Where the Watermelons Grow Page 3

  Mama and Daddy were sure they’d wash out and move back north before long. Both Arden’s parents have fancy degrees and had big-city jobs before they moved down south, and Mama and Daddy figured they wouldn’t be cut out for the never-ending hard work and not much money you get out of running a farm. But they stayed, and now none of us can imagine what life would be like without them as neighbors. The Hawthornes sure cause a lot of talking over the fence from everyone in Maryville, even now, but Mr. Ben and Miss Amanda are both so sweet and kind I don’t think you could find a single soul in town who didn’t like them despite it all.

  “You okay? How’s Miss Suzanne?” Even in Mama’s good moments, people still asked about her.

  “Yeah.” I itched to tell Arden everything, but I was scared, too. Maybe I hadn’t all the way agreed with Daddy about not telling anybody about the watermelon seeds the day before, but I still understood. Sometimes, if I talked too much about Mama and her hard times, that was all people asked about—they’d look at us and see a sad family with big problems. And then they’d worry, and ask me about Mama every time I saw them. And they’d go around treating me and Mama and Daddy and even Mylie like we were made out of glass, ready to shatter any second.

  Still, the memory of Saturday night—and of the way Mama had been hearing voices in her head nobody else could hear yesterday—was rising up in me the way a balloon fills with air, making my skin tight and stretched.

  A dizzy-looking honeybee bumbled its way past my head, twirling over the produce boxes toward the wildflowers that bloomed tall beside the highway. I thought of the Bee Stories, of the question that had been on the tip of my tongue when I’d seen Miss Tabitha the day before.

  “I have to tell you what happened this weekend,” I started, squeezing my chalk so hard the edges of it crumbled in my hand.

  “Oh yeah.” Arden giggled. “That reminds me—I was going to tell you something about the weekend, too. But you first,” she added loyally, blending white chalk through one of her streaming yellow sunbeams.

  The little bubble of courage inside me popped.

  “Never mind. You go ahead.” Even best friends get it wrong sometimes—I couldn’t blame Arden for not being able to read my mind, not being able to sense just how much I needed to talk about what had happened. But that one breath of being brave was over, and all my words were stuck in me just as deeply as they had been since Saturday night. I swallowed hard and went back to drawing.

  “So, Mom has been saying that Eli’s room smelled funny for at least a week now,” Arden said. “She’s made him clean it twice but still thought something was strange in there. Eli has promised over and over that there’s nothing in there that shouldn’t be.”

  Slowly, listening to Arden tell her story, the strings wound around my heart loosened up a little. If I tried hard enough, I could even forget the image of Mama Saturday night with a watermelon seed above her eye.

  Mostly.

  “Then last night, Dad went in there to ask Eli something and he heard a noise. Coming from the closet.” Arden’s nose scrunched up in remembered humor. “I was in the kitchen loading the dishwasher and Mom was putting the little girls to bed, and all of a sudden we all heard a shriek from Eli, and Dad shouting, ‘YOU HAVE A FROG LIVING IN YOUR CLOSET?!’”

  Arden was all the way laughing now, her swirling yellow sun-half forgotten on the pavement in front of her. “So it turned out that Eli found this tree frog down by Hummingbird Bay last week and decided to keep it. So he put it in a shoe box and he’s been catching crickets and ants to feed it ever since.”

  I laughed without even meaning to. Eli was Arden’s ten-year-old brother, and it’d been war between the two of them for just about as long as they’d been alive. The picture of him sneaking bugs into his closet, a little brown frog hiding unhappily in a dark shoe box, was just like him.

  “What did your parents do?” I asked.

  “Oh, they were furious. Mom gave him a big lecture on respect for life and caring properly for living creatures.”

  “Did they make him take it back outside?”

  “Nah. Dad dug out an old aquarium and helped Eli build it a habitat. Said as long as the frog is healthy, he can stay. Eli named it Bartholomew.”

  I brushed my palms together again and again until they were mostly free of chalk dust. That was the only part of drawing I didn’t like—the way the grit stayed on my skin, hiding deep in the cracks and crevices of my hands, until I washed them good with soap. All the way completed, our yellow-and-blue sun didn’t look sad at all to me anymore. It just looked real. Good and bad. Sad and happy. Worrying and laughing.

  Kind of like today.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?” Arden asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. And I meant it. Somehow that little bit of laughter and silliness had cleared the air inside of me.

  A ladybug flitted down to land on the top of my hand. Ladybugs were always around me and Arden—lucky ladybugs, Mama called them, and laughed that it was a part of the magic Arden and I made together. When Arden and I are together, things all around us know it—when it’s our turn to sell at the stand, the fruit is riper and shinier, the herbs smell sweeter, the cut flower bouquets from our mamas’ gardens hold little warbles of birdsong caught in their petals.

  I blew the ladybug gently off.

  Arden sat up. There was a big streak of orange chalk across her white cheek. “Do you ever think what would’ve happened if my mom and dad hadn’t decided to move down here?”

  I shuddered. “Don’t even say that. It would’ve been awful.” I’ve got other friends at school, when school’s in session, but nobody at all like Arden, who knows me better than I know my own self.

  Arden stuck out her hand, all the fingers folded down except for her pinkie. “Best friends forever?”

  “Forever,” I agreed, wrapping my pinkie around hers and giving it a firm shake. It was our promise, the one we’d been making for as long as I could remember.

  “Wanna get Popsicles when we’re done?”

  “Sure. It’s hot enough.” I tossed the chalk I’d been using into the chalk bucket. The thump it made was echoed a minute later by a much louder thump-thump, thump-thump, and a cloud of dust moved down Arden’s driveway with Mr. Ben’s old rusted-out pickup in the middle of it.

  “Finally!” Arden said, standing up and stretching. Arden is about my same size, but she can run so fast her feet have trouble staying on the ground, so she looks athletic while I just look soft in some places and bony in others.

  Mr. Ben parked beside the pavilion and jumped down from the truck, waving at us. He had a big straw hat on, casting his pale face into shadow. “You girls ready for a break?”

  “Yes,” said Arden. “Can we bike to Mr. Anton’s to get some Popsicles or something?”

  “That’s fine with me,” said Mr. Ben, checking the record of the couple of transactions we’d made that morning, “but Della will need to ask her parents.”

  Arden shaded her eyes and looked off across the highway, toward my place. “Is that your dad over there, Dell?”

  Daddy’s truck was rumbling toward us from the direction of my house, kicking up a cloud of dust just like Mr. Ben’s had a moment ago, one more reminder of the drought that wouldn’t let Maryville go.

  “Hoped it was your turn over here, Ben,” Daddy said, after he’d parked and jumped out of the truck cab into the shade of the pavilion. “Wanna pick your brain. Something’s turning my watermelon leaves brown and it’s got me worrying.” He sighed. “Just what I need on top of everything else. We’ve been going dawn to dusk every day for the last few weeks trying to get the wheat in.”

  “Daddy, can Arden and I bike over to the gas station and get Popsicles?”

  “Actually, I need to go gas up,” Daddy said. “You girls go on along and hop in the truck and get the AC cranking, and I’ll be right along.” He tossed his keys over to me, silver in the hot summer sun.

  “I’m starting to th
ink making all these changes was a bad idea,” Daddy was saying to Mr. Ben as Arden and I climbed up into Daddy’s truck. “Seems like it’s all turning into a disaster. The Kelly farm has been ours since my great-granddaddy’s time, Ben, and I can’t imagine trying to look my own daddy in the eye if I lost it.”

  “Well, anything I can do to help, you just ask,” Mr. Ben said. “Sorry for the stress. Suzanne doing okay?”

  Daddy paused with his hand on the driver’s-side door. “Well,” he said, each of his words as carefully picked as the strawberries we sold in the spring, “she’s got her ups and downs, just like always. But we’re doing fine.”

  Chapter Five

  It’s almost a mile from our stand to the gas station and Duck-Thru Food Store, owned by Mr. Anton Jones. Mr. Anton is about as tall as a tree, with great big reddish-brown hands that are always stained with gasoline or motor oil. He’s one of the nicest grown-ups in town, and usually has a little treat for me and Mylie whenever we go with Daddy to gas up.

  Arden and I climbed out as Daddy pulled the truck around to one of the gas pumps. A black boy I’d never seen before, maybe sixteen or seventeen, stood on the curb by the gas station, sinking the pole of what looked like the world’s strangest birdhouse into the dirt that ran between the parking lot and the highway. The birdhouse was bigger than the boy’s head, with a glass door and a shelf inside it, and no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t figure out how the birds would get into it. Arden and I watched him for a long minute, neither of us brave enough to ask what he was doing.

  Finally, he looked up and saw us. His smile was like the first time you glimpse a seedling coming up from the ground—bright and happy and made me feel happy, too, just seeing it. His eyes were the color of a crayon I’d had once called umber, such a deep, rich brown it felt like I might get dizzy just looking at them.

  “Mornin’, ladies,” he said, and came over and stuck out his hand for us to shake, just like we were all grown up. His accent was a lot lighter than most folks in Maryville; Miss Amanda, who was from Boston and talked like she was holding her nose closed, said that the Maryville accent was “thick enough to stuff pillows.” The new boy talked more like Arden: halfway between North and South, some words sharp and some words twanging.

  Arden glanced up, her eyes squinting against the sunlight. “It’s more like afternoon now.”

  The stranger laughed. “Guess you’re about right. My name’s Thomas Bradley. Anton’s my uncle. Me and my mama just moved into town last night.”

  “I’m Arden Hawthorne. This is Della Kelly, though I guess she forgot how to talk.”

  “Did not,” I said, but I said it quietly. “What are you putting up over there?”

  “It’s a library,” said Thomas, and I couldn’t keep my jaw from dropping down just a little. Maryville might not have a library of its own, but I’d been to the library in Windsor plenty of times, and it was a lot bigger than a birdhouse.

  Thomas smiled. “A little library. A box library, I guess. Or it will be, once it’s got some books in it.”

  Just then, the bell over Mr. Anton’s shop door jingled and a woman came out, Mr. Anton walking beside her. Both of their arms were filled with books.

  “See?” Thomas said. “Here come the books now. This is my mama, Lorena Bradley. Mama, this is Arden here, and Della.” Thomas took the stack of books from his mama and lined them all up neat and tidy in the box library.

  “I confess I wasn’t very happy about moving to a town where you’ve gotta drive nearly half an hour to get to a library,” Mrs. Bradley said. She was younger than Mr. Anton, with warm brown skin and tight curls that reached to her chin and looked touched with amber in the sunlight, and when she said that bit about the library being so far away, she gave a sly little grin in Mr. Anton’s direction.

  He chuckled. “Took me quite a while to convince my baby sister to come live here in the middle of nowhere. She and her boy, they’re city folk from up Norfolk way.” He wrapped an arm around Mrs. Bradley’s shoulders and squeezed. “I finally wore ’em down. It’ll be nice, having some company in that lonely old house.”

  Mrs. Bradley patted the book box. “This was my way of making myself feel a bit better about the library situation. Thomas built it for me.”

  “But how does it work?” I asked, my voice timid in my own ears. My face heated, and it wasn’t just from the sun beating down on us all.

  “It’s an honor system,” said Thomas. “Anyone who wants can take a book out or put one in. It’s not a real library, but it might have something different than what you’ve already got at home.”

  “Would you like to look at what we’ve got in there now, sugar?” Mrs. Bradley asked, looking at me with eyes that seemed to see all the way into my bones.

  “My favorites are these,” Thomas said, tapping the books at one end. There were three of them, each one thick, with pages that were all ruffled, like they had been read lots. “The Lord of the Rings. I just got new copies, so I figured I’d donate these here.”

  “They’re kind of . . . long,” I whispered.

  “Go on,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Look what else we have.”

  The box library smelled like sawdust and sunlight, and the glass door was heavy on its smooth hinges as I opened it wider, so I could see everything in there. I had to turn my head sideways to read all the titles—some I’d seen before or even read in school, like The Crossover, and some I’d never heard of, like Akata Witch. My favorite was a tiny little book with a sky-colored spine that just said POEMS in big letters and Emily Dickinson in small ones. I put up a finger and touched it, tentative as a feather. The jacket was cool and soft.

  “Y’all going to get those Popsicles?” Daddy asked, coming up behind Mr. Anton and Mrs. Bradley.

  “Yeah,” I said, not wanting to let the book go.

  “You wanna take that with you, Della?” Mrs. Bradley asked.

  Without even meaning to, I slipped the book out of the box library and held it in my hands, looking down at it. “Yes,” I whispered, and then cleared my throat.

  “I mean, yes, ma’am, Mrs. Bradley,” I said again, louder this time. “If that’s all right, I’d like to borrow it. When do I gotta bring it back?” Mama and I used to drive to the library plenty, but we hadn’t been a single time since Mylie was born. I didn’t read anywhere near as much as Mama did, but something about having a brand-new book I’d never seen before wrapped up in my arms felt like coming home.

  “Please, go on ahead and call me Miss Lorena. Bring it back whenever you’re done. There’s no hurry. And if you find you want to keep it, just bring us another one to trade.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll be fast, I promise.”

  “No need,” said Miss Lorena, smiling. I could see where Thomas got his springtime smile from; Miss Lorena’s liked to light up the whole town. “You take your time, honey—that one’s an especially good one.”

  “By the way,” Daddy said, sticking his hand out for Miss Lorena and then Thomas to shake it. “I’m Miles Kelly. Della’s daddy. Anton mentioned yesterday he had family coming to stay—I guess that’s you two?”

  Miss Lorena nodded.

  “Actually, Miles,” said Mr. Anton, clapping a hand on Thomas’s back. “Remember how you was telling me you might be on the lookout for some help this summer? I imagine there’s not many kids around here who aren’t busy helping their own daddies. But Thomas mentioned last night he’d be looking for a summer job.”

  “I can’t say I know a single blessed thing about farm work,” Thomas said, “but I’m game to give it a try.”

  “You sure?” Daddy asked.

  “It’d keep him out of trouble this summer,” Miss Lorena said with a grin.

  “Probably four or five days a week,” said Daddy. “Mostly mornings. You could start tomorrow, if you like. Anton knows my address.”

  “Cool,” said Thomas. “I’ll see you then, Mr. Kelly. And you too, probably, Della,” he added, looking right at me.
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  I hugged the Emily Dickinson book to me, feeling it hard against my chest just like a second heart, and tried not to let my cheeks flame as red as the cherry tomatoes dripping off the vines in the garden out behind our house.

  Chapter Six

  That whole week was just about the hottest I’d ever lived through. Every day Daddy came in from the fields looking like he’d been dunked in a swimming pool. Thomas had come by to help one morning, too, and even though he didn’t say anything, I could tell by the look in his dark eyes when he came in to get a cold drink that he’d never worked that hard or been that hot in his life. Still, he didn’t complain, even if he downed that sweet tea like it was the best thing he’d ever tasted.

  By Thursday night I felt like I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been sticky and salty, my hair clinging to my skin all around my head till I wanted to cut it as short as Daddy’s just to give me some relief. In every room we had ceiling fans and big box fans and little tiny round fans working as hard as they could, and it still wasn’t ever enough.

  It would’ve been better if we’d had the AC going, too, but our unit had broken in May and Mama refused to let a repairman come out to look at it.

  “Why in the Sam Hill not?” Daddy had asked when she’d stopped him calling the air-conditioning company.

  “I just don’t think we should run it right now, Miles,” Mama had said, holding his phone behind her back so he couldn’t make the call. “It’s got all those chemicals in it—just think of the ways it could hurt our girls. The fans are better. We got along fine without the AC for years and years, didn’t we?”

  Daddy had gaped at her for a minute but then laughed. “You are the strangest woman alive,” he’d said to Mama, and then kissed her on the lips. I’d tried hard to forget I’d heard the conversation at all, even though it was impossible to do once the heat set in. I never liked noticing the ways that Mama was different. Mama had always worried about me and Mylie, probably more than most mothers. But it had never been as bad as last Saturday night, with Mama sitting in the ghostly light of the fridge, picking seeds out of watermelons.