Watermelon Summer

by Anna Hess

  Mom's words were enough to pull me out of my mindless misery and make me take a mental step back. Kat's theft and Glen's more-permanent absence from my life had torn me apart, but this wasn't the way I wanted my Greensun adventure to end. It took a concerted effort, but I turned off my personal waterfall in time to interrupt Mom before she could go any further. "I'm not coming home like that!" I said.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, then Mom changed gears. "Okay, that makes sense. You want to go to Glen's funeral." There was another short hiatus, then she continued, "Dad says I can get on the red-eye and be there tomorrow morning. How does that sound?"

  This second suggestion sounded perfect, like a cup of chamomile tea doctored up with a spoonful of honey. I reluctantly let Mom go so she could pack and get ready for her flight, but I rejected Arvil's kind offer that I stay over in his guest room. I needed to be alone to digest this news, and I could tell my neighbor was also torn up about the death of his oldest friend.

  The great thing about a walking commute is that it's not terribly dangerous to get from point A to point B, even if your eyes keep tearing up and your vision is hazy. Lucy steered me in the right direction when I seemed about to branch off on a deer trail into the woods, and we reached the Greensun farmhouse without any undue trauma, except for the emotional kind.

  And then I cried until I couldn't cry any more. And, being the type A person I am, I decided that the only solution to the way I was feeling was to find every note Glen had written me and compile them into a simulacrum of his life to replace the physical body that was now absent.

  My search turned up dozens of missives that had heretofore gone unnoticed. My bio-dad had apparently hoped I was as fond of the classics as he and my mother were, so the most in-depth letters had previously escaped my more scientific eye. Catcher in the Rye yielded a brief recap of Glen's own boyhood, Catch-22 included a handwritten piece about Glen's take on the evils of war, and, slipped between the slender covers of A Midsummer Night's Dream, my father included the tale of my birth. "I caught you as you slid out into the world," Glen recalled in this final note. "Even though I've never met you as an adult, you are the child I've always felt closest to in my heart."

  And I cried again, but this time the tears were cathartic. Before long, I was able to fall asleep on the couch, Lucy's head beneath my hand.

  I woke to Mom's worried face peering into mine. "Forsythia?" she said quietly. "Are you okay?"

  When I first arrived at Greensun, I used to try to picture Mom in various locations. She'd told me stories about the root cellar, but I hadn't been able to imagine my put-together mother inside that dank structure, the dirty water pouring out along the floor during a heavy rain. And how could Mom have canned those fabled quarts of tomatoes and apples in the rough Greensun kitchen when her own counters were now spotless and modern?

  But when I opened my eyes to see Mom in Greensun's doorway, the stories and truth slid together, and I understood exactly how my mother had fit into Greensun. She'd thought the farm was an adventure, just like I had this summer, and her intrepid spirit would have made it easy to dive right into primitive conditions with enthusiasm. Sure, Mom's sheltered upbringing—like my own—would have made her afraid of some of Greensun's rougher edges, but bravery is really about overcoming your fears, not about being fearless in the first place. It occurred to me that my mother was probably just as stout as Kat, maybe more so.

  All those thoughts ran through my head in the space of time it took to say: "I'm so glad you came." And even though I had thought I'd dissolve into a puddle of tears when Mom finally showed up, I instead realized I was eager to see how much of the Greensun world we shared.

  "It's wonderful to be here," Mom agreed, hugging me tight then letting me loose. "So, are you going to give me the grand tour?"

  "Maybe you should give me the grand tour instead," I countered, and one dimple popped up on Mom's ever-so-slightly lop-sided face, just like on mine.

  That morning, I learned that Mom had planted the pine grove I was camping in and that my favorite cleared spot had been her favorite location as well. Our experiences had differences, though. Mom told me about her first winter at Greensun, when the snow had made roads impassable and she felt so isolated and alone at Greensun, despite (or perhaps because of) sharing the house with three other adults. In contrast, I liked the quiet at Greensun, although I had to admit I'd never seen it when the sun was so low in the sky you'd only be out of the shade for a few hours a day.

  I ended up telling Mom the whole sordid tale of Kat's treachery, and rather than using the admission as an excuse to make me promise I'd go home, my mother reciprocated with a description of how Glen's goats had escaped, bred, and gone a long way toward defoliating all two-hundred acres of Greensun. "Glen finally let a neighbor come in and hunt them down," Mom confided, a twinkle in her eye, "But we didn't eat the meat. We were all vegetarians then." It was the goat episode that had prompted Mom to plant my pine grove.

  Our story swap seemed to mark a loosening of Mom's resolve to keep her reminiscences sugar-coated. And as the day progressed, I began to realize how much Mom had edited her stories in the past so they wouldn't color my own impressions when I finally met Glen. Now that the possibility of first-hand experience was gone, Mom was willing to tell me more about my biological father.

  "But if you really want to know what life was like back then, we'll have to find the time capsule," Mom told me at last. We walked up the holler past the pine grove, taking a right when the creek forked, and ending up at a cement box. Looking back the way we'd come, I noticed a plastic pipe running toward the farmhouse and realized the box enclosed the spring, which in turn provided all of the farm's drinking water.

  The spring itself wasn't the purpose of our journey, though. Mom drew my attention to a pile of rocks behind the spring box, then began carefully lifting each mossy stone and setting it aside. "It might be gone," she warned, but the area looked like it hadn't been touched for as long as I'd been alive. And, sure enough, after a couple of false starts, Mom plucked out a plastic yogurt container, brittle with age, but still doing its job of protecting the ziplock bag inside. Within these two layers of protection were a black-and-white photo of my parents in their youth, a carved wooden pendant, and a farewell letter from my mother to the farm.

  I won't quote Mom's full letter here, although I read it three times and took it away with me when we left. Mom had addressed the letter to "my dearest Greensun," and she cringed as we read the words together. "I was so melodramatic!" Mom laughed at her younger self, but I was glad to realize that my mother had felt the same magnetic attraction of this tract of land.

  The truth, though, was that the younger Mom didn't sound like me—she sounded like Kat. Excited and depressed in turn, my mother had left Greensun to give me a better life, relinquishing her hold on the three things she held most dear—my bio-dad, my half-sister, and this farm.

  Even at thirty, Mom knew she was making ripples that would have far-reaching consequences, but she'd decided that her own daughter wouldn't be raised in the willy-nilly parenting style Kat had received. The younger Mom didn't want me to grow up in a world divided along gender lines. Instead, she needed me to know I could achieve anything I dared to dreamed of.

  So she had poured out all of her mourning onto this tear-stained note, tucked it away, then left Greensun so she could grow up and raise her own daughter. Looking up at my mother now, I could see that she had matured, but still kept that spark of glee that had drawn her to Greensun in the first place. And I finally admitted to myself that I was glad Mom had made every decision the way she did, because those decisions had molded me into the person I was, which was exactly who I wanted to be.

  While I was coming to this conclusion, Mom was thinking something entirely different. "Kat is my one true regret," Mom told me, or maybe told herself. "It makes me wonder if my abandonment of your sister isn't the real root of her recent behavior after all."

&n
bsp; Every Greensun Ex from the meeting, plus some, had returned for Glen's funeral the following day. We gathered in an old cemetery on the corner of Greensun land, where the headstones were long, flat rocks turned on their end, most with no names visible. "Even though," Arvil explained loudly, "Glen really wanted us to build a platform and leave his body exposed to the elements so the vultures could pick at his flesh."

  "A Tibetan sky burial," Bill agreed, nodding along as if he thought the spectacle would have been interesting to see.

  "But of dubious legality," Arvil continued, reclaiming the figurative center stage. "Instead, we'll honor Greensun's founder with an Appalachian tradition of digging his grave by hand. And if you don't want to dig, there's plenty of food to go around." Then Arvil picked up a shovel and suited actions to words, being the first to break through the grassy ground.

  The only other funeral I'd been to, that of a distant relative, had been a hushed affair—closed casket in a funeral home overflowing with flowers and peopled by men in dark suits. This felt more like a party, although one with an undercurrent of sadness, and it seemed the thing to do was to mingle, so I did.

  "And you are the long-lost sister!" exclaimed a woman Mom's age...who did indeed look remarkably similar to me. "Angela?" I asked and was informed that the woman arm-in-arm with my lookalike was my other sister, Jessica. Even though I had the strongest physical resemblance to Angela, it was Jessica who struck me as a potential soul mate. The latter had some of Kat's exuberance, but it was tempered with an earthy wisdom that felt like the spirit of Greensun itself.

  "Do you want to meet our little brother?" Jessica asked, waving goodbye to Angela and drawing me to the outskirts of the crowd where a tall, dark stranger was leaning against a car. "Peter!" she called, while we were still fifty feet away. "Stop brooding and come say hello to Thia."

  The ensuing conversation was a bit stilted since we were total strangers, but I liked Peter right away, and appreciated Jessica even more for being the bridge that brought us all together. Still, when my eyes roamed across the crowd and saw the person I'd been looking for all morning, I made polite excuses and took my leave.

  Jacob didn't say a word, just engulfed me in the hug I'd been yearning for. I imagined I could feel the good energy floating from his body into mine, and I was able to muster the first bit of happiness I'd felt since opening Pandora's box.

  "Thia, I'm so sorry," Jacob told me once we'd finally stepped apart enough to look at each other's faces. He reached down to take hold of my hand, as if unwilling to be separated from me entirely, and I leaned into his shoulder to extend the bond.

  "I'm thinking of going back to the name Forsythia," I answered him quietly, my face starting to crinkle up into tears as the memory of Kat's actions filtered back up to the surface. Between Glen's death and Mom's arrival, I'd managed to forget about my half-sister for nearly a day, but the wound was still raw to the touch. I dreaded having to explain the events to Jacob, but it turned out Arvil had already broken the news.

  "You can't let Kat take away everything good you've done this summer," Jacob told me firmly. Then he changed gears and asked, "Did I ever tell you that I looked up the name 'Thia' on the internet a few weeks ago?"

  His words surprised a slight smile onto my lips. Even though Jacob and I were a couple now, it still thrilled me to know he was thinking of me even when I wasn't present. "What did you find out?" I asked, willing to be diverted onto a less-loaded topic.

  "Thia was a Greek goddess," Jacob informed me, "Daughter of the earth and sky."

  "And mother of the sun and moon," added Mom, who had walked up behind us without me noticing. "I used to call you Thia before you were even born," she added, "Which is probably where Kat got it from. I didn't want to saddle you with such a strong name, though, until you grew into it." I almost laughed, thinking of the name Mom had saddled me with instead. But her next words turned the laugh into a lump in my throat. "I see you've grown into 'Thia' now," she concluded. Then, looking at Jacob. "I'm Kat's mother. It's so good to finally meet you."

  Even though I'd itched to see Jacob's face in the crowd, I'd been dreading Mom's reaction when she met him. Bringing your first boyfriend home to meet the parents is always dicey, but so many things complicated this particular rendition of that age-old drama. There were Mom's feelings about mountain men for one, and added on top of that was the still-unresolved college issue. With my eyes, I begged Mom to be polite, and she didn't let me down.

  "I don't know if the two of you want to help dig," she said, "But it looks like the first round of excavators is getting tired." She led us over to the deepening grave, chatted briefly with the current workers, and ended up with two shovels for the three of us to share.

  "I've been to a few of these mountain funerals," Mom explained, choosing a spot to work at the far end of the grave, "And what I've learned is that you want to put in your time first thing. Earth is much harder to dig the deeper you go." She shoveled for only a minute before passing the tool off to Jacob, then, trailing a comforting hand over my arm, she left us alone. Although my mother didn't say the words, I could read her approval of Jacob in the way she looked him straight in the eye with a smile (and in how she was willing to leave me alone with him).

  It was comforting to be digging when my head and heart were full of so many conflicting emotions. My spade bit into the soft earth easily, and my time in Greensun's garden made me think momentarily about the rich, dark color, so good for nurturing seeds. I glanced over at Jacob, who was intent on his labor, and I remembered the line my father had underlined in his copy of Peace Is Every Step, and which I'd read two nights ago while hunting down my father's messages. "When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence," the Buddhist guru wrote. "How can you love if you are not there?" The words had struck me as profoundly ironic coming from my father, but now I was glad to have read them. Whether or not he loved me in the romantic sense, I realized that Jacob was offering me the greatest gift he could just by being present at my estranged father's funeral.

  "Well, isn't this cute." The cutting words broke through my thoughts, and I felt like fleeing as I turned to the look at the source. "The couple that digs graves together stays together," she continued sarcastically.

  Unfortunately, the song was right—Kat had come back.

  "What are you doing here?" Jacob demanded, anger fully coloring his voice for the first time in my memory.

  "What are you doing here?" Kat retorted. "I'm here to attend my father's funeral. Oh, and to collect my share of the inheritance."

  Blue eyes and brown eyes flashed, but before the exchange could turn any nastier, Arvil had stepped between the combatants. "Well now, slow down a minute," he drawled, his accent becoming thicker as he took on the role of a gentle southern sheriff. "Last I heard, I was the administrator of Glen's estate. And I seem to recall your father gave a challenge that still has eleven months to run before we can think about splitting up this land among his children."

  "That letter is old news," Kat replied, turning to Arvil as a more-worthy object of her fury. "This property is worth a lot more than $30,000, and I want my share. I should have about $80,000 coming to me after we sell Greensun on the open market, and that's what we're going to do."

  When Kat first showed up, I was so heart-broken to see her in the flesh that I hadn't even been able to look my sister in the eye. But now, as my friends waged the battle for me, I realized that I needed to face Kat myself. I stepped up out of the grave so I'd at least be close to her level, took a deep breath, and spoke as firmly as I could. "The first $2,000 wasn't enough for you?" I challenged.

  Kat spun around again so she was now facing me. She was by far the most beautiful person present, if not dressed for grave-digging, and for one second I thought it might be worth giving up Greensun if I could have my vibrant companion back. But could I ever really enjoy Kat's presence now that I knew about her rotten core? I doubted it.

  "You said yourself that the
money was for the use of the community," my half-sister answered, no regret visible on her face. "I was part of the community and I used it."

  "That's the sorriest excuse for thievery I've ever heard," I replied. "But we won't go there now. First, we'll look at this from another standpoint. Carol, wouldn't you say that Glen's letter is a legally-binding document that requires us to hold Greensun in escrow for the next eleven months?" I shot the Greensun Ex a hopeful glance, since I had no clue whether I was right and wasn't even sure I'd used the term "escrow" correctly. I seemed to recall something to that effect in the books Carol had lent me, but my memory was hazy.

  For a second, Carol seemed ready to explain that she really wasn't all that well-versed in that part of the law, but then she took a look at Kat, pursed up her lips, and agreed with me wholeheartedly. "Yes, anyone who meets the guidelines as set out in that letter would have the right to buy Greensun from Glen's heirs at the rate of $30,000. As I understand it, that would be $6,000 for Kat, minus the $2,000 she owes the community, for a total of $4,000."

  I would thank Carol later; now it was time to drive my point home. "You knew that we were almost there, Kat," I told my sister. "I'm actually surprised you left the community when you did, but maybe you didn't realize how Jacob's deer video went viral last week. We'll be in the black in no time." Jacob gave Kat a slow, smug smile that almost made me believe my lie—I hadn't checked in with him lately, so maybe the website was getting a lot more hits than I'd imagined.

  Kat looked shaken for a moment, but then she recovered. "You never were very good at bluffing, Thia," she told me, repeating the words she'd often said in a more pleasant tone during our card games. "There's one big problem with your line of reasoning. With me and Drew gone, you've only got two people in your little 'community,' and that's not nearly enough to meet Dad's requirements. It's time to give it up."