    Getting us ready consisted of explaining that
swimming in the river was nothing like diving into a swimming
pool.  I thought Kat would come out of her room sporting a bikini
that left nothing to the imagination, but instead she greeted me dressed
in cutoff jeans, a ratty t-shirt, and ancient tennis shoes.  She
took one look at my bathing suit and told me to dress down.  "You
need more clothes," my sister said, dragging me into her room to toss
holey t-shirts in my direction and to pull another pair of worn-out
shoes from beneath her bed.  On any other day, I would have asked
Kat where these old clothes had been when she'd told us she couldn't be
involved in cleaning out the barn because she didn't want to ruin her
fancy duds, but today, I just let myself be swept up in my sister's
enthusiasm.

 

    By the time we reached the river, Jacob was already
there, the promised melon resting in the still water near the
shore.  "Swing!" exclaimed Drew, and took off like a bee to
honey.  A long rope had been tied high in a tree at the water's
edge, and Drew grabbed the trailing end, took a running leap, and swung
out over the water.  "Yahoo!" he yelled at the top of his lungs,
letting go in time to splash into a deep pool twenty feet out from the
shore.  Lucy barked once, then dove in to join him—it turned
out she was a water dog.

 

    Jacob and Kat talked me into trying out the rope
swing once as well, but mostly I spent the afternoon drifting with the
current.  We had two cars, so Jacob was able to drive us all a mile
upstream and park, then we let the water carry us back to our starting
point.  At first I worried about everything.  Was Lucy going
to get lost following us along the shore?  (No.  She wandered
off following scents but seemed to check in at least every few minutes
to make sure we were still on course, splashing out to meet us every
once in a while.)  Were snakes and turtles going to bite me in the
water?  (No again.  Although Kat did make me shriek when she
told me about hellbenders, huge salamanders as long as my arm that lived
under river rocks.  "They're perfectly harmless," Jacob chimed in
eventually, but even he was laughing at the look on my face.)

 

    Despite my worries, by the time we had floated back
down to our original location, I was ready to do the whole thing over
again.  But, instead, Jacob cut the watermelon, and we ate until
juices drizzled down all of our chins, forcing us to dive back into the
water to wash off the stickiness.  Here, the rocks had formed a
water slide, chuting us down across smoothed stone to another deep pool
at the end.  Kat lazed on top of a boulder that stood just above
the flowing water, letting her trail her feet in the river, and Drew
went back to his rope swing.  Meanwhile, Jacob and I whooshed down
the water slide together, hand in hand, and I thought I'd died and gone
to heaven.  This was summer perfection at its finest.

 

 

 

    Trouble started the next day when Jacob and I were
working in the library and my cell phone rang.  I almost never got
incoming calls, so I hadn't thought to
turn the ringer off, and I shot an apologetic look at the librarians as I
rushed outside to answer.  "Hello?"

 

    "My
head
hurts."  The muffled voice could have been anyone, but I thought I
recognized the tone.  "Davey?" I asked, motioning through the
window for Jacob to join me.  "It's Davey," I mouthed, then passed
the phone off to his older brother.

 

    From the tone of Davey's voice, I knew we needed to
check on him as soon as possible, so I drove while Jacob talked on the
phone.  Davey
had been feeling a little under the weather when his grandmother and
brother left that morning, but once he was home alone, he got much
worse.  By the time we opened the door to Jacob's trailer, Davey
looked flushed and feverish.

 

    "They say Mamaw's on her lunch break," Jacob told me,
putting down their land line with one hand while keeping his grip on
the thermometer in Davey's mouth with the other.  "She's working a
double shift, and I think they give her a longer break on doubles. 
It could be a couple of hours before she calls us back."  Looking
at his watch, he pulled the thermometer out of Davey's mouth, held it up
to the light of the window, and frowned.  "A hundred and four
point five."

 

    "That sounds dangerous."  I was feeling out of
my league.  Sure, kids get sick all the time, but Davey looked
really bad, and Jacob didn't seem to have any more idea of what to do
than I did.  We'd taken Davey's temperature (which he fought) and
offered orange juice (which he refused), and that was pretty much all we
could think of to do.  Luckily, I knew someone who had lots of
experience with kids.

 

    Mom answered right away.  She was calm and
decisive, and within minutes, all three of us were back in the van
heading toward an emergency clinic.  Jacob filled out a clipboard
of Davey's information at the receptionist's window while I tried to
keep the sick child occupied, reading from the sorry selection of
children's books on display.

 

    "You have to put down some sort of payment
information," the receptionist said, loudly enough to draw my attention
away from the book Davey and I were sharing.  Jacob's reply was too
low for me to make out, but his words were clearly heated, so I walked
over to join them.

 

    "What's wrong?" I asked Jacob, but the receptionist
is the one who replied.  In a tired voice, she explained that the
clinic had to have some form of insurance or payment up front before
they could see new patients.

 

    "But we brought Davey here last year," Jacob
insisted.  No, the receptionist countered, he wasn't in their
system.  She recommended we go to the emergency room, where the
doctors were federally mandated to treat everyone, regardless of their
ability to pay.

 

    "We can't drive for another half hour and then wait
who knows how long," Jacob countered.  "My brother's a sick
kid—can't you just slide him in?  My mamaw will pay the bill."

 

    "They're all sick when they show up here," the
receptionist replied.  "I'm sorry, but those are the rules." 
She seemed sympathetic, but not ready to be swayed by pity.

 

    "So we'll pay up front," I said, the answer obvious.  "How much is the visit?"

 

    Jacob tried to talk me out of it, but I was more
interested in the tears trickling down Davey's red face than I was in
Jacob's pride.  And when we left the clinic with a calmly-sleeping
child in the backseat, a prescription for antibiotics on the dashboard,
and Jacob's hand in mine, I felt like we'd gotten a pretty good deal.

 

 

 

    "You spent $150 of the community's money on a kid,
and then you tell me we don't have enough to buy Drew the kind of pop he
likes?" Kat said incredulously.  "Do you know how hypocritical
that sounds?"

 

    I closed my eyes for a second and took a deep
breath.  Kat and I were on our weekly grocery-store run, which
should have been fun, but which had turned into a battle of wills
lately.  Kat felt like we were flush now that I'd cashed my buy-in
check, but I'd been keeping a budget and knew that $2,000 wasn't going
to go all that far.  Plus, Jacob and I had voted against the pickup
truck idea this morning, and Kat was in a foul mood.

 

    Rather than argue the point, though, this time I
decided discretion was the better part of valor.  The name-brand
soft drink went into the cart, and so did the expensive bread that I had
argued we could make ourselves for a fraction of the price.  Fancy
bratwursts for Drew replaced my usual choice of meat from the last-chance, sale
aisle, raising our food bill even further.  But even that wasn't
enough to push Kat back into her usual happy-go-lucky mood.

 

     Still, it seemed like she might, at least, be
mollified.  "How about I drop you off at Jacob's on the way home?"
my sister asked as we loaded groceries into the car in the store's
parking lot.  Jacob and I had a work date set for that afternoon,
and I'd assumed I'd have to go home with Kat, unload the groceries, and
then walk back up the hill for Jacob to pick me up, so I was quick to
agree.

 

    "Thanks for the ride!" I enthused a few minutes later,
looking back in the open window of Kat's car after disembarking outside
Jacob's trailer.  "I really appreciate it."  Sometimes a bit
of effusiveness goes a long way with Kat, so I'd learned to thank her at
every opportunity, but this time my words didn't bring a smile to my sister's
face.  But I soon shrugged off Kat's bad mood when I headed inside
and saw Davey back to his usual rambunctious self.

 

    I didn't learn why Kat was so grim until hours later,
when Jacob dropped me off at Greensun to an empty parking field. 
At first, I figured Kat and Drew had simply gone out, and I was
impressed that the perishables weren't sitting on the kitchen counter
going bad.  But when I started rustling up dinner, I discovered the
day's groceries weren't in the fridge either, and Kat's behavior
earlier in the day started making more sense.  I hoped I was wrong,
but a walk up the stairs confirmed my fears—both Drew's and Kat's
belongings were gone.  Kat had moved out.

 

    I'd forgotten how bare the Greensun rooms looked
without Kat's colorful clothes flung across every available surface, and
the house felt so empty that I almost started missing Drew's
monosyllabic replies.  After sitting on the stairs for a minute to
gather my courage, I headed back to the kitchen with an even worse
sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  The coffee can of
community funds was just where it was supposed to be, tucked away behind
the mouse-proof flour and sugar containers in the kitchen, and for a
moment, I berated myself for thinking ill of my sister.

 

    But I had to open Pandora's box.  And when I
did, I found nothing left but a handful of coins and a scrawled
note.  "Goodbye, Thia," the paper read, and the note was
right.  Thia, the intrepid younger sister molded this summer by
Stout Kat, was gone.  Instead, Forsythia—that wee, sleeked,
cowering, timorous beastie—was back to take her place.

 

 

 

    I fled to Arvil.  While you might think the
obvious person to help me drown my sorrows was Jacob, my boyfriend had
never appreciated the full potential of Kat's free-spirited personality,
and I couldn't help thinking that if Jacob hadn't been in my life, Kat
might have stuck around.  Of course, Jacob would have been
sympathetic when he saw I was hurting, and so would Mom, but the latter
was also off the potential-comforter list since I knew that if I called
my mother with this news, she'd insist I come home.  The rumblings
from the Seattle contingent had leaned in that direction ever since the
Greensun meeting, and I didn't want to add fuel to their fire.