Where the Watermelons Grow Read online

  “It’s just your class, Mylie,” I said, trying to talk to her like I was her mama and not just her big sister who would really rather be out of this hot church, too. “You love your class. There’s Miss Marvella, see?”

  “Come on, Mylie honey,” Miss Marvella said. “We got lots of fun things to do today.”

  Mylie’s teacher was young and pretty, with light brown skin and long hair braided into cornrows that swayed a little as she waved to us. I’d gone to church a couple times with Grandma and Grandpa Kelly up in Alberta, and most Sundays their service was filled with row after row of sunburned white faces. Maryville was so small—according to the newspaper, the last census had recorded only a couple hundred people—that Maryville Methodist Church was the only church for a half hour’s drive, which meant that pretty much anybody Christian ended up there come Sunday morning. I was glad, too; if we’d had white-person churches and black-person churches, like lots of cities did, then Mylie wouldn’t have had Miss Marvella for a teacher, which would’ve been a straight-up disaster. Miss Marvella was just about the only grown-up Mylie liked, aside from my parents and Arden’s. During the week she taught kindergarten at the elementary school, and you could tell, because little kids went to her like bees went to the Bee Lady.

  But not today. Mylie wasn’t having any of it. She arched her back so hard I thought I might drop her, and screamed even louder. “No, NO!”

  I put her down before she could fly out of my arms, and she started stamping her feet on the floor like it was covered in ants. Big fat tears were running down her flushed pink cheeks now, splashing onto the collar of her dress and leaving round wet spots. “Wan’ Mama,” she sobbed, wrapping her arms around my leg so I couldn’t move an inch. “Mama, Mama!”

  Miss Marvella bent down, trying to pry Mylie’s arms off me. “Your mama not feeling well, sugar?” she asked, her voice quiet, like she was talking to a skittish horse. “You wanna come play with me and the others now? You gone be just fine, sweet baby.”

  Mylie just cried harder, pressing her face into my leg until I could feel the tears seeping through my own dress.

  I sighed. “She can just come with us today,” I said, reaching down to pull Mylie’s head away from my skirt. “You hear that, silly baby? You can come with Della and Daddy, okay? But you gotta stop crying and you gotta stay quiet the whole time.”

  Mylie stopped crying so fast she choked, gagging on her own tears.

  “You sure?” Miss Marvella asked.

  “We’ll be all right,” I said to Miss Marvella, and then looked down at Mylie. “You come on, little monster. And be quiet.”

  After the service was over we got stopped by church lady after church lady, all of them waving their fans and asking about Mama. “She doin’ all right?” “Can I bring you a meal tonight?” “Suzanne be needing help with the kids this week? I know that baby is a handful and a half.” Daddy and I just shook our heads and smiled real big, saying, “No, thank you” over and over.

  “Suzie’s just feeling a little under the weather,” Daddy said, keeping a firm hold on Mylie’s hand so she couldn’t dash off through the open church doors and into the parking lot. It wouldn’t have been the first time. “She’ll be back to her usual self by tomorrow, I’m sure of it. We’ll be just fine, but thanks for the offer.”

  “You just call me anytime y’all need anything at all,” they all said, one after another, their husbands nodding agreement. Each one of them church ladies looked hard into my eyes, like they were checking to see if Daddy was telling the truth or not. I did my best to smile big and normal, trying not to think about the night before.

  The image of Mama with a watermelon seed stuck above her eyebrow was burned right into me.

  I wished Arden were there. She was the kind of person who wasn’t afraid to talk to anyone and knew just how to make other people smile. That was one of the reasons that I was pretty sure even if we hadn’t grown up seeing each other nearly every day, I’d still have wanted to be her best friend. Being with Arden made it okay that I was quiet, okay that sometimes I blushed around new people and stumbled over my words.

  If Arden had been there, she would’ve given me the courage to go back home and see how Mama was doing this morning. But the Hawthornes were one of the few families in town that didn’t go to church on Sundays; it was just one more thing that made people raise their eyebrows when they thought Arden’s parents weren’t looking. Everybody in Maryville loved the Hawthornes, but most everybody also agreed they were just a little different.

  I always figured that Maryville could use all the different it could get.

  We were almost out the door and into the bright-white summer sunlight when one last church lady caught us, her pale light-blond hair shining in the sun. She was only medium-old for an adult, not much older than my daddy, but she was the kind of grown-up who spoke so confidently and knew so much that she might have been alive a hundred years.

  It was Miss Tabitha Quigley. The Bee Lady.

  She had a backyard full of white beehives, the bees buzzing around them till the whole place hummed with it, and her honey wasn’t just the kind you could get from any grocery store. It was pretty well accepted that the Bee Lady’s honey could cheer you up if you were feeling down, or fix your broken heart, or help you see things clearer when you had big decisions to make. Some people even mixed her honey into water and poured it on their gardens and farms, swearing it made their plants grow twice as strong.

  “Noticed y’all all alone in your pew today,” Miss Tabitha said. Her eyes were the same bright blue as the silky turquoise scarf she wore, so blue it looked like they couldn’t possibly be real. Mama said the Quigleys had always had those eyes, as far back as anyone in town could remember. Even here inside the church building, a black-and-gold bee darted back and forth above her, its wings like lace in the light from the glass doors. Miss Tabitha didn’t seem to notice it.

  “Hi there, Tabitha. Suzanne’s just feeling a little under the weather,” said Daddy, looking out the doorway to where his truck sat parked, invisible in the haze from the heat and the sun. “Just got a little one of them summer colds.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Miss Tabitha, putting a pale hand down on my shoulder in that absentminded way grown-ups sometimes did. Her skin smelled like honey and lavender.

  “Thanks,” said Daddy, with a grimace that was probably meant to look like a smile.

  “You tell me if you ever need anything, Della, you hear?” Her voice was as warm and soft as her skin, as sweet as the honey she sold.

  I looked up at her, my tongue all tied up in knots. I’d always felt a little shy around the Bee Lady—even more shy than I felt around most folks. Seeing her was like seeing somebody step right out of the stories that Mama used to tell to me, the stories I loved to tell Mylie. Plenty of people had a little bit of magic to them, but the Quigleys and their bees had more than most.

  Standing there in that light-and-shadow entryway, I wanted to open my mouth so bad and tell her everything that had happened the night before, wanted to beg her to give me some of her magic honey to fix Mama up like Miss Tabitha’s grandma had once fixed Grandpa Kelly’s leg.

  But Daddy was standing right there beside me, his hand in Mylie’s, impatience written all over his face, and I knew if I said anything it would only frustrate him more. I knew without even asking that he didn’t want anyone to know about Mama right now, didn’t want anyone hearing about how she’d been with the watermelon seeds last night, didn’t want anyone putting two and two together.

  “It’s important for your mama to have dignity, Della,” he’d told me more than once, his eyes sad. “And lots of people, they don’t understand an illness like your mama’s, like schizophrenia. They hear that name and start to use hurtful words, like ‘crazy’ and ‘psychotic,’ and start seeing a person as just a disease, not a human being. Your mama’s always going to have good days and bad days, and we’ll get through them the way we always have. Together
, as a family.”

  Daddy figured that since schizophrenia had been part of our family exactly as long as I had, nobody knew as well as we did how to handle it. And maybe I’d felt that way, too, sometimes.

  But not right now. Not after last night. Those watermelon seeds had been something worse, something more than all Mama’s symptoms since the bad time.

  I could see just the way Daddy’s mouth would pull together into a thin line if he heard me beg magic honey off Miss Tabitha.

  Don’t go bothering Miss Quigley, he’d say, holding on to Mylie’s hand while she tried to tug him toward the car. You know just as well as I do, Della, that your mama’s medication is the best treatment available.

  But what Daddy didn’t understand was that after last night, treatment didn’t feel like enough. Treatment meant “good days and bad days.”

  What I wanted was a cure—not something that would work for just a year or two at a time, like Mama’s medicines. Something that would heal forever, so we never had to worry again.

  Chapter Three

  Mama was awake when we got home from church, acting like her regular old self and slicing up bread for lunchtime sandwiches. Mylie ran right up to her and wrapped her arms around Mama’s legs, whimpering like she might start crying again.

  “Hush, honey,” said Mama. “I’ll pick you up just as soon as I’m done here. Della, you want to find some play clothes for Mylie to wear? I don’t want her eating lunch in her nice Sunday dress.”

  I watched Mama real close, not moving. She looked pretty, in a pair of shorts and a tank top, with her straw-colored hair pulled up into a ponytail. She was done slicing bread now and was working on the mayo, spreading it fast over all the pieces she’d cut and then slapping ham on top of it. She seemed perfectly, perfectly normal.

  Mama looked up and caught me watching. “Didn’t you hear what I said, Della? Go find some play clothes for Mylie to wear—quick now, because I’m almost done with these sandwiches!”

  The phone rang just as we were all finishing up our lunch, and Daddy got it. “Hi there, Mama. Hi, Daddy,” he said, and tucked the phone between his shoulder and his neck and started washing up our sandwich plates while he talked. Grandma and Grandpa Kelly called most Sunday afternoons; they’d lived with us for nearly my whole entire life, until Grandpa had a stroke last fall and his doctor told him he had to stop farming and move closer to the hospital. Grandpa cussed up a blue streak, but Grandma put her foot down, and they moved into a house in Alberta only a few weeks later.

  I missed having them around, but I liked it, too, since it meant that Mylie and I got to move into a real true bedroom for the first time ever. When Grandma and Grandpa lived with us, Mylie had slept in with Mama and Daddy, and I had a tiny little bed in an old storage room Daddy had painted pink when I turned two.

  I handed Daddy my plate and started putting away the lemonade pitcher and the sandwich fixings. Mama had got up from the table already and taken Mylie in for a nap, but I didn’t think it was working, since all I could hear from my bedroom was hollering and banging, like Mylie was kicking the crib the way she did when she didn’t want to go to sleep.

  “Mm-hmm,” Daddy said into the phone handset. I could hear Grandma’s voice through it, tinny and garbled like it was coming from a million miles away, even though Alberta was just a little more than an hour in the truck. “Yep, that sounds real nice.” Daddy closed the dishwasher and wiped his wet hands off on a towel. “Glad they’re taking good care of you, Mama. What’s that?” Now the voice spilling out of the receiver was Grandpa’s deep and husky one. Grandpa’s voice sounded like his skin looked—suntanned and weathered, a little dry and a little crackly.

  Daddy’s lips pulled tight into a line. I kept sneaking looks at him out of the corner of my eye as I cleaned the table with a wet rag, curiosity boiling up my throat like water. “The farm’s fine. Nope, everything’s just fine, Dad. Yeah, the drought’s pretty bad, but it’s not hurting the crops too much. Costing us a bit more in water, but we’ll be okay. Yeah, Suzie’s great. No problems at all.”

  I stopped bothering to hide my eavesdropping and stared at Daddy. No problems at all?

  “Here, Della,” Daddy said, turning and reaching the phone out toward me. “Give me that rag and take this. Grandma has something she wants to tell you.”

  I took the handset from him and put it to my ear. “Della honey,” said Grandma through the phone, “I found a recipe yesterday that made me think of you.” Grandma’s words were always like slow, sweet syrup, and no matter what she was saying, listening to her always made me feel better. Grandma grew up in Georgia before she married Grandpa, and you could still hear that Georgia sun in every word she said. “Watermelon limeade. Bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you, sweetheart? Soon as I saw it, I said to your granddaddy, ‘I gotta send that to our little watermelon girl.’ I’m gonna email it to you this afternoon, before I forget.”

  “Sounds delicious. Love you, Grandma.”

  “Love you, too, Della. Tell your mama and Mylie hi for us. Bye, shug.”

  I put the phone back on its cradle just as my bedroom door opened and Mama came out. Mylie was quiet now, so I guessed she must have gone to sleep, after all. I opened my mouth to tell Mama about Grandma’s recipe, but the words died before they made it up to my tongue.

  Mama wasn’t looking at me—wasn’t looking at anything. Still, her head was nodding over and over again, just like mine had when Grandma was telling me about the watermelon limeade. Just like Mama was having a conversation with somebody the rest of us couldn’t see at all.

  Chapter Four

  Monday morning, seeing Arden felt like running through a sprinkler on a hot day.

  Every day of the week except Sunday, the two of us met in the morning to take a shift at the farm stand our families ran together, selling melons and berries and peaches and whatever else was in season to tourists who drove up and down the highway, on their way to places that were more interesting than Maryville. Sometimes people asked if we were sisters or twins, since we both had light skin, brown hair, and brown eyes. Those questions always felt like a little warm light had been turned on inside my heart. Arden may not have been my sister for real, but most of the time, she felt like something just as good.

  The farm stand was simple, just a big canvas canopy held up by four metal poles with a cement pad underneath. The Kelly farm had had something or other here for longer than Daddy had been alive, but he and Mr. Ben had made it nicer, pouring the cement when me and Arden were just a few years old. You could still see our chubby little toddler handprints in a corner, where our daddies had pressed our hands into the wet cement and written our names and the date underneath. The farm stand was as much a part of me as the farm itself, or the bay, or the sound of cicadas on a hot summer night.

  Business was quiet today, only a few tourists stopping by to fill their trunks. When we didn’t have any customers, Arden and I sat cross-legged on the ground, a bucket of sidewalk chalk between us.

  We were probably too old to play with chalk like little kids, but ever since our obsession with Mary Poppins when we were seven, we’d spent every summer trying to draw a mural realistic enough to step into. They didn’t last very long—between the thunderstorms that visited Maryville most summer afternoons so long as we weren’t in a drought, and the wind that blew the chalk dust away, the pictures were usually gone within a day or two. Once, Arden had looked it up on the computer and figured out that real sidewalk artists spray hairspray on top to make the drawings last longer, but we never had. There was only space on the farm stand floor for a couple murals at a time. It was more fun to let them fade and create something brand-new a few days later.

  Sometimes we took pictures of our favorites, though. If we asked her to, Miss Amanda would print them off for us, and Arden and I would pick through them and choose the best ones to hang up on the walls of our bedrooms. During the bad time when I was eight, while Mama was getting sicker and sicker, I used to
lie on my bed and look at those prints and imagine that if I tried hard enough, I could Mary Poppins my way right into those pictures and disappear into a life made out of color and fun.

  Today we were sketching out two halves of a sun: Arden using a chalk the color of Daddy’s wheat when it’s ripe, me with one just the same shade as the summer sky. Where our colors met in the middle, I’d traced a swirling line. Right now I was filling in the shadows on my side of the sun’s face, using navy and gray to make it look like that two-colored sun was ready to send its warmth right off the sidewalk.

  “That looks kind of depressing,” Arden said with a corner-of-the-eye glance at me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, sitting back on my heels to look at it. I wasn’t the world’s best artist, but after so many years of practicing, we were both pretty good. And I liked drawing. The two things in the world I was best at were math problems and telling stories, and drawing is a little bit of both. Our yellow-blue sun, even only halfway done, pulled at something deep inside me, like one of the curling rays that wrapped around its center had hooked into me somewhere behind my belly button.

  “I don’t know. It’s just kind of sad, isn’t it? Like it’s cheerful over here, and depressed over there.”

  “I like it.” What I didn’t know how to say was that I liked it because of that, because of the way the happiness and the sadness swirled together in the middle, two halves of a whole. This week, I couldn’t have drawn with yellow if I’d tried.

  I rubbed my thumb against the gray chalk in my hand.

  Arden has been my best friend since before I was even born, when my mama was right at the end of her pregnancy and Miss Amanda brought baby Arden over (All wrapped up in some big sheet, like a baby kangaroo, my mama always says) to say hello. They’d moved down from Boston and bought the farm just east of us, wanting to “live closer to the land” and “build a sustainable lifestyle” (says my mama with her fingers scrunched into little quotation marks).