Watermelon Summer (2 page)

 

    "Jacob?" a female voice answered.  "Did you
get your uncle to the airport on time?  Will you be home in
time for supper?"

 

    Now it was Jacob's turn to look a bit chagrined,
which actually made me feel a lot better.  If he still lived at
home, he probably was as young as he looked, and no one my age could
be a serial killer, right?  "Um, Mamaw, I'm still up in
Huntington, so I'll probably be late...."

 

    "Well, could you pick up some milk on your way
home?  Your brother drank it all, and we need some for
breakfast.  And maybe some bananas and eggs?"

 

    Wow.  I didn't know it was possible for
someone's face to turn that shade of red without his air passage
being restricted enough to make him pass out.  "Mamaw," Jacob
tried to interrupt her as the grocery list continued. 
"Grandmother!  Yes, I'll stop by the store, but there's a girl here who
wants a ride down to Pikeville, and she needs to know I run a real
taxi service."

 

    "Well, now, I don't know if I'd call it a
real
taxi service," his grandmother
replied.  It occurred to me at this point that her accent
was thicker than Jacob's and the McDonald's lady's but that I was
understanding her just fine.  Progress, right?  "After
all, that's my minivan you're driving and I pay for your
insurance.  But you did buy the magnetic sign yourself, so that
makes it a bit official, I guess....  Be sure to invite her to
supper if she's from out of town!"

 

    "Never mind, Mamaw.  I've gotta go," Jacob
replied, ending the call and turning away.  Having endured more
than my share of parental embarrassments, I figured he was going to
flee and pretend he'd never made his offer.  But somewhere in
the midst of the conversation just past, I'd made up my mind and
decided Jacob wasn't an ax murderer.

 

    "Wait!" I called, gathering up my bags. 
"I'll take you up on that ride, with just one caveat—I drive."

 

 

    Okay, there were really two caveats, the second
of which was price.  You see, I wasn't exactly flush with cash,
and the longer I could make the contents of my wallet last, the
longer I could explore Greensun.  I'd saved up quite a chunk of
change working as a park ranger for the last two years (which sounds
much more glamorous than it really was—mostly I rented out
paddle boats and told people where to find the bathrooms).  But
the Greensun meeting came with a pretty hefty price tag attached.

 

    "Uh uh," Dad had said over dinner the night I
first floated the idea of attending Greensun's (maybe) final
meeting.  "No way are you promising two grand to a cult in
Kentucky.  This has 'scam' written all over it."

 

    Oh, did I not mention that I already have a
father?  I'm not one of those poor, fatherless girls with an
Electra complex or anything.  Mom married my step-dad soon
after she left the commune...ahem, community land trust...and he'd
always felt like a father to me.  I even titled my half-sibling
"brother"...except when he was being really annoying.  Wanting
to meet my bio-dad...I can't really explain it.  But the hole I
was trying to fill (if there was one) wasn't a paternal gap.

 

    Surprisingly, Mom was the one to defend my crazy
notion.  (Her words, not mine.)  "Well, that's the one
thing I can promise you, honey—it's not a scam," she reassured
Dad.  "That's how we always dealt with money at Greensun. 
We'd throw it in a pot and then decide what to do with it. 
Unfortunately, it never seemed to extend much past buying beer and prayer
flags, but no one ever ran off with the kitty."

 

    "So that means I can go?" I asked.  My
younger sibling, Johnny, calls this my "Daddy voice," meaning that I
use it when I'm trying to wheedle something out of the paternal
unit.  It really worked, too...until the darn kid pointed out
the technique in Dad's hearing.

 

    "No," Mom said, at the same time Dad (to my
profound surprise, but maybe the Daddy voice still works after all?)
chimed in with his answer: "Yes."

 

    My mother raised her eyebrows at my step-dad, who
shrugged.  "Hey, I was trying to follow your lead," he muttered
under his breath.

 

    "Maybe," Mom said after a long pause.  "That
means a definite maybe."

 

    I won't bore you with the details of how I
managed to wrap Mom and Dad around my little finger.  Okay, the
truth is I have no clue what decided it—they talked that night
and the next morning told me I could change my ticket from Heathrow
to Tri-State Airport.  (I'm making a concerted effort here not
to take it as a bad sign that it required three states to muster
enough population to merit an airport.) 

 

    Dad rolled his eyes when I wrote out a check to
Greensun—"What, they don't take credit cards?  You know,
then at least we'd be protected if this turns out to be a
scam.  Okay, okay...."  I already had a tent and all the
trappings from my plan to spend the summer before college camping in
every park I could find across the Pond, so I wouldn't have to sleep
in that drafty old farmhouse with who-knows-how-many-other people. 
And, after $2,000 went into Greensun's kitty and I paid the
ticket-transfer fee, I had all of nineteen bucks left in my Europe
fund.  While taking me to the bank to withdraw that measly
amount of money, Dad slipped in an extra hundred—"Just in case
you have to take a cab or something."  And then Mom pressed $50
into my hand at the airport for the same reason, and I refrained
from calling her cheap.

 

    But $169 only gets you so far, even if you're
doing Europe on $5 a day (which, by the way, would be $37 a day now
if you consider inflation).  Which is why the real clincher on
my "taxi" ride was Jacob backpedaling to the point where I only had
to pay for gas.  Done and done.

 

 

 

    A two-hour ride with a stranger gives you plenty of
time to ponder, and what I was thinking about was...mountain
men.  Mountain men (Mom's term) were one of the top-ten reasons
my mother had left Greensun and my bio-dad for the hip Seattle
suburbs and my computer-programmer step-dad.  She wasn't very
specific about whether my bio-dad was, indeed, a mountain man, but
Mom spent the better part of an hour right before my adventure began
regaling me with the pros and cons of the typical Appalachian
male.  Apparently, I had a genetic predisposition to be taken
in by them, and forewarned was forearmed.

 

    At first glance, a mountain man looks
perfect...but then you scratch the surface and see the rough
interior (or so Mom told me).  Sure, a mountain man will likely
stop and change your tire with a smile if you end up with a flat by
the side of the road, but you'd better bring a male of your own
along to the mechanic if you want to get any details about a more serious
problem.  "Don't worry your pretty, little head about it" might
not be uttered, but the sentiment is no less true for being
unspoken.

 

    While most of Greensun's compatriots drifted in
from far out of town, the mountain ways seemed to seep into their
previously-liberal brains.  I'd inherited a love of gardening
from my mother, and I couldn't quite understand how she could trade
in two-hundred acres of potential for a postage-stamp lawn...until
Mom explained that it was frowned upon for her to spend much time in
the garden at Greensun.  The vegetable plot was a communal
affair run by the men, who brought the produce into the kitchen for
the women to turn into bountiful meals (and then to do the dishes
afterwards).  Not that Mom didn't like to cook, but the
division of labor rubbed her the wrong way.

 

    Which is a long way of explaining why I had
planned my trip so I'd arrive a solid month before anyone else was
likely to show up.  Mom had made some phone calls and
discovered that the farm was entirely vacant at the moment, and I
wanted to experience the land in all its glory before the former
inhabitants came home.  I had a sinking suspicion I wasn't
going to like these old frenemies of my mother and wanted to give
Greensun the benefit of the doubt before they arrived.

 

    "So, what are you doing in Pikeville?" Jacob
asked, dragging me out of my thoughts after we'd gone about an hour
down the road.

 

    "I'm going to a...um...meeting at Greensun," I
said, while my mind turned to pondering whether or not Jacob was a
mountain man.  His grandmother's menu of soup beans and biscuits
(she'd called up again to regale him with the details and to extend
another invitation to me) suggested that Jacob was, in fact, typical
mountain material, but my own mother had pointed out that mountain
men won't shake a woman's hand without a pointed pause, so maybe he
wasn't.  Heck, for all I knew, mountain men might have gone
extinct in the last seventeen years, and the new generation could
have a completely different set of unpleasant traits.  Worst-case
scenario, they could be like the guys at my old high school.

 

    "Greensun?  Are you sure that's near
Pikeville—I've never heard of a town called Greensun," Jacob
replied, starting to look a bit worried.  He pulled a map out
of the glove compartment and tried to spread it out, a tricky
project in the confines of the passenger seat.  (Yes, I'd meant
it about being the one driving.  Even if Jacob wasn't an ax
murderer, one of Mom's hard-and-fast rules is that I never ride in a
car driven by anyone under twenty-one, myself excluded.  After
a few clandestine, and very harrowing, excursions with friends, I
decided Mom was on the right track.)

 

    "It's pretty close, actually," I told him. 
"And I've got directions if you need them."

 

    I handed over the paper that had been waiting,
folded, in my hip pocket, and seconds later Jacob started to laugh
uncontrollably.  "Hippie Holler," he finally gasped out when
the chortles subsided.  "You're trying to get to the hippie
farm!"

 

 

 

    It turns out that Jacob's mamaw might have been
dubious about inviting me to supper if she'd known my final
destination (which was no problem because I wasn't planning on
dining with complete strangers anyway).  You see, Greensun had a
bit of a bad reputation among the wider community, and parents warned
their offspring away from what was commonly referred to as "Hippie
Holler."

 

    "Which just means we wanted to go there even
more," Jacob explained after his laughter died down.  "There's
not much to do way out in the country like that, so after you spend
some time at the Ghost Lady's house waiting for a sighting, then
knock down a few mailboxes, Hippie Holler is the next stop." 
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and backpedaled. 
"Not that I knocked down any mailboxes," he muttered.  "Usually,
I was the one driving...."

 

    "So that means you know where Greensun is,
right?" I asked, that being my primary concern since the day was
already starting to dim.  "Will we get there before dark?"