Umbrella Summer

by Lisa Graff

“From a book,” I said. Which reminded me of the thing I wanted to ask him. “Hey, Dr. Young? Do you have a dictionary I could borrow? This new book I’m reading has millions of long words in it I don’t know, so I want to look them up.”

  “Good for you, Annie,” he said, and he smiled big. “Which one would you like? Webster’s, Oxford English, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable? I have dozens.”

  I thought about that. “Just a real fat one, I think. The fattest one you have.”

  “I know exactly the one then,” he said. “Actually, it’s right”—he reached up above his head and opened a cupboard, where there were tons of cookbooks and phone books and pieces of paper mashed all together—“here. There you go. You think you can carry that home without any mishaps?”

  It really was big, the hugest dictionary I’d ever seen, and it must’ve weighed more than three watermelons. “Yep,” I said. “My bike has a basket. Thanks.”

  “Sure thing. So what’s this book you’re reading?”

  “The Everyday Guide to Preventing Illness,” I told him. “It has lots of good stuff in there. So I don’t get sick and die.”

  I thought Dr. Young would be proud of me for trying to be a good disease catcher, like he was. But when I looked up at him, he was frowning into his mug of coffee while he stirred it slowly with a spoon. “Annie,” he said after a while, “do you know what despondent means?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, then.” He rummaged around in a drawer until he found a piece of chalk, and then he wrote the word despondent on the word wall in big squiggly letters. Chalk dust fell to the ground as he crossed the t. He didn’t tell me what it meant. I think he wanted me to look it up in the dictionary. But I could tell by the dead-brother look he was giving me as he set the chalk on the counter that I didn’t want to.

  “Why don’t we go find Rebecca?” he said after a little bit. “I think she’s in the backyard with her mom.”

  I didn’t answer at first, just studied the black-and-white tiles on the kitchen floor. One of them was chipped, which I’d never noticed before. “Dr. Young?” I said.

  “Yes?” He picked up his coffee mug, his chalky fingers leaving marks on the handle.

  “If you’d been at the hospital that day, instead of that other doctor, I mean…” I smoothed my hands over my legs. My palms were sweatier than normal. I was going to have to check that one in the big green book when I got home to see if it was a symptom of any bad diseases. “Do you think you would’ve figured out about Jared’s heart?” I asked. “Do you think you could’ve fixed him?”

  “Oh, Annie,” Dr. Young said, and he set his mug back on the counter even though he hadn’t taken any sips. “I must have asked myself that very same question at least a hundred times.”

  But he didn’t tell me the answer, just stood there scratching his cheek.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  He took a deep breath, like he needed lots of air to help push out the words he was going to say. “I know the doctor who saw your brother that day. Dr. Amundsen. She’s a good friend of mine, actually, and an excellent doctor. Annie, what your brother had, an aortic dissection, it’s extremely uncommon, especially in someone his age. And if Dr. Amundsen didn’t figure it out, I don’t know that anyone could have.”

  “Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse. “But—”

  “The most important thing, however,” Dr. Young said, “is that you are healthy.” He picked up his coffee again and took a long sip, but his eyes were on me the whole time. “You know that, right, Annie?” he said after he was done swallowing his coffee sip. “You’re not going to get what Jared had. You’re perfectly healthy, inside and out.”

  I squeezed the dictionary closer to my chest. “Mmm,” I said.

  Dr. Young looked like he was going to say something else then, but before he got a chance, Rebecca came into the kitchen.

  “Hi, Annie!” she said when she saw me. Her two blond braids were falling down her back, same as always, and she was carrying her hamster’s cage, with all its neon pink and yellow crawling tubes sticking out everywhere. “I didn’t even know you were here.”

  “Yep.” I pointed to the hamster cage in her arms. “What are you doing with Fuzzby?”

  “Mom said I have to clean his cage because he’s looking peaked.”

  “Ooh!” Dr. Young said. “Peaked! Fabulous word.” And he scribbled it on the wall.

  I peered inside Fuzzby’s cage. “He’s sleeping,” I said. Fuzzby was always sleeping. He hardly ever did anything except every once in a while he’d squeak-squeak-squeak in his hamster wheel, and that was only when me and Rebecca were having sleepovers and were finally at the sleeping part.

  “Yeah,” Rebecca said. “Except normally he sleeps up top and now he’s right next to his food dish.”

  “Maybe he has seasonal affective disorder,” I told her. I’d read about that one that morning. “You can get it in the winter and it makes you real tired and sad.”

  Rebecca frowned. “But it’s the summer,” she said. “And he’s a hamster.”

  “Let me take a look,” Dr. Young said. He opened up the top part of the cage and scooped Fuzzby out with one hand. Fuzzby blinked his eyes open sleepy sleepy. He didn’t look too happy about being woken up.

  While Dr. Young examined Fuzzby, Rebecca took apart all the parts of the hamster cage and dumped out the wood chips at the bottom and then filled the sink with soapy water to dunk the hamster tubes in. I hated when Rebecca had to clean Fuzzby’s cage, because it took forever and it smelled disgusting, sick-sweet like fruit punch that spilled in the carpet a million years ago. But I decided I should be a good friend and help anyway. So I dug out the yellow rubber gloves from under the sink and gave one pair to Rebecca and put one pair on my own hands, and we got to cleaning.

  “Well?” Rebecca asked her dad while she scrubbed a tiny hamster poop off the squeak wheel. “Is he okay?”

  “I think he’s fine,” Dr. Young said. “But I’m no hamster expert. His breathing might be a little more shallow than normal. If he’s still looking lethargic tomorrow, we’ll take him to the vet, okay?”

  “Okay,” Rebecca said.

  Dr. Young put Fuzzby in a giant mixing bowl on the counter and picked up his mug again. “I’m going to go find your mother,” he said to Rebecca. “Annie, good luck with that book of yours.”

  I looked up from my suds. “Thanks,” I said.

  I thought he was going to leave the kitchen right then, but he didn’t. Instead he took a sip of his coffee, nodded his head at me, and said, “Not all words are helpful, you know.” Which I thought was pretty weird.

  “So guess what,” I told Rebecca once Dr. Young had left the kitchen with his coffee.

  “What?”

  “Someone’s moving into the haunted house.”

  “Really?” As soon as I said “haunted house,” Rebecca’s eyes got big as Ping-Pong balls. “Is it a ghost?”

  “Nah. It’s just an old lady. She doesn’t have a pit bull.” I rinsed off the last neon pink tube. “I think she’s moving in tomorrow.”

  “Man!” Rebecca said, taking her gloves off to start on the drying part. “How are we ever going to sneak into the yard to see inside if someone lives there?”

  Rebecca started thinking. I could tell that was what she was doing, because whenever Rebecca thought real hard, she chewed on the end of one of her braids. Her mom always braided her hair in two long pieces, every single day. Rebecca had real pretty hair, twice as long as mine and the exact same color as the split in the top of her mom’s loaf of fresh-baked bread. I know because we checked it. We tried to figure out what color my hair was once and it turned out it was the same as the dirt at the very bottom of Mr. L.’s compost pile. Which in my opinion was not nearly as nice a color as bread.

  Rebecca pulled her braid out of her mouth and said, “We’ve got to find a way to get in there and see the ghosts.”

  “I guess.”


  “But now if we break in, we’ll get caught for sure, with that old lady and everything.”

  I rubbed the bottom part of Fuzzby’s cage with a dish towel. I didn’t care so much about getting inside the haunted house, but I could tell Rebecca thought it’d be better than Disneyland in there. “Well, what if we didn’t break in?” I said. “What if we just”—an idea was starting to tingle at the sides of my brain—“visited?”

  Rebecca chewed some more, and then said, “But what would we visit her for? She’s an old lady.”

  “Well, maybe we could bring her something. Like a present. And then when she was opening it, we’d sneak inside and find all the ghosts.”

  “Yeah,” Rebecca said, and she was grinning now. “Yeah. And you know what we could bring her? A casserole.”

  “A casserole?”

  “That’s what Mrs. Harper brought us when we moved here.”

  “But I don’t know how to make casserole.”

  “Me neither.” Rebecca frowned.

  I tried to think some more while we dried, and Rebecca chewed faster than ever. But by the time we’d finished with Fuzzby’s cage, and all the tubes were clicked back into place, and we’d put a fresh layer of wood chips at the bottom and new food in the food bowl and water in the water bottle, we still hadn’t thought of anything. Rebecca stuck Fuzzby back inside and shrugged her shoulders at me.

  “You wanna ride bikes?” she asked. “We could do turtle tracks if you want. Maybe that’ll give us some good ideas.”

  “Sure,” I said. Turtle tracks was the game I made up three months ago, where you rode your bike as slow as possible without coming to a stop. It was the opposite of racing. Whoever took the longest to get to the finish line was the winner. So far the record was five minutes to get from Mrs. Harper’s petunia bed to my mailbox. We used to ride races all the time, and I could tell Rebecca liked that more, but I didn’t think racing was such a good idea. Because even with a helmet on, if you got going too fast, you could crash into a tree and get paralyzed. I read about it in the newspaper.

  “Great!” Rebecca said. “Let me just get my helmet.” She leaned over in front of Fuzzby’s cage so she was eye to eye with him and said, “Don’t worry, Fuzz. You’ll be just fine.” And then she picked up the cage and headed to her room.

  When Rebecca got back, I was staring at the word wall, that word despondent staring back at me. I didn’t like it.

  “I’m ready to go!” Rebecca hollered at me, her bike helmet already strapped to her head. For some reason she always talked super loud whenever she was wearing her bike helmet, even if I was standing right next to her.

  I lugged the dictionary off the counter and looked back at the word wall, trying to find the perfect shouting-out word. And then I found it.

  “Shish-kebab!” I said.

  “Shish-kebab!” Rebecca cried back. And we raced for the door.

  five

  When I woke up Sunday morning, there was a word rolling around in my brain, the word despondent, and for a second I couldn’t figure out where it came from. But then I remembered it was the dead-brother word Dr. Young had written up on his word wall. I wriggled out of bed and found the dictionary and plunked it open on the floor. You could tell just by looking inside that it was a Dr. Young dictionary, because there were squiggly notes all up and down the margins, and half the pages were marked with Post-its or tiny pieces of paper, and some words were highlighted and other ones were circled or had check marks next to them. It was like a word jungle in there, and you had to trek through all the scribbles to find the word you wanted.

  Des Moines, desperado, despise…Yep, there it was, despondent. “In low spirits from loss of hope or courage.” That’s what it said.

  I thumped the dictionary closed.

  Dr. Young was the one who’d told me I was perfectly healthy, inside and out, and now he was saying I was despondent? Well, he was wrong about that one too. I wasn’t despondent, I knew that. I was…I opened the dictionary up again just to make sure I had the right word, and finally I found it, outlined with a rectangle in dark blue ink. Cautious. “Attentive to potential problems or dangers.”

  I read the big green book for a while, learning about lots more diseases and sicknesses and stuff. When I went downstairs for breakfast, Dad was in the kitchen already, sitting at the table reading the paper.

  “Good morning, Moonbeam,” he said, shaking the fold part in the paper just a teeny bit so it stuck up straight. He took a sip of coffee, still reading.

  “Hi,” I said. Then I stood there in the doorway, frozen still like a Popsicle, to see if maybe he’d remember.

  It used to be, on Sundays, Dad and I would read the newspaper together, him sipping his coffee and me snuggled in close in the chair right next to him. We’d read the whole thing, front to back, even the stuff I didn’t always understand, like what the president said about China, and floods and stock markets and everything. We’d been doing it for as long as I could remember, since before I could read a single word myself. Every Sunday I’d come down to the kitchen early, still in my pajamas, and Dad would be there, already sipping his coffee. And he’d smile at me and say, “Good morning, Moonbeam. Care to read with me?” And I’d squeeze right up next to him with my cereal bowl, and we’d spend the whole morning reading. Sometimes I even helped him with the crossword, because he said I was his good luck charm for finishing.

  But we hadn’t done that since February, not once since Jared died. Every Sunday I’d wait and wait, but Dad only ever remembered the “Good morning, Moonbeam” part, and forgot the rest.

  Dad turned a page in the paper. “Got any fun plans today?” he asked, shaking the newspaper flat again.

  I just shrugged. “I might go to Rebecca’s when she’s back from church.”

  “Oh,” he said, eyeballs stuck like glue to his newspaper. “Well, that sounds fun.”

  “Yeah.”

  Maybe he didn’t forget the second part, I thought. Maybe he just didn’t feel like reading with me anymore.

  After I found the cereal I wanted in the cupboard, I opened up the bread box on the counter just to make sure my bread was in there. I’d saved half an old loaf of sandwich bread, and I’d told Mom and Dad about fifty times not to throw it away, but you never could be sure about things like that. I’d put it in there a week ago, and I was waiting for it to get good and stale, so we could feed it to the ducks on Tuesday, when we went to the Fourth of July picnic at the lake. We did that every year, feeding the ducks. You got five points if more than one duck went for your piece, and ten if one of them caught it in its mouth. Jared made that part up. I poked the bread through the bag. Good and stale, just the way the ducks liked it.

  Mom came into the kitchen and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “Hello, sweetie,” she said. Then she saw the box I was holding. “Annie Richards,” she said with a smile squished up in the corner of her mouth, “are you eating your father’s bran flakes for breakfast?” I nodded and she laughed, plopping a slice of nonstale bread into the toaster. “No Loco Cocoas today? I thought those were your favorite.”

  “Nah,” I said, getting out a bowl from the cupboard. “Anyway, it’s Cocoa Locos. And I’m watching my fiber. So I can prevent against colon cancer.” I poured in the milk.

  Mom sighed. “You realize that you absolutely do not need to be worrying about colon cancer at your age, don’t you? What even put that in your head?”

  “This new book I got,” I said, putting the milk back in the fridge. “It’s a real good one. It tells you all the things to watch out for.”

  Mom turned to look at Dad like he might have something to say about that, but he was busy reading the newspaper, not even listening at all. “Annie,” she said again in her Mom voice, all concern and wrinkles, “you know I don’t like you worrying so much. You are absolutely fine. Reading that book is only going to make you think you’re sick.”

  “But what if I really am, and just no one knows it yet?” I said
. “You thought Jared was fine too, until—”

  “Annie!” she said, and she sounded real mad. But then her face went back to normal so fast, I thought maybe I made the madness up. “Just eat your breakfast, all right?”

  So I sat down at the table across from Dad, with my cereal and a spoon. I thought about asking if we could get soy milk at the grocery store later, because the book had said that was healthier than regular, but then I saw Mom scrubbing at the stovetop with a sponge and I figured it was best not to ask her. When her bread popped up out of the toaster, she didn’t even bother to get it.

  After one bite of my cereal, I realized that bran flakes might be good for you, but they tasted worse than dog food. When I grew up, I was going to figure out a way to make Cocoa Locos the healthiest food on Earth. I mashed my cereal down the garbage disposal and grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl. Then I found my pencil with the star-shaped eraser and my old science notebook in the den, and I went outside to sit on the porch steps, careful to sit down in a spot that didn’t look too splintery.

  If there was one thing that big green book had made me realize, it was that I couldn’t wait any longer to make a will. Cholesterol, typhoid fever, ticks, rabies, lung cancer. There was tons of stuff that could get me, and I wasn’t even halfway through the book yet. Plus there were loads of things that weren’t even in there—nondisease things, like crashing airplanes and runaway zoo animals and earthquakes and falling off the monkey bars. And hockey pucks. You never knew what was going to get you, and you never knew when. Jared’s twelfth birthday was exactly one week away, and he hadn’t made it to that. So who knew how long I’d be around?

  I opened up my science notebook to a blank page in the back and propped it up against my knee. Then I peeled my banana and chewed it slow, one bite at a time, staring at the blue lines in my notebook and thinking about what I was going to put down there. And when I was all done eating, I had it. I licked the tip of my pencil, the way they did sometimes in movies, and I began to write.

  Annie Richards’s Will