Where the Watermelons Grow Read online

  And I needed to be the one to fix it.

  The new plan came to me that night. As I tossed and turned in my bed, playing back over the conversation with the Bee Lady and getting madder and madder every minute, something that Dr. DuBose had said last time Mama had been in the hospital came into my mind.

  I’d been eight years old and in the hospital waiting room, not allowed to see Mama because I was too young, crying and angry and not old enough to even understand exactly what was going on. Dr. DuBose had come to sit down beside me, his mustache twitching as he’d smiled and put a gentle hand on mine.

  “I know this is hard, Della,” he’d said, his voice deep and slow. “I know you miss your mama, and we’re working hard to get her back to you as soon as we can. But it’s best for her to be here for a while. Her brain needs a rest, so it can get better the way it needs to.”

  Lying there in my bed, those remembered words slipped right into and through me. I’d only been eight then, but now I was twelve and could do lots more. I could help Mama’s brain get a rest. I’d do so much to help her around the house that she wouldn’t have to do anything at all, and with all that resting, her brain was bound to heal. And not just a temporary fix, like the few years of right thinking she’d gotten from her new medication. Real healing. Permanently. Fixed so perfectly that by the time Mylie and I were grown up, we’d all laugh to think that Mama had once had such trouble.

  I thought about what Arden had seen the day before, and hoped just about as hard as I ever had that she’d made good on her promise and not said anything to her parents. I’d told Mama and Daddy I had a stomachache and begged out of going to my usual shift at the farm stand, and Miss Amanda had had to send Eli to stay with Arden instead. It had made all the grown-ups cranky, but I hadn’t been able to face Arden yet. I knew exactly how her eyes would’ve followed me, glaring until I’d spilled the whole truth. But now, maybe I could get Mama heading toward healthy before Arden—or anyone else—had time to do much worrying at all.

  I settled deeper into my pillows and closed my eyes. Tomorrow.

  Tomorrow was going to be the start of something a whole lot better.

  Chapter Ten

  Mama had Mylie up and dressed by the time I’d finished gathering the eggs the next day, and Mylie was sitting in her high chair drinking juice with a big smile on her face while Mama penciled in the crossword.

  She was always good at the crosswords—words, Mama had said to me ever since I could remember, were her best thing. They sure weren’t mine, though; I’d always done better with numbers, which never go and change on you when you aren’t expecting it. You couldn’t grow up with a mama like mine and not get to liking reading, but I still had a hard time in English class, especially if we were supposed to read something aloud to the whole room, which was a surefire way to make me blush all the way to the roots of my hair.

  The place where I was good with my words was telling stories to people I knew well: Mylie, or Mama and Daddy, or Arden. I liked the feeling of those stories rising up inside me, filling me with light and wonder. Math made me feel close to Daddy, but stories made me feel close to Mama. She had been telling me stories as long as I could remember—fairy tales, Bee Stories, funny things about what she got up to when she was growing up. One year, when I was five or six, I’d had trouble falling asleep at nights, and Mama had sat by my bed and told me stories about a family of kittens who got up to mischief until I’d drifted off to sleep.

  Sometimes, even now, I could still hear her soft voice telling those kitten stories when I closed my eyes at bedtime.

  “Got a bunch of eggs this morning,” I said, sailing past the table to the stove and pulling out a frying pan. Cooking wasn’t really my best thing, either, but I knew that if I was going to carry through on my plan to fix Mama’s brain, I needed to practice. I turned the heat up under the pan halfway, just like Mama always did, and put a dollop of butter inside it.

  “You find Matilda’s?” Mama asked me without looking up.

  “Cluck! Cluck!” shouted Mylie, banging her cup on the high-chair tray. Mama reached over, eyes still on the crossword, and pushed Mylie’s cup down so she couldn’t bang it again.

  “Mm-hmm.” The butter was starting to melt and sizzle against the pan now, filling the kitchen up with that sharp warm smell butter gets when it’s cooking. I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand and cracked six eggs into the pan as carefully as possible, but a few shell pieces still snuck in. I tried to grab them out with my finger, hoping hard that Mama wouldn’t look up and yell at me for having my hands in the food, which was the thing she hated more than just about anything in the world.

  Good thing the crossword was keeping her pretty busy.

  “There,” said Mama a minute later, after I’d finished fishing out the eggshells and grabbed a rubber spatula to scramble up the eggs. “I got every single one. Ha! Your mama’s vocabulary is as extensive as it is erudite, Della.”

  She looked up at me, her smile freezing as she noticed the pan I was stirring. “You know I don’t like you to turn on the stove without asking, hon. What are you doing?”

  “Just making some breakfast,” I said, leaving the eggs for a minute to wash a couple of peaches. “So you don’t have to.”

  “Goodness, what’s come over you?” Mama asked, but there was a laugh in her voice, and I knew she wasn’t mad. I breathed a teeny little sigh of relief. “Usually it feels like pulling teeth to get you to do chores around here.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek, knowing Mama was right and feeling about as bad as I could feel. Was that part of the reason she was getting sick again?

  “Better turn that off,” Mama said. “Smells like it’s burning.” I jumped and looked back at the pan, which was starting to smoke just a little. I pulled it off the heat and stirred the eggs up again, frowning at the little brown bits and the way a layer of egg was stuck tight to the bottom of the skillet. It was going to take a lot of scrubbing to get it clean, but I hoped it would be worth it.

  I popped four slices of bread into the toaster and started cutting up the peaches, pulling the little paring knife around the peach pits slowly and carefully, just like Mama had shown me when I was younger.

  “I’m going to help you extra from now on, Mama, I promise,” I said, arranging the peach slices on a plate and spreading butter and strawberry jam on the toast. “That way you can get plenty of rest.”

  “Rest?” Mama said, a funny look on her face, but before she could say anything else, the back door banged open and Daddy came inside.

  “I think it’s gonna be even hotter than yesterday,” Daddy said, wiping his face with his shoulder and leaving a big dark sweaty mark on his sleeve. He came into the kitchen and ran his hands under the cold water for a long, long minute, cooling himself down just as much as he was washing up. “It keeps on like this, eastern North Carolina will end up looking like Death Valley before long.”

  Mama patted the chair next to her. “Come on and sit down, Miles. Della made us breakfast.”

  “Thought I smelled something funny,” Daddy said, but he winked at me. I balanced the toast plate in one hand and the peach plate in the other and brought them to the table, then grabbed the pan of eggs and added that, too. I gave Mylie a piece of toast, which she promptly dumped upside down on her tray and rubbed around.

  “Wed!” she shouted, pointing at the red jam smeared across her tray. “Woooooah.” She cackled and swooped her fat white fingers through the jam like it was finger paint.

  Mama didn’t say anything, just put a peach slice on Mylie’s high-chair tray, so that I wondered if she even saw or heard anything else going on in the kitchen. Her face was pulled into a strange shape, a sour, wrong-looking kind of grimace, like she was in pain. I turned away quick, my hand tight around my fork. I wished for the hundredth time that my conversation with Miss Tabitha yesterday had gone differently. How could she not see how important this was?

  “I’m still worried ab
out my watermelons,” Daddy told Mama as he dished eggs onto his plate. “Ben thinks maybe it’s anthracnose fungus. Gave me some kind of oil to try, but if it doesn’t work, I might have to give up on keeping them organic this year and order some of the stuff my daddy always used. I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong to try to make so many changes at once after my daddy had to leave last year, Suzanne. We just can’t afford to lose this batch of melons right now.”

  Daddy sighed. Way back when he’d gone to college he’d studied agriculture science. He and Grandpa had always had different ideas about how to run things on the farm—Grandpa wanted to do it the way his daddy and his granddaddy had done it, while Daddy wanted to try some of the things he’d learned in college, things Grandpa scoffed at and called ridiculous. Like getting rid of all the chemicals Grandpa had used, and putting the big spiral tiller in the shed and investing in other equipment Daddy said wouldn’t hurt the soil as much.

  “I’ll keep my fingers crossed for Ben’s oil,” Mama said, like she’d come back to earth again from wherever she’d been a minute ago.

  I tried to eat my breakfast as fast as Daddy did, and by the time he’d got up from the table and headed back outside, I was already gathering up plates from the table and rinsing them in the sink so they could go right into the dishwasher.

  “I like this new version of you, Della,” said Mama, heading toward the sink, where Mylie’s washcloth was drying over the faucet.

  “Let me wipe Mylie up,” I said, grabbing the washcloth before Mama could and getting it wet.

  Mylie squirmed away, squealing, “No way!” as I tried to wipe her, but I made growling noises and chased her with the washcloth till she giggled and opened her fingers for me to clean. She was a mess, strings of peach flesh wrapped around her fingers and bright red jam smeared all over her cheeks and stuffed up her nose.

  “I’m gonna take care of Mylie for you today, Mama,” I said, pulling out the high-chair tray and picking Mylie up. “That way you can rest, all right?”

  Mama put her hands on her hips. “I appreciate the thought, Della honey, but I don’t need any rest, and I’m not sure where you came by the idea that I do. It’s my job to keep you and Mylie safe. Besides, you gotta go help your daddy this morning and then watch the farm stand—you know full well Arden can’t stay there all by herself. Who knows what might happen to her all alone on that highway?”

  I stood planted there in the middle of the kitchen, Mylie hot and sweaty in my arms, little drafts of breeze trickling down from the ceiling fan. “You sure?” I said finally, hugging Mylie a little tighter and feeling old and young, all at the same time.

  Mama nodded, her face relaxing and softening, the way the sky unwrinkles after a thunderstorm. “Of course.”

  “If you’re really sure,” I said, remembering all the ways Mama hadn’t been her normal self lately. Mama nodded one more time, and I sighed and handed Mylie over to her. Mama’s arm was slick with sweat where it brushed against mine, and her red cheeks made her look as hot as I felt. For just a minute I found myself thinking about rain, about the way most Carolina summers brought thunderstorms nearly every afternoon, pounding the houses and the dirt and your skin with so much water all at once that it ran like a river through the gutters and irrigation canals.

  Right then, I don’t know if Daddy or I was wishing harder for one of those big, beautiful rainstorms.

  Chapter Eleven

  Daddy was working on butter beans when I got outside, tossing the picked pods into a bucket with a quick snap-snap-snap. Without looking up at me, he pointed down the row a ways, to a section he hadn’t reached yet, and I dropped down into a squat and started feeling through the bean plants for the fat green pods, the ones that were just ripe enough but not so old their beans had already lost that buttery softness. A box of fresh-picked butter beans would hardly last a day out at the stand, they were that good.

  Neither of us talked. Me and Daddy had always had something special—sometimes, before Mylie came along and Grandma and Grandpa Kelly moved to Alberta, before the worry wrinkles took up permanent residence on Daddy’s face, the two of us would sit on the back porch step and look out over the farm fields, and he’d put his arm around my shoulder and squeeze and call me his best little girl. We used to sit there while he helped me with my homework, or quizzed me on interesting math problems he knew I’d like, or told dumb math jokes that made us both laugh till we nearly cried.

  But all year he’d been quieter than usual, constantly rubbing his forehead like he does when he’s tired and walking around like he carried a fifty-pound bag of Kelly Family Farm wheat over each shoulder.

  “Daddy, here’s some advice,” I said, forcing my voice to sound cheerful. “At a job interview, always tell them you’re ready to give a hundred and ten percent.” I paused for effect. “Except if that job’s for a statistician.”

  Daddy grunted but didn’t even look up. I shrugged away the tickle of a drop of sweat making its way between my shoulder blades.

  There wasn’t anything I could do to take away Daddy’s stress about the farm, but maybe I could at least help him feel easier about Mama.

  I scooted down the row, pulling my bucket of bean pods after me, my thoughts twisting around all the ways I could help Mama out this summer so she could rest more. The closest grocery store was more than halfway to Alberta, so she’d have to drive us, but what if I told her she could sit in the car and read while I took Mylie into the store and bought the groceries?

  I could do more cleaning around the house, too, but I had a feeling that if I tried that, Mama would just follow right along after me, doing things the “right” way. There was a reason most of my chores were outside—Mama was awfully particular about cleaning. It was okay if I loaded up the dishwasher, or cooked a little as long as I was extra careful to have clean hands and never touch the food I was cooking, but things like scrubbing counters and toilets and windows were Mama’s special responsibility. Daddy told me once, a long time ago, that it was part of Mama’s sickness; that making sure everything was sparkling clean was the one thing she could do to feel a little in control when everything inside her was going wrong.

  I took a deep breath and stood up, stretching out my legs, which were sore from all that squatting. Daddy and I had picked the whole row of butter beans clean without saying hardly anything to each other. The silence was thick and heavy all around us, like the heat and humidity that pressed into my skin until all I wanted to do was stick my whole self in the refrigerator to get some relief.

  “Think that’s it for this morning,” Daddy said, picking up both our buckets in the same great big hand. “Nothin’ else ripe enough to harvest again just yet. There ought to be a crop of watermelon, but all the ripe ones have come down with disease this week.”

  His face was gleaming with sweat and there was a streak of dirt across his forehead, where he’d rubbed it with his fingers. “You want a ride over to the stand on the tractor, Dell?”

  “Sure,” I said. There were only a few acres between the farm garden and the highway, but any walking in this heat sent dizzy swoopings through my head. I followed Daddy to where the John Deere was parked, its green paint turned yellow from all the dust and pollen caked onto it. I climbed up behind him and held on around his waist, trying to ignore the fact that even through his T-shirt I could feel how sweaty he was.

  Then again, he was probably thinking the same thing about me.

  We were nearly out to the road when a blue sedan pulled into our driveway. Thomas had come out to help a couple times already, usually staying far out on the farm with Daddy, but every now and then coming up to the kitchen for a glass of icy tea sweetened with Quigley honey, or a plate of cold watermelon. He was easy to talk to, even for me—and despite the fact that he was getting ready to start his last year of high school, he treated me like an adult.

  Just as the engine on the Bradleys’ car turned off, the tractor gave a shuddering thump and stopped dead in the driveway. Da
ddy banged his fist down on the steering wheel and swore so loud and dirty it made me jump. I’d never heard Daddy use so many bad words all in a row, and almost never heard him yell like that. I swallowed, feeling that sandpapery sensation of a dry throat on a hot day, and hopped down as quick as I could.

  Daddy followed me, pacing around to the front of the John Deere and throwing up the hood. He said another dirty word and brought his fingers up to rub at his forehead, leaving a smear of grease across his skin to match the smudge of dirt there.

  Thomas got out of the car and called over to us. “Everything okay, Mr. Kelly?”

  “Not really,” said Daddy, his face tight and stretched like he was having to work every second to keep his anger in. “Know anything about fixing tractors?”

  Thomas laughed incredulously. “You know I’m a city boy, Mr. Kelly. I wouldn’t know a tractor if it bit me. Didn’t even need a riding mower at my old place.”

  Daddy sighed, kicking at one of the tractor wheels. “Knew I should’ve gone ahead and replaced the belt when Anton said to. This is the last thing I need right now. You go on to the stand with Arden, Della. I’ve gotta go back to the house and call Anton to ask him to order the part I need.”

  “You sure?” I asked, watching Arden wave at me out of the corner of my eye. After I’d skipped out of my shift at the farm stand Saturday, Arden had tried to call twice yesterday afternoon, but I’d made sure I wasn’t around when the phone got picked up. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say about the things she’d seen Saturday morning, after Mama had left Mylie to cry in her crib. I didn’t want Arden doing her best to convince me my plans weren’t going to work out.

  Daddy tried to smile, a sad little thing that only made it halfway up his mouth. “This tractor won’t be going anywhere under its own steam till it’s got a new belt,” he said, taking a big deep breath and raking his hands through his hair. “You go on with Arden. I’ll go tell your mama what happened.”