Bend in the Road

by Sara Biren

  This guy’s a jackass, but I have a feeling that he’s a jackass who could potentially get me a ton of cash, and that’s what matters most right now.

  His phone starts to ring as he walks across the driveway to the SUV. “Eric Dunbar here,” he says as he gets into the vehicle, on to the next thing before he even drives away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  JUNIPER

  I’ve barely gotten started on the soil-testing project I’m working on for my independent study when Gabe shows up to the greenhouse, much sooner than I expected.

  “That was quick,” I say. “Is Chris back?”

  “No,” he says. He seems shaky, rattled.

  “Who was at Leona’s, then?”

  “Oh, a friend of Chris’s. Eric something. Do you know him? He came over to meet with Chris about something and didn’t realize Chris wasn’t here yet.”

  I look down at the vial in my hand and try to keep my tone light and, well, not suspicious. “I don’t know anyone named Eric. Where was he from?”

  “Are you almost ready?” he asks, not bothering to answer my question. “I’ve got a paper due tomorrow.”

  I want to ask him for which class or when he started caring about homework but bite back the snark, reminding myself about the honey.

  “Sure. I can do this later,” I say instead, tucking aside my project. “Well, this is the greenhouse. We typically grow our market produce in the fields—pumpkins, summer and winter squash, radishes, tomatoes. We use the greenhouse for herbs and salad greens mostly. Less likely to be damaged by hail or eaten by critters.”

  He walks up and down the rows, glancing at what’s left of this summer’s crop. I can’t tell if he’s genuinely interested or killing time. He doesn’t ask questions or make any comments, so I keep talking.

  “My dad was working on some renovations to make this a deep winter greenhouse so we could use it all year,” I say. “He got sick before he could implement the changes, so I’ve got a shorter growing season. I’ve always wanted to pick up where he left off, though. We’ll see.”

  Still nothing from Gabe.

  “Should we move on?”

  He nods and follows me outside. The weather has turned gray and a bit drizzly, not unusual for this time of year.

  “Great,” Gabe mumbles as we step out into the mist. “A tour in the rain.”

  “Rain is usually a good thing for farmers,” I reply.

  “Can we make it quick?”

  A quick tour of a farm this size. I shake my head and head past our house, beyond the willow tree, and toward the pumpkin patch in the north field.

  “Stone & Wool is known for two things, basically,” I tell him. “Fleece, obviously, and pumpkins in the fall. We’ve talked about doing some sort of u-pick in the fall, but it’s too much with only Mom and me. That’s why we focus on the farmers’ market.”

  “Do you make enough money that way?”

  How interesting that his first question is about money. I don’t want him to think the farm’s not doing well. I don’t want to give him any ammunition.

  “Yes,” I answer, not bothering to explain that on a farm, some years are better than others, that fifteen minutes of hail or high winds can change the course of a year.

  We cross the road to the west field, and it’s raining enough now that the water is starting to collect in ruts in the gravel.

  “In this field, we grow zucchini, yellow squash . . .” I trail off as Gabe, instead of following me, heads down the road toward the barns. “OK, then.”

  We walk past the farmhouse into the big barn. I flick on the lights and shake the raindrops from my hair once we’re inside. The big barn is mainly where we store equipment and vegetables we’ve harvested, and where we prep for the farmers’ market each week. I give him a quick rundown. There’s not a whole lot to see, but Gabe doesn’t seem even remotely interested in any of it.

  “So, for the farm stand project,” I say, “we need to decide whether the retail space will be near the roadside of our hypothetical farm or farther into the property. Either way, we’re going to have to think about storage space and if the storage will be in the same location as the retail portion.”

  “Whatever you think,” Gabe says. “You’re the expert. How much do we have left?”

  I take a deep breath. He is trying my last shred of patience. “The round barn. The sheep.”

  “Do we need to know about the sheep for the project?”

  “No. It’s a farm stand, right? Vegetables.”

  “I think I’ve got the general idea, then.”

  “That’s it? You don’t want to see the rest of the farm?” I can’t keep the irritation out of my voice.

  “Yeah,” he says absently. “Thanks for the tour, though.”

  Gabe leaves the barn door open and sprints across the yard to the farmhouse. I watch him run through the rain, stare after him long after he’s gone up the porch steps and into the house. I stand in the doorframe until the rain’s coming down so hard, the farmhouse and the trees blur in front of me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  GABE

  I expect Juniper to be pissed at me after I ditched the tour of the farm, but Thursday morning when she picks me up, she hands me a travel mug.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “Hot chocolate.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I would have brought you coffee, but I wasn’t sure how you take it.”

  “Black.”

  “Like your soul?” she asks, then laughs. “Just kidding.”

  “I didn’t realize you had a sense of humor,” I say drily.

  “There’s a lot you don’t realize about me,” she says.

  “Thank you,” I say. “For the hot chocolate.”

  She lifts one shoulder as she drives out of the farm.

  “Sorry I cut the tour short yesterday,” I offer. “The rain and, you know, homework . . .”

  “Really?” she asks. “It’s supposed to be sunny and in the fifties today. You want to try again after school?”

  “I’m not that sorry,” I say. I take a drink of Juniper’s hot chocolate, and she scowls.

  Marxen gives us time to work on our executive summaries during class. Juniper’s given this some thought.

  “We need to make a list of vegetables and their growing seasons and determine what kind of volume we’re looking at. Square footage of the stand itself and how many employees we’ll need. Oh, and we need a name.”

  Juniper hands me the executive summary worksheet Marxen gave us earlier.

  “What do you want me to do with this? You have all the answers.”

  “Your handwriting’s better than mine,” she says. “Fifty-fifty, remember?”

  We work through the questions on the sheet. Every few minutes, Juniper will ask for my opinion and then huff with frustration if I don’t sound interested enough. My phone vibrates with a text, and I pull it out of my pocket to check. Eric Dunbar, Commercial Real Estate Jackass. This has to be the fourth or fifth text today. I power the phone off.

  “Don’t let Marxen catch you with that,” Juniper warns. “She’s got a desk drawer full of confiscated cell phones.”

  “I’d like to see her try.”

  “I suppose you think that because you’re the Gabe Hudson, she wouldn’t dare.”

  I don’t disagree with her.

  The last question we answer is the name of the farm stand. When Juniper suggests Beet Street, I don’t argue, mainly because I want to get this over with. I’ve never eaten a beet in my life.

  “I can’t believe you’ve never tried beets.”

  “Juniper. I can name probably five vegetables that I’ve eaten in my life.”

  Her mouth drops open. “Five? What five?”

  I think about it. “Carrots. Peas, which I hate, by the way. Green beans—not a fan of those, either. Does lettuce count, like in a salad? Let’s see, that’s four. Oh, right. Gran used to make chocolate zucchini cake. Did you ever have i
t? You couldn’t even tell.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “About the cake? No.”

  “Gabe. You live in LA. You’ve traveled, like, all over the world. You have access to amazing restaurants. And you’ve eaten five vegetables?”

  “I don’t think geography has anything to do with it. I don’t like vegetables.” I shudder.

  “How do you know if you’ve never tried? And what if, like, you’re at a restaurant and the signature dish comes with asparagus or something?” She snaps her fingers. “You’re at, I don’t know, an awards dinner and the starter is prosciutto-wrapped asparagus. What do you do?”

  “I don’t eat it. You know, restaurants around the world will accommodate picky eaters.”

  “What about egg rolls? With the vegetables right inside?”

  “Don’t eat them.” I grin. She’s getting really worked up about my eating habits. This is kind of fun.

  “OK, what about pizza?”

  “What about it?”

  “Can you honestly sit there and tell me that you’ve never eaten supreme pizza?”

  I look at her, eyebrows raised. “Can you elaborate?”

  “Supreme pizza. Pepperoni, sausage, onions, green peppers.”

  “OK, fine. Maybe I’ve had seven vegetables.”

  “Aha!” she cries and leans back in her chair, arms crossed.

  “You’re very . . . passionate about vegetables, Juniper,” I say, smiling.

  She shakes her head in disbelief.

  The bell rings and Juniper turns in our executive summary prep work as we walk past Marxen’s desk. I make a big show of pulling my phone out of my jacket pocket and checking it in front of the teacher, who rolls her eyes. She can see that it’s not even on.

  Juniper doesn’t say much on the drive home. Maybe I’ve stunned her with my vegetable confession. When she pulls into the farmhouse driveway and puts the car into park, though, she says, “You know you’re always welcome to join us for dinner. However, I think we’re having shepherd’s pie tonight, and sometimes Mom uses corn in the veggie mix. Technically, corn is a grain and not a vegetable, but I wanted to give you a heads-up, anyway.”

  “You’re funny,” I tell her.

  I’ve eaten frozen pizzas—pepperoni only, not supreme—and sandwiches all week. A hot, home-cooked meal sounds like a dream come true right now.

  “I’ll think about it.” I open the door to get out. I really will think about it. Today has been a good day. “Thank you for the ride.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says. “Six o’clock, if you can make it.”

  I get out, then lean back in. “I like corn, especially the Mexican street corn from this taco stand near my school.”

  I close the door and watch her back out of the driveway, my stomach growling. Before her car disappears up the road, though, my phone buzzes with a text. I pull it out of my jacket pocket and swipe open the notification.

  Rocky: Hey it’s Rocky. How’s it going in Minnie? Find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow yet?

  I guess I’m not as hungry as I thought.

  Chapter Sixteen

  JUNIPER

  Friday night, Amelia and I and our friends Bunny and Youa pile into Bunny’s old Saturn Vue and drive the twenty miles up to Eveleth, home of the World’s Largest Hockey Stick, for the HRH game against the Golden Bears. The visitors’ section is crammed with Screamin’ Eagles fans dressed in green and gold—except for Gabe Hudson, rock star, who is dressed in head-to-toe black. He’s even wearing a black wool beanie that he must have found in one of Leona’s closets. He sits with Frank and Janie and some of the other football parents, and I can’t decide if I should relish in that fact or feel sorry for him.

  Today, right before the bell, Marxen returned the executive summary worksheets. She rejected the summary for Beet Street, saying that it was too elementary. Not enough happening here, she wrote across the top. How will you make this business stand out from the rest? Revisions are due Monday. There’s no avoiding the fact that Gabe and I will have to work on this over the weekend.

  Not long after the game starts, HRH takes the lead thanks to a rushing touchdown by Ted. Amelia whoops and we all stand and clap along as the pep band plays the rouser.

  “Oh, wow,” Youa says. “I will be so disappointed if this game is a total blowout. Come on, Golden Bears! Make us work for it!”

  “You’re nuts,” Bunny says.

  “No,” Youa says, not taking her eyes off the action on the field. “You wanna know who’s nuts? My auntie Chia. So, you know, we were down in St. Paul over the weekend for my cousin Mailee’s birthday—also, Amelia, you should be glad that this is the other side of my family.”

  “I’ve met them,” Amelia says. She and Youa are cousins—their dads are brothers. Their moms, however, became best friends during the time that Amelia’s parents were married, and that’s one of the reasons why Amelia ended up moving to Harper’s Mill after her parents’ divorce. “Remember? Your sixteenth-birthday party or something?”

  I grin. Youa’s stories about her big family are often the highlight of these games. And as much as these people stress her out, she’s lucky to have them. I’ve got Mom, and Ted and his family, too, but it won’t always be like that.

  “Oh God, that’s right,” she says, nodding her head. “Was that the time she tried to make tapioca? She is the worst cook. I don’t know how she and Mommy are related. Anyway, so Mailee turned fifteen and she asks Chia if she can go to the Mall of America with friends, right, like, alone? Without Chia? And Chia says, of course, of course. And so Mailee invites a bunch of her friends and they all come over Saturday after lunch to take the light rail to the mall together. And all of a sudden, her brother Chewy comes downstairs and says he’s ready to go to the mall.”

  “Oh no, she didn’t,” Amelia says.

  “She totally did.”

  “Your cousin’s name is Chewy?” Bunny asks.

  “Chewy’s his nickname, Bunny. He’s a big Star Wars fan, right, and he’s wearing this Han Solo jacket from, I don’t know, Empire Strikes Back? Which, other than being short, Chewy looks nothing like Han Solo. He’s got that mop-top hair and thick black Clark Kent glasses and he’s so skinny.”

  “So Chewy was going to take Mailee and her friends to the mall dressed like Han Solo?” Amelia asks.

  “Yes.”

  “But isn’t he younger than Mailee?”

  Youa nods. “A year younger, yes. So, Mailee, you can imagine, freaks out. She’s crying hysterically because Chia doesn’t trust them to go to the mall by themselves and Chewy is such a dork, plus, yeah, he’s younger, she doesn’t want to be seen with him. And all this is going down in front of her friends, right?”

  “Which would totally be embarrassing,” Amelia says, “except that her friends probably deal with the same stuff at home?”

  “Totally,” Youa agrees. “So meanwhile, my mom comes into the living room from the kitchen where she’s been trying to reorganize Chia’s nightmare of a pantry, and she pulls me aside and she says—”

  “Oh no,” Amelia says.

  “Oh yes. She says, ‘Chia, Mailee, calm down. I have the solution! Youa can take the girls to the mall.’”

  “Oh no,” Amelia says again.

  “Wait a minute,” Bunny says. “Didn’t you have tickets to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Saturday night?”

  “Yes!” she cries. “At the Ordway! And it was Schumann’s Piano Concerto.”

  “Please tell me you made it back from the mall in time,” Amelia says. Youa plays piano, cello, and clarinet and has started taking guitar lessons, too. Getting tickets to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra was a huge deal.

  She shakes her head. “Of course not! Mailee had to redo her hair and makeup after her little tantrum, and by the time we made it to the mall, it was after two o’clock, and on top of all the shopping, they had to go on every single ride at Nickelodeon Universe, even the Backyardigans swing. It was the worst.”


  “What about your tickets to the Ordway?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “Well.” She sighs. “They didn’t go to waste, exactly, although one might argue that they were wasted on Chia.”

  “She did not go!” Amelia cries.

  “She did. She and Mommy took the tickets.”

  “Uffda,” Bunny says.

  “You can say that again,” Youa says. Then she elbows me. “But enough about me and my loony family. What is going on at that farm of yours, Juniper, and do not play dumb. You know what I’m talking about, and I want some answers.”

  Amelia laughs. “Yeah, Juniper, why don’t you give us some answers?”

  I wish I had some.

  “What do you want to know?” I know better than to try to fight Youa off. She’s persistent.

  “He sits, like, right next to me in World History and he barely says a word, even when I address him directly. I mean, obviously he’s very, very good-looking, and I dig his music—well, his first album, anyway—but what’s he like? Were you instantly best friends? You were, weren’t you? Makes perfect sense. Your dad, his dad, best friends growing up and all. Now Gabe’s inheriting the farm and it’s, like, of course you’ll follow in their footsteps.”

  “I have enough best friends, thank you,” I say. “He’s fine.”

  “Hold on,” Bunny says, not taking her eyes off the field. Tonight she’s got her long red hair in one thick braid and a Screamin’ Eagles baseball cap pulled down low over her forehead. The quarterback is her younger brother Bucky, a junior, and I don’t think she’s ever missed one of his games. “Oh, sweet pass! Did you see that? Anyway. Chloe Horrible came into the store the other night and spent like thirty minutes at my register telling me how devastated she was that she didn’t get Gabe for a partner on some project. She actually used the words ‘one of LA’s hottest celebrities.’ You know I don’t talk to Chloe Horrible if I can at all avoid it. And all you can say is, he’s fine?”

  “I wouldn’t say he’s one of LA’s hottest celebrities,” I argue.