The Great Peach Experiment 1

by Erin Soderberg Downing

  22

  KEEP ON TRUCKIN’

  Lucy wasn’t quite sure when the mutiny started. But she had noticed a major shift in her siblings’ attitudes as soon as they left Michigan.

  After Herb bid farewell to his mice, he was quiet for the rest of the day. Her sweet baby brother didn’t even want to read a chapter of The Penderwicks that night before bed. He just crawled under his covers and closed his eyes. When Lucy crouched over his sleeping bag to kiss his forehead, he didn’t roar or make funny faces or attempt a tickle surprise attack like he usually did. He just lay there quietly, pretending he was already asleep. She knew letting the mice go had been hard for him. He didn’t like to let anything go. She was surprised to realize how much Herb had grown up in the past few years, and even more so in the past few weeks.

  Freddy was grumpy, too. As they’d pulled out of Jackson, Michigan, heading southeast toward Columbus, Ohio, Freddy had reminded their dad—for the fourth time—that the World’s Largest Cherry Pie Pan (as well as the second largest cherry pie pan) was not far away in northern Michigan, and that those were two of the strange roadside attractions he’d been most looking forward to seeing along the way. In response, Dad had said, “Oh, Freddy, stop being silly. We just don’t have that kind of time. We can’t get sidetracked now, or this whole thing is going to crumble to pieces.”

  “But,” Freddy said, pleading, “you said we could stop and see weird stuff on the trip. That was supposed to be part of the fun—and it’s my goal. A giant pie pan is too cool and too perfect to miss. We’re already in Michigan; it can’t be that far out of the way!”

  Dad snapped, “End of discussion. We need to buckle down and focus on what matters. There’s been enough dillydallying.”

  In Lucy’s estimation, there had been almost no dilly-dallying, but who was she to judge? (If Dad had asked Lucy, she would have told him that he was the only one who’d done any real dillydallying, because he kept sneaking away from the food truck to check in with work. But he didn’t ask.)

  Then, on Tuesday morning, while they were finishing up all the pies they were hoping to sell at that day’s art fair, Lucy discovered they were out of whipped cream for the French silk and turtle pies. “Oh, well,” Freddy replied, shrugging one shoulder.

  “Oh, well?” Lucy asked, rattled by her brother’s bad-itude.

  “We’ll just get more tomorrow,” Freddy grumbled, hastily crossing French silk and turtle pie off their chalkboard menu.

  Lucy stared at him in disbelief. From day one, Freddy had been the Peach most committed to this venture. He had flung himself into this crazy idea feet-first, just like their mom would have done. Freddy was constantly brainstorming new pies to try, doing research by chatting with other food truck owners, figuring out clever new ways of drawing customers to the truck, and checking supply levels to make sure they never ran out of any key ingredients. But now, Freddy didn’t even seem to care that they were going to lose sales. They were still thousands of dollars away from reaching their goal, yet her brother seemed to have lost some of the Freddy “spark” that had gotten everyone fired up at the beginning of the trip.

  As a result, their first day at the art fair was utterly miserable. And by the second day, somehow each Peach was even more lackluster than the day before. When their first customer ordered a slice of apple crumb pie, Freddy unenthusiastically plopped a thick slab of the pie onto her plate and took the customer’s money without his usual bright smile. Moments after ambling away, the woman returned to the counter with a disgusted look on her face. “This is terrible!” she said, tossing the pie onto the service counter. “Awful!” the woman repeated. “Taste it.”

  Freddy shook his head. He held up his hands and said, “I’m pied out. I refuse.”

  So Lucy cut a bite-sized chunk out of the apple pie and popped it in her mouth. She spit it right back out. “Ew! Salt!” she wailed. Someone had obviously used salt instead of sugar in the apple pie filling, and it tasted absolutely horrible. Lucy secretly wondered if the salt topping had been an accident, or if—maybe—the ingredient switcheroo had been some form of sabotage by one of her brothers.

  By the third day of the art fair, business had slowed to a trickle. It was nearing one hundred degrees outside (which meant it was hotter inside the food truck, and even the fridge was struggling to keep cool), so the Peaches closed up shop early and returned to the campground. The four of them settled in around the picnic table at their campsite, sweating and mushy and miserable.

  “So tomorrow it’s on to Indianapolis,” Dad said, scanning Herb’s map. Herb had taken the map out of his mouse house after he’d freed his pals at Happy Campground.

  Dad’s finger traced their path across the map. “We’re all set to sell pies at the Indianapolis Motor Show, then we’ll head back this way for our grand finale: the big Food Truck Festival in Delaware, Ohio.”

  “Wait a sec,” Lucy said, looking at the map over her dad’s shoulder. She pointed and drew a line across the page with her finger. “We’re going from Columbus to Indianapolis and then basically back to just outside Columbus again? Isn’t that a little weird?”

  “That’s how the permits and schedule worked out,” Dad snapped, apparently unconcerned about the fact that they were about to spend five hot, extra hours driving in their enormous truck. “The schedule got a little messed up with our extra days in Michigan, and besides, it’s not that far out of the way.”

  Dad pulled off his hat, revealing a bright red mark encircling his forehead. “I’ve got to warn you,” he said with a deep sigh. “It’s going to be a hot couple of days in Indy. I checked the forecast this morning, and it looks like it’s going to be at least ninety-five, with eighty percent humidity.”

  Lucy could see that Herb was trying to hold back tears. Her brother had never done well in heat when he didn’t have some sort of water to cool off in, and the poor kid was bored stiff. He had no one to play with, now that his mice had moved on to greener pastures, and he never got to help with any of the baking. He spent his days playing with a LEGO set (building the same three things over and over again) or drawing with chalk outside the food truck. He’d also started working his way through Freddy’s math workbooks for fun.

  There was more than a week to go before the Ohio Food Truck Festival started, and Lucy wasn’t sure any one of them would make it that long.

  “So, tonight,” Dad said in a weary voice, “we have a lot to do. Herb, you’ll come to the store with me so you can cool off in the freezer aisle while we get some more supplies. Lucy, you can start making crusts for the motor show. Freddy, I need you to clean out the truck, and then—”

  “What about swimming?” Herb asked, interrupting. “I didn’t get to go in the water at all yesterday, and—”

  Dad cut him off before he could finish. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard Herb at all. Like he’d zoned out and disappeared—just the way he had, over and over again, after Mom died. “Lucy, I’m also going to need you to take another couple loads to the Laundromat, and then if you could get dinner started while—”

  “No,” Lucy said. The heat had obviously melted the last remnants of her patience, and she suddenly felt something inside her snap. “I’m not doing any of that. It’s hot, I’m tired, Herb wants to go swimming, and there’s no reason we need to do any of these chores right this second. What’s the rush?”

  “Lucy,” Dad said, his voice equally snappy, “must I remind you that this is a family experiment? The whole point of this summer was for us to build something new together, and work hard to succeed.” He huffed out a breath and ran a shaking, sweaty hand through his hair. “I refuse to fail at the Food Truck Festival. Failing isn’t an option. And as I’ve told you kids time and again, we can’t succeed if we’re not all doing our part.” He slapped his hat on the table. “If you don’t like the way something’s working, Lucy, perhaps it’s worth taking a closer look at your appro
ach to the process. You can propose a solution and we’ll analyze it, then—”

  “No!” Lucy growled. “This is your experiment, your adventure, and you’re the parent so it’s your job to fix it if something’s not working. I can’t do everything. You want to pretend that this food truck is going to fix us and make everything go back to the way it used to be? Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s not!”

  Dad opened his mouth, but no words came out. Freddy and Herb were staring at their sister like she’d suddenly grown an extra ear, right in the middle of her forehead.

  Lucy heaved a sigh, and all the words she’d been holding back for far too long spilled out of her. “Nothing has been the same since Mom died. It makes me sick that we’re pretending to have this big adventure in her honor, since she would absolutely hate the way you’re sucking the fun out of it!” She stood up and put her hands on her hips. “You’re spending this summer experimenting with the wrong thing, Dad. We’ve been wasting all this energy trying to get a stupid food truck up and running, but isn’t it more important that our family work first? We’re breaking down!”

  Her dad gaped at her. Her siblings’ mouths hung open. Lucy knew why: it wasn’t like her to lose her cool. She was usually tough, hard, and unsmooshable. But today she was hot and frustrated, and she just wanted to flop down in a hammock and read her book. Or better yet, do nothing at all!

  She was exhausted. And she missed her mom. She missed the way things used to be. If Mom were still alive, she would say: “Let’s go grab an ice cream cone and find a lake to cool off in,” or “Who’s up for a little Frisbee golf?” or even, “Great work today, kids, it’s fun doing this as a team.” But Dad didn’t say any of that. He never said any of that.

  Lucy quietly went on, “I wish you’d take a second to look at the big picture, instead of getting all bogged down in the stupid details of this so-called Great Peach Experiment. We’re your family; not an experiment. The point of this summer shouldn’t just be winning! This is my life, our summer break, and I hate that you’re messing with it. I just want everything to go back to the way it used to be.”

  “Lucy…,” Dad began, his voice soft. There was a very long pause, during which his mouth opened, closed, and then finally opened again. “I’m trying.”

  “Are you really?” Lucy huffed, her hands on her hips.

  “But, Lulu,” Dad went on, slowly, as though he couldn’t quite pull the words out of his brain. “We can never go back to exactly the way life used to be. I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s reality.”

  Lucy felt hot, messy tears crowding into the space behind her eyeballs. She refused to let them spill. Then Herb scooted over and wrapped his arms around her tightly. He gave her a sad smile and rubbed his cheek against hers, and suddenly, she couldn’t stop her tears from falling. Dad was right: nothing would ever be the same again. She had known this for a long time, but she’d refused to see it. She’d been trying so hard to cling to the life they’d once had, but it was time to figure out how to build a new family—just the four of them.

  The time had come to let go of what was, and accept what is. She swiped at her face and said, “If this is how it’s going to be, we need to make some changes.”

  Dad drew in a sharp breath. He looked at her, really looked at her in a way he hadn’t in a long time. Then he closed his eyes, shook his head, and said nothing.

  The kids all waited. The only sounds were the loud squeal and thunk of the campground’s bathroom door in the distance, the trilling of chickadees in a tree overhead, and the pop of gravel as a car drove slowly past their campsite.

  Lucy was the first to speak, after a long silence. “There need to be changes, Dad. We don’t have a choice.”

  He glanced up at her. His eyes were unfocused, as though he’d drifted off into his own world—again. But then, finally, he said, “You’re right.”

  “I am?” Lucy gasped.

  “She is?” Herb asked.

  “We can’t go to Indianapolis,” Dad said, dropping his chin into his hands. “I can’t do it.”

  “Did we lose our permit?” Freddy asked.

  “We need a break.” Dad stood up. “I’ve been trying so hard to create a fun adventure for us. I just wanted to succeed at something, to show that we have what it takes—just the four of us—to function as a family. But simply chasing Mom’s old dreams isn’t the thing that’s going to bring us together. Lucy’s right: this isn’t the solution.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I don’t want to let you kids down by giving up on our goal, but I seriously think we need to come up with a new plan.”

  Lucy cringed. She waited, wondering what “new plan” her dad would spout out next. At least chasing Mom’s dream involved some element of whimsy and fun. Dad seemed to have lost his ability to have fun.

  “What do you say we hit the road?” Dad said after a long pause. “Bail on the Peach Pie Truck and have some fun—a new way.”

  “What about the Food Truck Festival?” Freddy asked. “What about winning? We can’t just quit. You said you don’t like to fail, Dad? Well, I don’t quit. Mom wouldn’t quit. We’ve put in all this work, and I’m not going to let us give up completely.”

  “We can come back for the festival, if that’s what we all decide we want to do,” Dad said, nodding. “But we have a week before it starts, and a little more fun money to burn, so why not make the most of it? Another week of hard work and practice isn’t going to make or break us at the festival. I haven’t been to the beach in North Carolina since I was a kid. We’re halfway there. Let’s pack up our stuff and go.”

  “To North Carolina?” Lucy asked. “To the beach?”

  “To North Carolina!” Dad cried. Then he galloped around the table, waving his hat in the air like a full-on fool.

  From the Sketchbook of Freddy Peach:

  CRAZY CORN

  We didn’t stop a lot on the way from Ohio to North Carolina (it’s a LONG drive), but we did see a couple cool things. There’s this field in Dublin, Ohio, that is jam-packed with more than 100 giant cement corncobs. They’re each more than six feet tall.

  And how’s THIS for odd? On the way through West Virginia, Dad surprised me by stopping in a town called Odd! That’s the name: ODD! I’m pretty sure we almost careened off the road a few times on the way there, since Dad had to navigate the food truck through these narrow, winding mountain passes. It was SUPER beautiful, but also SUPER terrifying.

  23

  PEACH ON THE BEACH

  The Peaches arrived in North Carolina very late, nearly midnight. They set up their tents in a small, rugged campground a few miles from Carolina Beach.

  The next morning, when Lucy came back to their site from the campground bathroom, she found her dad packing up the truck. He looked like he was preparing to hit the road again. Lucy had known this change in plans had to be too good to be true, and now, it seemed, she’d been right again. “Are we leaving?” she asked.

  “Yep,” her dad said, securing all their food inside cabinets, the way they had to do before they drove anywhere. “We’ve got big plans, kid.”

  Lucy nodded, resigned to the fact that her father was simply incapable of doing nothing. It was obviously time for her to just accept who he was and adapt. “Where to now?”

  Dad winked at her. Lucy took a step back. She had never, in all her life, seen her dad wink. To be honest, it was more of a squinty-blink, but she was pretty sure he’d been going for an actual wink. “To our beach house.”

  Lucy’s eyebrows shot up. “Beach house?”

  “Yep.”

  “For real?”

  “I’m tired of living out of this truck and tents,” Dad said. “We have some of Mom’s fun money left over, and you’ve all been working really hard. We deserve to splurge a little. So I found a nice house that’s available to rent for the next few nights. It’s nothing
fancy, but it’s right on Kure Beach. That’s not too far from here. It’s near the spot I used to stay with my cousins, Aunt Lucinda, and Uncle Martin when I was a kid.”

  Lucy stepped forward and wrapped her dad in a huge hug.

  “I hope that’s okay?” Dad asked, his voice teasing. “Think Mom would mind me using a little of her invention money to spend a few days relaxing with you kids?”

  “I don’t think she’d mind at all,” Lucy said. As she hugged her dad tight, she felt something inside herself unravel for the first time since their mom had died. “In fact, I’m pretty sure this would make her very happy.”

  * * *

  A few hours later, they pulled up to a two-story house on stilts that was painted a crazy teal color. They parked the food truck in the driveway at the back of the house, then made their way around the side to a wooden staircase that led up to the door.

  Inside, the house was bright and airy, and there were enough bedrooms that everyone got their very own space. It was Lucy’s own little slice of heaven. “So, what’s the plan for today?” she asked, after she’d unloaded her things into the neat little chest of drawers in her borrowed bedroom.

  “Nothing,” Dad said.

  “Nothing?” Lucy repeated.

  “I have nothing planned and that’s the plan,” Dad repeated. “I figure we can walk down to the beach, test out the waves, and then figure out what sounds good for dinner later.”

  As far as Lucy was concerned, this no-plan plan was too good to be true. She’d never been much of a do-nothing kind of girl, but at the moment, a few days of doing nothing sounded perfect. She still had fourteen books left to read on the seventh-grade summer reading list, and she was hoping she might have some time to sink into a few of them here at the beach. But if she didn’t finish them all before the trip was over, she had decided that was totally okay, too.