Where the Watermelons Grow Read online

  That afternoon the temperature had hit 105, which was a record high for Maryville and nearly everywhere around us, too.

  “I can practically hear the crops drying up and dying out there in the fields,” Daddy told Mama, his voice flat as rolled-out pie dough, while I was weeding in the big garden. I squinted in the sunlight as I picked; Mylie had stolen my sunglasses earlier that morning, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where she’d put them.

  Mama and Daddy had both spent all of Mylie’s nap time working outside, Daddy driving the combine to finish up the July harvest of winter wheat and Mama picking boxes full of tomatoes to sell at the stand. We’d got so behind on everything this month that lots of the tomatoes had swelled and split down the middle, turning to mush right on their plants so they were good for nothing but the compost heap. Now Mama and Daddy stood by the tractor, Daddy twisting his baseball cap over in his work-tanned hands.

  “It’s getting to be the only thing I can think about, Suzie. We’re not set up for this much summer irrigation, and everything’s suffering for it. At this point I’ll be grateful if we just break even this year. It’s not looking likely.”

  “We’ll make ends meet somehow,” Mama said.

  “I sure hope so.” But when Mama turned to go back inside, hopeful wasn’t exactly the look on Daddy’s face.

  The heat didn’t make any of us happy, but Mylie was the worst. She was never much of a one for going to bed, but lately she’d been pitching more fits than ever, probably because it felt like an oven inside our room. Most nights Daddy put her to bed, but Thursdays were special, and Mama took over bedtime so that Daddy and I could watch our favorite detective show together. We’d been watching TV mysteries nearly since I got old enough to talk, and we always had a competition to see who could solve them first. Daddy usually won, but I was getting better these days and beat him plenty.

  Mysteries were a little like math. When all the pieces slotted together in my head, it felt just like solving a problem and knowing I’d got it right, the way everything inside me suddenly snapped into perfect order.

  Tonight Mylie was still screaming her head off when our show started, and I turned it up real loud so we could hear it.

  “Turn it down, Della,” said Daddy, rubbing his forehead so hard it looked more pink than tan. “The noise’ll just keep Mylie up longer. Put on the captions instead.”

  I huffed out a sigh and did as he asked. Mylie cried so loud through the first half of the show that I could hardly even read the subtitles, my thoughts were so jumbled, but she finally quieted down just as the cops put the wrong person in jail and a commercial started.

  Mama stomped out of my bedroom, looking like a wild woman with her hair all jammed up into a ponytail and sweaty wisps plastered to her forehead.

  “I tell you, I cannot take the sass of that child anymore,” she said, going into the kitchen and pouring herself a big glass of ice-cold filtered water from the refrigerator. Mama never drank water from the tap, only from her special pitcher with the filter in it to keep all the bad stuff out.

  Daddy muted the TV and turned to look at Mama. “Sorry she was so hard, Suzie. Wanna come finish the show with us?”

  Mama sat down on the sofa next to him, the water sloshing quietly in her glass. She closed her eyes and let out a big, long breath. “I’m just so tired of fighting with her over every little dumb thing. She’s not even a year and a half. Isn’t that way too young for this? Della never had a tantrum till she was at least three.”

  Daddy put his hand around Mama’s shoulder and gave her a squeeze. “Nothing lasts forever,” he said, unmuting the TV as our show came back on. “This won’t, either.”

  Mylie stayed asleep all the way through the rest of the show, but Mama got shiftier and shiftier, her eyes getting wide and her fingers twisting together as she watched. Just a few minutes before it finished up, I put all the clues together and came up with an answer I was sure was right—but before I could open my mouth to beat Daddy to the solution, Mama pointed at the screen.

  “It’s the social worker,” she said, looking queasy. “She was the only one who wasn’t with them that night, right? And she had access to all those files.”

  Right as she finished talking, the detectives on the television came to the same conclusion.

  Daddy looked at Mama with his eyebrows up, smiling. “Nice job, Suzie,” he said. Mama almost never played our game; she just liked to watch, she said, and have a chance to rest like she never could during the day. “I was miles away from that. I’m impressed.”

  I clapped my mouth shut as the credits started to roll. That had been my guess, too.

  “Wasn’t hard. But I don’t like this show,” Mama said, pressing her lips together till they turned white. “Don’t want Della watching it no more. That woman was hurting a little girl, just like people keep on trying to hurt my girls.”

  “What do you mean?” Daddy asked, reaching over to hit the power button on the remote, his voice like a cliff-edge walk—just a breath away from getting really, really upset.

  “My daddy keeps telling me, Miles. He keeps on telling me there are people out there wanting to hurt Mylie and Della.”

  The only sound in the whole house was the whir-whir-whir of half a dozen fans, blades rotating around and around so fast they became invisible. Daddy and I both stared.

  Mama’s daddy, my grandpa Case, died of a heart attack when I was eight years old.

  “Suzanne, honey,” said Daddy at the breakfast table the next morning. He wasn’t looking at Mama—he was looking down at the butter he was spreading across his biscuit instead. His words were careful and slow, like soldiers creeping into enemy territory. “I made you an appointment with Dr. DuBose for later this morning, okay? It’s been awhile since you been to see him. I can drive you there, if you like.”

  “You what?” asked Mama, jaw tightening. “I haven’t got time today, Miles. Who’d watch Mylie and Della?”

  “I don’t need watching,” I said. “And I could stay with Mylie. Or we could go to Miss Amanda’s.”

  Mama kept on like I was no louder than a fly buzzing round the kitchen. “And what do you mean, you’d drive me there? There’s no way you could take the day off chores today, not with this drought. And if I drove myself, what would you do all on your own? In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time out on the farm lately.”

  “I know, Suzie, thanks for that.” Daddy rubbed at his forehead. Mylie picked her sippy cup up experimentally and launched it at Mama’s head; Mama caught it and put it back on the tray without even looking up.

  “Never thought I’d say this, but I miss having my parents here. Things seemed to run a little smoother around here with four adults instead of just two. Still,” Daddy added after a moment, his voice quieter than ever. “I think you ought to take that appointment. We can leave the girls here—I’ll call Amanda and tell her to keep an eye on them. It could be nice, Suzie, having some time just for the two of us. Thomas is coming in a bit. He can handle a few chores by himself for one morning.”

  “Honestly,” said Mama, sounding about ready to take Daddy’s head off with one bite. “I’m fine. Actually, I’ve been feeling more like myself than I have since Mylie was born. Nothing’s wrong with me, and I don’t need to go wasting Dr. DuBose’s time or my own. And besides, last I checked, there’s twice as many of those squash beetles out there—and if we don’t get weeding done out in your vegetable field, the seed heads’ll start popping and we’ll be in a world of trouble—”

  “I’m not saying anything’s wrong with you. Just that you haven’t been to see him in a long time. Won’t you be running out of pills soon? When does your prescription expire?”

  “Not for months. Now finish shredding that biscuit and stop bugging me.”

  After we’d finished eating, Daddy took his keys down off their hook by the door and went outside. The pickup engine rumbled to life, but either Mama didn’t notice or she
was ignoring that sound as hard as she could.

  I closed my eyes and thought of numbers. One. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen.

  Half an hour later, Thomas Bradley’s blue car pulled into the driveway. Daddy gave up and turned the truck engine off.

  “Hey, Della, how you doing?” Thomas called, waving as he and Daddy passed through the house to the back door, which was the quickest way to get to the fields.

  Daddy didn’t even look at me. His face was hard, stormy as one of the rain clouds we hadn’t seen all summer long.

  Chapter Seven

  After we’d finished our shift at the farm stand that morning, Arden and I escaped down to our playhouse. We’d built it last summer, right by where the curve of Hummingbird Bay met the edge of the Hawthorne farm, and both our daddies hated it because we’d made it ourselves out of old plywood we scavenged from the supplies my daddy used to build our chicken coop last year. Before that we’d spent years playing in an old tobacco shed, but the playhouse was better, because it was made with our own hands.

  Mr. Ben said it was unsafe and would fall over on us next time a hurricane rolled through town, but Arden always shot back that we didn’t plan to stay in the playhouse during a hurricane, so that wouldn’t be a problem.

  The playhouse was our place, the one place in Maryville where nobody could come unless we let them. Today Arden had all her younger siblings to watch except the baby, but the three of them were busy down at the water’s edge trying to catch tadpoles and water skimmers in nets, so Arden and I got the playhouse to ourselves as long as we kept a good eye on them. We were painting the walls with paints and brushes we’d snuck out of Arden’s mama’s craft room, trying to make it look as much like a real house as a rickety plywood box nailed together by two eleven-year-olds can. Arden wanted to paint the whole thing over with flowers once we’d finished with the base coat, but I hadn’t decided what I thought yet. The idea of making something that permanent, the kind of thing you couldn’t just wash off and start over, made me nervous.

  “Eli!” Arden yelled, looking up from her painting to see her brother wading into the bay so far his shorts got wet. Eli hated being bossed. “Get out of the water! Mom said no swimming unless she or Dad are with us.”

  Arden and I went swimming in there without any grown-ups all the time, dunking each other under the brackish water or trying to swim all the way out to the point where the bay opened up into the Albemarle Sound, but nobody else but us knew about that.

  Eli stuck out his tongue at us, but he obeyed, trudging back to the shore with his skinny white legs dripping water.

  “I can’t believe summer’s nearly half over.” Arden sounded wistful.

  “Me neither.” I’d always been shy, and every new school year was like jumping back into a cold pool once you’ve finally warmed up. Seventh grade had to be better than sixth—starting at a new school was worse than almost anything—but I still wasn’t looking forward to it. The seventh graders last year had seemed so old, so smart, so mysterious. There had been whispers about kissing and boyfriends and things I didn’t feel ready for. “I wish you were going to be with me. You could be on the track team, and we could have lunch together . . .”

  “I wish you could do school with me.”

  “Me too.” Arden got to pick all her own homeschool projects, and as long as she got her work done it didn’t matter if she finished up by lunchtime and could spend the rest of the day doing whatever she wanted. Last year, her mama had let her spend a whole school year studying the changes in the water plants by the bay’s edge and called it botany, while my science class had to dissect frogs. I’d smelled like formaldehyde for days.

  “Mom’s already planning a whole unit on aeronautics. We’re going to take a day trip to Kitty Hawk and everything. Mom says maybe if the weather’s nice we’ll rent a condo on the beach for a few days, maybe drive up to Corolla and see the wild horses.”

  “It sounds nice.” I squeezed the paintbrush in my hand. What would my family be doing this autumn?

  Would Mama be in the hospital by the time I got back to school at the end of August?

  “Want to go for a run with me tomorrow?” Arden asked.

  “No.” I liked swimming, and when school was in session I did fine in PE, but as far as I was concerned, running was not something a person should do for fun, especially when it was hitting triple-digit temperatures before breakfast.

  “Is . . . something going on with you, Della?” Arden asked, dipping her brush back into the Styrofoam plate we’d filled with paint. She kept her eyes on the plywood wall as she drew her brush across it, leaving a thick green streak in its wake. She was watching that wall so hard she might have been waiting for it to sprout flowers or start talking.

  “I’m fine.” All week long, the words I’d wanted to say had fizzled before they hit my tongue, leaving me with a whole lot of buzzing in my head and no way to let it out. I’d wanted more than anything to talk to Arden about my mama and the things that had started coming out of her mouth again, but every time I’d been with her, I found I just couldn’t. There was always something else going on: her brother and sisters causing trouble, or customers coming to the farm stand just as I opened my mouth to spill out the truth, or a little spark of worry in her eyes that made my skin crawl uneasily.

  What could Arden do, anyway? The Hawthornes and the Kellys were twined together like the branches of a weeping willow, but in the twelve years since Mama’s sickness came on, the best they’d been able to do was watch me when things got extra bad four years ago.

  Arden painted right over the same spot she’d just done, like she didn’t even notice it. She looked hurt, her eyebrows pinched together just a tiny bit in the middle, her cheek pulled in like she was chewing on it.

  “You sure? You’ve just been so quiet. You didn’t even laugh when I asked you to go for a run. Is . . . is something the matter with your mama?”

  “She’s fine.” A trio of ladybugs flew around our heads, their pointed red wings blurring with their flight. One after another, they came to rest on the top of the playhouse. In the sunshine, they looked like little jewels, shining and bright and such a rich scarlet color my eyes could hardly take it in.

  Four years ago, when Mama’s sickness had gotten so bad, the doctor had taken her away and put her in the mental hospital in Alberta. I couldn’t see her for weeks and weeks; I’d had to stay with Arden’s family every time Daddy drove out to visit. I could still remember crawling into Daddy’s bed every night after I was supposed to have already been asleep, asking him if Mama was ever gonna come back to us.

  I’d opened that Emily Dickinson book from Miss Lorena’s box library yesterday, let the pages fall open in the middle until my heart was full up with the smell of old books. Most of the poems in it I didn’t much understand, but I liked the way they sounded, the way they pulled at something inside of me. There had been one that talked about grief, about how sometimes it hurts to live.

  That’s how it had felt when Mama went away to the Alberta hospital last time.

  If I told Arden about the things that had been happening this week, it would make it real—make it so I couldn’t ignore or explain away the things Mama had said, the way she’d been so much worse than she ever had been since the bad time after Grandpa Case died.

  “Rena!” Arden shouted, so loud I almost let my paintbrush tumble into the dirt. “Put that snake back where you got it, and leave Charlotte alone.”

  Rena looked up at us so fast her hair bounced, and then dropped the garter snake she’d been teasing her little sister with, so it could slither back away into the marsh.

  Arden looked back at me. “You sure, Dell?”

  “Positive,” I said, hoping it was true, knowing I had to find a way to fix Mama for good before she disappeared like that again. Last night, hearing Mama talk about Grandpa Case like he was still alive and talking to her, that had been bad. But it couldn’t be too late yet—it just couldn’t.

  I�
�d been littler the last time Mama had gotten so sick. I hadn’t been able to help as much. Maybe this time, I could make the difference.

  Chapter Eight

  That Saturday morning when I went out to do my chores it had already hit a hundred degrees even though it wasn’t eight o’clock yet, and big fat droplets of sweat rolled off me as I searched through the straw in the henhouse looking for eggs. Our best layer, Matilda, liked to hide them in new places every time, and more than once I’d missed some only to smash them flat by accident later on. Daddy was already out in the fields, trying to fix one of his irrigation sprinklers where it had stopped spraying right; he’d been awake and gone before I’d even gotten out of bed.

  I’d snuck the Emily Dickinson book out with me, and after I’d finished collecting the eggs into my basket, I sat down beside the coop and let the pages flutter open. They landed on a poem called “Book”:

  There is no Frigate like a Book

  To take us Lands away

  Nor any Coursers like a Page

  Of prancing Poetry—

  I smiled. I didn’t know what frigates or coursers were, but somehow in this hot and awful week, Miss Emily’s book was just the thing that helped me fly away from the drought and the way the heat made me feel more dead than alive. The precise march of those words in the little blue book was like an equation, the way they all knew just where they belonged in the poem.

  I’d just closed the book when Arden came into view from around the house, her face flushed red with the heat, her light brown hair in a pair of French braids already starting to come loose and frizzy at the edges.

  “Mom sent me over to see if I could borrow some eggs,” she said as soon as she saw me. “About a million things are up with our hens and they didn’t give any this morning.”

  “Sure. We’ve got plenty.” I stood up. “Come inside and I’ll see if we’ve got a carton you can borrow.”