Summer at Meadow Wood

by Amy Rebecca Tan

  The disappointment in her voice when she heard me say hello got tacked onto the list in my head of all the reasons I was furious with my mom.

  “I can’t get canteen,” I said, as slow and steady as I could manage.

  “Yes, I know,” she said, after a pause. “I’m sorry. We’re having some unexpected financial issues.”

  “Who is?”

  “Us. We are,” she answered.

  “Did Dad lose his job?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “No, of course not. He’s just—”

  “He’s just gone, right?”

  She gasped. “Why would you say that?”

  “You’re the only one having financial issues. Because he’s gone and he’s in charge of the money and he was so mad he left you with nothing, right?” I wasn’t going to make this easy for her. I could taste my anger, bitter and salty on my tongue.

  “Have you talked to him?” my mom asked immediately. “Where is he?” Even the four hundred miles between us couldn’t keep the desperation in her voice from reaching me. And I almost felt bad for her.

  Almost.

  Because those words still pressed on my brain.

  We’ll be together, just wait.

  So I mustered the courage I didn’t know I had and heard myself say, “If you need money so badly, why don’t you ask Darrin?”

  My stomach clenched and I felt dizzy the moment the words were out. I had crossed a line and could never go back. No more pretending I didn’t know.

  There was a silence so thick and heavy it could have suffocated us both.

  “Vic, I don’t know what you know,” she started, a quiver in her voice that was either very angry or very sad, and possibly a mixture of both, “or what you think you know, but please understand that I’m trying to sort it out.”

  “Did you take Freddy’s canteen money, too?”

  “Freddy is fine,” she said, but the fact that her voice jumped an octave made it clear to me that she had pulled all the money from his account, too.

  “How could you do that?” I spit at her.

  “He has everything he needs. I packed it all myself. Extra money for candy is not a requirement. I’m sure there are other kids who never get canteen food.”

  “No, Mom, there aren’t. Everyone gets canteen. It’s part of camp.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous. Even your father said the extra money for canteen was a scam. We already pay a small fortune for you to go to camp, you know. It’s a luxury, how you get to spend your summer up there.”

  “I didn’t want to go to camp!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “And neither did Freddy. I didn’t want this ‘luxury’! You wanted the luxury of not having me and Freddy around so you could be with Darrin!” I spit his name out of my mouth like a piece of gristle. “If I was Dad, I would have left, too.”

  I didn’t hear what she said next because I slammed the phone down with such force I worried for a second I might have broken it.

  The air around me hummed with emptiness while I caught my breath.

  I had never hung up on my mom before.

  I had never hung up on anyone before.

  I left the office, shutting the door carefully behind me. I could hear the seniors talking and laughing and cheering down at canteen.

  So I went the other way, past the flag and through junior camp and into the woods. I climbed on top of my rock to sort out the spinning in my brain, and that’s when I realized, as I sat down and went to hug my knees into my chest, that there was a Kit Kat Big Kat bar in my pocket. It was the free canteen snack Brenda had gifted me. I remembered she had squeezed my hand and slipped something into it but was too distracted at the time to realize what it was. Now the chocolate was melting and I could feel the squish and goo of it through the wrapper.

  I peeled half the plastic back and dropped the whole mushy thing to the ground. Then I waited. While the sky grew dark and the sound of slamming cabin doors echoed behind me, I watched the chocolate bar disappear under a mob of swarming ants.

  Day 7—Friday

  “Do you want help at the farmers’ market tomorrow?” I asked.

  Earl was poking around one of the raised plant beds, his white-T-shirted back to me, when I arrived at the garden. It was Friday afternoon, my last farm elective day, and I had remembered to grab a baseball hat when I left Yarrow. I arrived early on purpose so I could talk to Earl before Bella showed up.

  He turned around slowly and looked me dead in the eye. “Good afternoon to you, too,” he answered.

  I sighed heavily and tried again. “Good afternoon. Do you want help at the farmers’ market tomorrow?”

  “I do,” he said. “Are you offering?”

  “Yes. I’ll help,” I said, but added, “If you’ll pay me.”

  He cocked his head to the side slightly as he continued to stare at me.

  I rushed to make my case. “You said there’s a lot of work to do and you need another pair of hands and it’s really early in the morning and it’s not actually camp, so if I’m going to do all that work, I think I should get paid.”

  He scratched at his chin and said, “I see.”

  I watched him put it together then—my empty canteen account and my offer—and waited for his answer.

  “Paid in blueberries?” he asked.

  “Paid in money,” I answered impatiently.

  His eyes crinkled up and I realized he was teasing me, which made me feel kind of stupid for falling for it.

  “Okay,” he said, and he pulled the blue bandanna out of his back pocket and tied it around his forehead again. “That’s fair.”

  “Yes!” I couldn’t help cheering for myself. Cheering at camp was contagious.

  “I’ve already got a permission slip for off-site travel and field trips,” Earl shared his thinking, “but I should call home to make sure the ride to town and back in the truck is okay.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I assured him. My mom didn’t seem to care what I did this summer as long as I wasn’t in her way.

  “I still have to call. But if she agrees, you’re good to go. Follow me.” Earl walked toward the blueberry bushes. They were shrouded in their white nets and bulged like heavy clouds.

  He pointed out the tray of small cardboard containers. “We’re gonna pick and fill these baskets today.”

  “But we already did that, on Wednesday.”

  “I sold those, to Bear Café. Sold those Wednesday evening.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe he was going to make me do all that backbreaking picking again. “Why would you do that? Those were for the market.”

  “You can’t pick Wednesday to sell on Saturday. That’s too long. Some of what you pick now will get used in the dining hall tomorrow morning, and the rest we’ll sell at market, so they’re less than twenty-four hours old. That’s fresh. The kale and lettuce won’t get picked till the morning of.”

  It made sense, but it didn’t make me happy.

  “Fine,” I huffed. “How do you get these net thingies off?” I started to tug, but Earl stepped in and showed me how to release the cinch and ease them off gently.

  It turned out I didn’t mind the work that day, the picking and pinching and bending and crouching and hot sun on my back. I was actually excited to sell the berries tomorrow so I could put money back in my canteen account, and also in Freddy’s. I would take care of my brother and myself, even if my mom wouldn’t.

  Bella showed up late, wearing a turquoise bikini top and shorts rolled up so high she might as well have just gone ahead and worn the bikini bottom instead. She went to her end of the blueberry bushes and started picking, but lifted her right leg out to the side each time she reached in to pull a berry. Then she switched arms and swung the other leg out to the side as she picked.

  I watched this routine for a few rounds, then rubbed my eyes and looked again, unsure of exactly what I was seeing.

  Bella caught me staring and explained, without stopping her leg lifts. “Simone go
t aerobics for elective all week and I’m missing it. So I’m doing exercises here. There’s no reason this can’t be a toning activity.”

  “Right.” I nodded, wishing Carly or Jamie were there to witness this with me.

  “It’s working,” she assured me. “I can already feel it in my glutes.”

  “Glutes, yeah,” I urged her on. “Tone away.” She looked ridiculous, but I kind of admired her anyway. She knew her problem—missing out on exercise because of farm—and fixed it, and didn’t care how it looked to anyone else.

  I tried to suck in my gut and squeeze my stomach muscles as I hunched forward into the bush as my own exercise. Within a minute I had a weird ache in my belly and new pain in my back, so I dropped that idea and just focused on the work. Bella continued with the leg lifts for a while, then changed to squats each time she dropped a berry into the container.

  The forty-minute period passed quickly, and I still had energy left when the bugle sounded.

  I finished filling the last container and slid it onto the tray with the others.

  “Where do you want this?” I asked Earl, who had been patiently lifting bugs off his lettuce leaves, one by one.

  “Just leave it there. I’ll take care of it.”

  Bella placed her container of berries on the tray next to mine, then stopped to watch Earl pinch a few bugs off a leaf of romaine.

  “You know, I have an Ultimate Power hair dryer that could blow those suckers off in two seconds flat. You want to borrow it?”

  Earl chuckled. “That is a generous offer, Bella, but I think I’ll stick to my method here.”

  “Suit yourself.” Bella shrugged. She adjusted her bikini top as she walked away, calling, “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya” as she went.

  Once she was gone, I said, “So we have a deal. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Earl nodded.

  Right before I turned the corner and disappeared around his cabin, he called, “See you at five.”

  I froze in my tracks.

  “Five?” My mouth dropped open. “You said the market was at eight.”

  “I did. It is. We have to be all picked and packed and set up by eight o’clock. And it’s a half-hour drive away.”

  “Five o’clock in the morning! That’s insane,” I flailed. Then I thought of Chieko. “And inane! That’s insane and inane.”

  “Nice vocabulary,” Earl said.

  “There is nothing nice about this,” I huffed back.

  “See you at five,” he repeated, and waved me off.

  “You’re really gonna wish you didn’t,” I muttered as I trudged myself back to Yarrow.

  Day 7—Friday Evening

  Evening activity was Game Hopping, where you could “hop” to any other cabin in your section of camp to play cards or board games. Carly and the Jaidas had just started a game of Pictionary with two Marigolds who had come over. Chieko was “supervising” from her bed in the counselor room, which just meant she was curled up reading a book. I was about to leave to check on Vera since I wasn’t in the mood for games, but Carly convinced me to stay for one round.

  Jaida A started to draw a long, clean line on the board with her black marker. Before she finished the last piece of a rectangle, the guessing began.

  “It’s a ruler!” Jaida C yelled.

  “It’s a plank of wood!” Jodi, one of the Marigold girls, called out.

  Jaida A shook her head at the guesses and kept drawing. She put little wavy lines inside the big rectangle.

  “It’s a diving board,” Carly tried.

  “It has to be a diving board,” Sasha, the other Marigold girl, agreed.

  Jaida A put a circle around the rectangle, and then traced over the rectangle again.

  “It’s a piece of paper with a list. On a table. It’s a grocery list!” Jaida C called.

  “It’s a book list!” Carly screamed. “It’s a list of books to read!” Her whole face beamed at the thought of a long list of book titles.

  Jaida A lowered her marker to tease Carly. “You are such a book nerd.”

  “And proud of it!” Chieko’s voice thundered from the front room.

  “Any other guesses?” Jaida A asked.

  “It’s a bookmark?” Jodi tried.

  “Time’s up,” Jaida C announced. “What is it?”

  Jaida A put the cap back on the marker, dropped it on her bed, and answered, “A three-course meal.”

  “What?” Jodi asked.

  “That’s a rectangle inside a circle,” Sasha added. “How is that a three-course meal?”

  “Oh my God,” I said, shaking my head as I figured it out.

  “I know, I know!” Carly jumped up. “It’s Jordana’s stick of gum!”

  Jaida A broke into a gigantic grin while Jaida C and Carly fell over laughing.

  “A stick of gum is a three-course meal?” Jodi asked.

  “It is if you’re Jordana,” I answered.

  “You Yarrows are seriously weird,” Sasha said. She picked up the marker, uncapped it, and called, “My turn.”

  Of course Jordana wasn’t there for any of this. She’d run to Aster the second the bugle blared the beginning of the period and was probably knee-deep in a round of Truth or Dare.

  When I got to Chicory, I found Vera sitting in the middle of her neatly made bed with a stack of playing cards in her hands. She was playing solitaire.

  So were six other girls in the room.

  “So, the idea of game hopping night is to play with people,” I said as my greeting.

  Vera looked up from the spread of cards laid out in front of her and flashed me a big smile, then looked back down and placed a five of clubs under a six of diamonds.

  “How are you, Vera?”

  “Great! I taught everyone solitaire because we didn’t like any of the other game choices and they didn’t know how to play.”

  A few girls nodded to agree, but none of them lifted their heads. They were too busy flipping cards over, studying the spreads before them, and adding on to the columns of numbers stretching across their cots. It looked fun, and I began to think a round of solitaire might be exactly what I needed to distract me from the things I didn’t want to think about—my mom, my missing dad, my empty canteen account, Darrin.

  “Well, I don’t want to interrupt. I just wanted to check on you—”

  “No, it’s okay. I play this all the time.”

  I looked down at her ankles. “Your legs look better. The rash is practically gone.”

  “You were right about clinic. The cream they gave me worked right away. It had calendula in it and some essential oils. Calendula is in the same plant family as marigolds, and you’ll be in Marigold next summer, right, Vic?”

  I didn’t know where I’d be at the end of August, let alone next summer, but I nodded anyway. “Do you want to go outside for a minute, by the rocks, and talk?”

  “Sure,” Vera answered. “I’ll be back in a few,” she told her fellow solitaire players, sounding more like a counselor than a junior camper.

  Vera slipped her bare feet into her sneakers, and we walked outside into the dimming light. We found two flat rocks by the lake and sat with our backs to Chicory.

  “So, have you been canoeing yet?”

  “No, but it’s on the schedule for tomorrow. And I already asked Jordyn about it. She said she’d go in a boat with me.”

  “That’s great. And how about feeling homesick?”

  “I’d say I’m only ten percent homesick now. Maybe eight. It’s decreasing as I adapt to the environment.”

  “Have you been writing to your mom? Sometimes that helps.”

  “I write a diary entry for her every day. The plan is to mail them all on Fridays so she’ll get a week’s worth at a time. She gave me seven prepaid envelopes, Priority Mail. I just put my letters in and seal the flap.”

  “Wow, you two really planned ahead.” My mom had sent me with only six stamps. She said I could buy more at canteen as I needed them, but th
at was before she stripped my account, before she knew she was going to need to.

  “My mom is very organized. It’s the only way she knows how to be,” Vera said. “I appreciate the example she set, because now I’m very organized, too.”

  “My friend Jamie is like that,” I shared. “Even inside her backpack, she keeps her folders and notebooks sequenced in the exact order of her classes every day.”

  “I do that, too,” Vera said approvingly.

  “I don’t.”

  “Is your mom organized? She could teach you.”

  “Yeah, she is. Or . . . was.”

  “She was but isn’t anymore?” Vera shuddered at the thought. “What happened?”

  “You know what? I shouldn’t have taken you out of your cabin when you were in the middle of an activity with so many friends. You should go back in.”

  “Okay,” Vera agreed without a pause. “They might have questions about how to end the game, when you run out of options. I’m their only resource for solitaire.”

  “And people need resources.” I smiled at her. “You better move it.”

  Vera gave me a quick hug and ran back inside Chicory, her pigtails swinging above her shoulders with each step.

  Instead of walking straight back to Yarrow, I shuffled slowly along a different route, my mind tripping over thoughts of home, of the change in my mom from organizational queen to someone I didn’t even recognize.

  I remembered being little, younger even than Vera, and playing for hours at a time in my mom’s closet. Her clothing had hung in neatly color-coordinated sections like a fabric rainbow, and her shoes were all stored in clear plastic boxes with typed labels taped to the end.

  I remembered planting flowers with her by the walkway to our front door each spring, where she made me carefully follow her red, pink, white, purple color pattern. When Freddy was four and put a white next to a red one, she sent him inside for a drink so he wouldn’t see and then quickly changed it out to the correct color.

  I even remembered the day she brought home a shiny white filing cabinet and a box of hanging folders, so excited you would have thought she had just bought a dream car instead of boring office supplies. She spent hours labeling and ordering her files, filling the folders with papers that had been living inside old cardboard boxes under her desk. She placed one small plant on top of the cabinet and dusted the surface regularly to keep it shiny clean.