Summer of the Gypsy Moths

by Sara Pennypacker

  I felt there was something wrong with Angel’s reasoning, but I couldn’t see exactly what it was. That was Angel—I always felt like I was arguing the wrong thing with her. The thing next to the thing I was trying to argue about. But it was true that the state had been paying Louise, and that the point of the money was to take care of her—and me, too—which meant clothes and—

  It hit me so hard, my mouth actually watered. My conscience argued with my empty stomach. My empty stomach won. “Angel. Once, when my mom went away, she left me her credit card and told me to order pizza. I called. And they delivered.”

  Angel’s face lit up. “Genius!” Second time that week I’d been called that.

  “I don’t know, though. It’s not our card….”

  But Angel was already on the phone to Mama’s Pizzeria. “Pepperoni,” she said, and you could practically hear the drool in her voice.

  “With peppers,” I mouthed, remembering scurvy.

  “Make that two pizzas. One pepperoni and one pepperoni with peppers,” she said. “How fast can they come?” She listened for a minute. “Good. And two Cokes.”

  I held up my fingers.

  “Make that four Cokes,” she corrected.

  I held up my fingers again.

  “I mean ten Cokes. And make those pizzas large.”

  Friday night was a big night for the parents to go out to dinner—I guess after a week solid with their kids, they needed a different kind of vacation. Both Angel and I got hired—I took Sandpiper and Angel went over to Gull, where she sat for the other Katie.

  My Katie’s mother showed me dinner. Organic mac and cheese, carrot sticks, and mango applesauce. Angel and I had eaten leftover pizza for breakfast and lunch, but I was suddenly starving.

  “Katie’s only eating orange food this week,” Mrs. Sandpiper sighed. “There are some tangerines in the fridge. Or just mix ketchup and mustard and give it to her on anything nutritious you can think of. I’m running out of ideas. Daniel’s eating with Shawn next door. We’ll be back by ten.” Then she and Mr. Sandpiper left.

  I made dinner right away and ate my plateful of orange food. Katie ate one bite of everything, then climbed down from her chair.

  “You done?” I asked her.

  Katie Sandpiper stuck out her tongue. “I hate orange food.” I emptied her macaroni onto my plate, every last elbow. Then the carrot sticks. I scraped the pan out onto my plate, too, and scarfed it all down.

  “You eat a lot,” Katie said.

  “Tonight I do. You want anything else?”

  “Popsicles. Purple.”

  We took the Popsicles outside and sat on the steps of the little deck. A sliver of a moon hung just above the trees, shining just enough light to see the Mill River winding through the marsh. “Fireflies!” Katie hollered, and shot off the step, tossing her Popsicle into the bushes. Within minutes, the yard was full of kids. Katie Gull dragged Angel out. She ran off with Katie Sandpiper, and Angel came to sit beside me.

  She stuck her stomach out with a proud grin. “Two hamburgers. A giant bag of chips.”

  “Oh, meat!” I sighed with envy. I patted my own belly. “A whole box of macaroni and cheese. And I might not be done yet.”

  My Katie came over then, her hands cupped in front of her. “Close your eyes,” she ordered. I closed my eyes and felt the tickle of lightning bug feet on my right knee. I opened them and didn’t even have to fake my amazement for Katie—that tiny weightless thing, exploring the mountain of my knee so carefully. Katie sat down and watched with me. She leaned her head against my shoulder and was still, and then she leaped up again, as if I were the source of some energy and she had just recharged, and joined the bigger kids in freeze tag.

  I bent over the firefly and offered it my finger, which it delicately accepted. At the tip of my nail, it lit up.

  CHAPTER 21

  There were only two cottages to clean that second changeover, because both Sandpiper and Tern were two-week rentals. Like before, we ate whatever we wanted of the food we found and packed up the rest, which wasn’t much that time.

  I left Angel in Gull with her stack of linens, and I took Plover. An hour and a half later, I locked it up, all clean and ready.

  In Gull, I found Angel polishing the toaster. She waved her hands around the cottage with a hopeful look on her face. “Well?”

  I looked around. It wasn’t great, but it was good enough. I raised my fist, and Angel grinned and bumped it. We tucked the tip money into the Earl Grey tin, made two more babysitting cards and two more bouquets, and then we were ready.

  Both of the new families pulled in early, but Angel and I didn’t see any reason to make them wait. By two thirty in the afternoon, everybody had unpacked and gone off to the beach or miniature golf or whatever it was tourists did on vacation.

  I wandered over to my blueberries, expecting them to look really perked up by now. A couple of the bushes were, but it was as if someone had hit the pause button on most of them. Or maybe even rewind. They were looking crumpled and gray again, like they’d run out of juice.

  The panty hose-and-Crisco ties were still in place, but my blueberry bushes were dying again. Most of them, anyway.

  SAT: Stop, Access, Think. That’s what Heloise recommends doing when you’ve got a big problem.

  I crossed my arms over my head and looked up at the clear blue sky. Access means gather whatever you’ve got. Okay, year after year, these bushes had produced berries. But this year they were in big trouble. The only thing different about this year was the gypsy moths, so somehow, they were involved. Except I’d stopped them from eating the leaves. The only difference between the healthier-looking bushes and the sick ones was…It took me a while to see it. When I did, it didn’t seem to make sense: The healthy ones were clustered under the two pine trees—the others were all under oaks.

  Think. I turned my gaze from the oaks to the pines, and back again. And again and again. And finally I knew.

  I ran inside and up to Louise’s closet.

  Angel was right: There must have been a hundred dresses in there. Well, thirty or forty at least. I swept armload after armload off their hangers and heaped them on her bed. Then I tied them into a huge flowery bundle and lugged it back outside.

  It didn’t take nearly as long as the panty hose solution. As I tied the bright clothing to the oak branches, I imagined Louise watching. “I guess you’ve got the makings of a gardener after all,” I imagined her saying. Louise hadn’t been much of a smiler, and when she did it, it looked like it hurt her face, but I had her smile in my imagination anyway. It made her face look really pretty.

  I draped the last dress over a forked branch and tied off the sleeves, then looked over what I had done. The dresses floated above my blueberry bushes like huge tropical blossoms, drifting a light, fluttery shade over them. Suddenly I wished that just once I had seen Louise wear a single one of them. It would be nice if all this fluttering could remind me of her, maybe moving around her kitchen in the mornings. A puff of breeze filled the dress beside me; it emptied again with a rustling sigh and I thought, Well, that will do. Louise is breathing out here again.

  As I started down the ladder for the final time, I heard George’s pickup pull in. When he stepped out, I waved him over.

  “Laundry?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Gypsy moths again. The bushes under the oaks were dying because the gypsy moths ate all the oak leaves—look, see how the branches are almost bare? The blueberry bushes were getting more sun than they were used to. They have really shallow roots, so no matter how much I watered them, they were baking. I fixed it. I mean, Louise and I fixed it.”

  “Good thing,” George said. “Lots of folks in town waiting for her pies.”

  “I know that.” I smiled, remembering what Louise had told me on the day she’d died. “She said you’d walk a mile on your knees for a slice.”

  George raised his hands. “That is the truth. A mile over broken glass. In shorts!” He laug
hed. Then he looked serious. “Louise must be awfully pleased. Not that she’ll show it, a course.”

  I climbed up a few rungs of the ladder and sat so I was at George’s level. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, she’s such a Yankee. Never wants to let on what she’s feeling. You need a crowbar to pry a compliment out of her. I’ll bet she hasn’t come out and told you, but she must be awfully happy to have you around.”

  I suddenly felt a little wobbly, as if I might be about to fall. “I don’t know,” I said, gripping the ladder rails tighter. “Maybe she’s just happy about the money. Did she tell you about that? About how she gets paid to take care of me?” I held my breath.

  “You know about that?” George looked over at the house. When he looked back at me, I suddenly wished I hadn’t said anything. I didn’t want to know.

  “And you think that’s why she’s doing it?”

  My shoulders gave a small shrug. Maybe I did.

  George shook his head. “Apparently the state pays about six thousand dollars a year for each of you. Louise is saving it for you girls. Said it ought to be a tidy sum by the time you’re college age.” He looked over at the house and lowered his voice, as if he was afraid Louise could hear him. “Don’t you tell her I told you. She’ll have my hide.”

  Just then, the Sandpiper family pulled in. Katie shot over as soon as her dad sprang her from her car seat. I waved to him that I’d got her, then I scooped her up.

  She started in right away with a minute-by-minute report of the family’s visit to the fish pier. The report starred her, of course.

  I watched George as he listened, and thought how sad it was that he and his wife hadn’t had any kids. He looked so peaceful and happy, smiling down at Katie as if there was nothing in the whole world he wanted to do more than listen to her chatter.

  Then Katie asked me a question that startled him. “Is your mommy still in the garden?”

  “Your mother?” George asked me. “Is she visiting?”

  “She means Louise,” I explained. I hoisted Katie higher, so she could see over the hedge. “Nope, you can see she’s not there right now, kidlet.”

  The kitchen door opened and Angel hurried over, as if we were having a party she didn’t want to miss. The way I was feeling, we kind of were.

  “Stella’s mommy is always in the garden,” Katie told George. “Stella can’t get her out of the garden.”

  “That so?” George turned to me and then to Angel, looking relieved. “You know, for a while, I’ve been thinking…well, I don’t know what I’ve been thinking. But it’s good to know she’s getting out to the garden again. I’ll go in and talk to her. We’ve got some paperwork to go over.”

  “Oh, too bad, you just missed her. Off with the boyfriend again.” Angel rolled her eyes. Then she leaned in toward him like they were in on a secret. “You know, maybe it would be easier if you stayed away for a while. Just so she doesn’t feel…confused.”

  George took off his hat and ruffled the hair on the back of his head—he was the one who seemed confused. “Well,” he said a couple of times. “Well, they’re waiting for me back at the boat. And that grass isn’t going to—”

  “Mow itself, you know,” I chimed in with George. His eyebrows shot up, and then he laughed and shook his head.

  Angel walked with George as he headed for his truck. I set Katie on the ground, took her hand, and followed.

  “Sure,” I heard George say to Angel. “You run a boat, you have to have a survival suit for everyone in your crew. It’s regulation.”

  “Do you keep an extra, though? In case someone extra is on board sometime?”

  George looked down at Angel, and I could tell Louise had never told him about Angel’s father. “No,” he said. “I’ve got a three-man crew, and there’s me, so I’ve got four suits. I keep a life jacket for Treb here, but that’s it. Why?”

  “Well, maybe you should get another one. Just in case.”

  George shrugged. “They’re expensive, you know. I can think of a lot of things I should do with five hundred dollars before getting an extra survival suit. Like a new bilge pump. The crew’s down at the dock right now, working on it. I’ll bet there’s a thousand dollars’ worth of repairs coming up.” He turned around and pointed back to our house. “Or new gutters. Looks like I’ll have to hire someone this fall. It’s always something.”

  They’d reached the pickup. George banged down the tailgate.

  “You’d do that for Louise?” Angel asked. “Put new gutters on her house?”

  Angel turned to flash me a look—He’s even more in love with her than I’d thought! I waved Katie off to her mom, who was waiting on Sandpiper’s steps, and walked over to the pickup.

  “Her house?” George repeated. “Nah, that’s my house. Louise lives there in exchange for managing Linger Longer for me. The repair bills are all mine.” He pulled the mower out, and it hit the ground with a thud. “You girls take care, now.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “Well?” Angel asked, for the third or fourth or tenth time. She was wedged into her favorite spot on the counter, beside the refrigerator. “What are we going to do? Do we have to leave?”

  My chest still hurt as though I had been kicked in the heart, but I lifted my head off the table. “It’s all been for nothing. It was never her house.” I put my head back down into the cradle of my arms.

  Angel picked up the chicken and rooster salt and pepper shakers, made them kiss, then put them down, lining them up together on the same counter tile I always kept them on. The one Louise had always kept them on. “Okay, then.” She didn’t move off the counter, though—she just sat there staring at me for a long time.

  “All right. Me too,” I finally said, knowing what she was thinking. “I wish we could stay, too.” For so many reasons. Because of the blueberries. Because my mother had been here. Because we had worked so hard and because I hated quitting things. Because of George, and Katie and all the new families that were coming. Because of Angel. And Louise. “But…”

  “I know.” Angel glanced out the window to where George was mowing. “Are you going to tell him?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t say the word “yes” out loud.

  “Now?”

  I nodded again.

  Angel nodded, too. “Okay. Back to plan A, then. I’ll get my stuff.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “New Bedford. My aunt wrote. She’s there now, staying with a friend of a relative of a friend or something. I guess I’ll go there. Maybe hide out until she gets a place to live. I don’t know.” She slid off the counter. “But I’m not going into another home.”

  Angel pulled the Earl Grey tin off the shelf and counted out the money. “A hundred eighty-six,” she said. She counted out ninety-three dollars and laid it on the table in front of me.

  I picked up the money and tried to think of a single thing it would buy me. I gave it back to Angel. “Use it to get to your aunt. Don’t hitch,” I said. “That’s a rule, got it? And eat some fruit once in a while.”

  Angel smiled a little, then leaned over and hugged me hard. She stuffed the money into her pocket and turned to leave. “I know I should go out there and tell him with you,” she said, pausing at the doorway. “But I can’t.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  And then I went outside.

  George was starting on the little strip of grass beside Louise’s house. His house, I corrected myself. “I have to tell you something. It’s about Louise. It’s something bad,” I practiced as I walked over. I planted myself in his path, taking tiny sips of air in and out to steady myself.

  George leaned down and cut the mower. “Hey.”

  “I have to tell you something,” I said. And my voice was only a little shaky. “It’s about Louise.” Then I stopped—the new Mr. and Mrs. Gull were heading over from their cottage, swinging their toddler between them.

  �
�Do you happen to have a child safety gate here?” Mrs. Gull asked. “Please say yes. We each thought the other one packed it, and—”

  “I really thought you said you had it,” Mr. Gull cut in.

  “No, I remember you said you had it, I’m sure—”

  Mr. and Mrs. Gull kept breaking into each other’s sentences and laughing about how impossible it had been to pack with Trevor being mobile. The little boy tried to make a break for it, but Mr. Gull swept him up under his arm, still squirming. “This little guy is really motoring around these days. He’s into everything….”

  “Sorry, no,” George said. “The nearest shopping center is in Hyannis. But maybe you could try the hardware store here.”

  Mrs. Gull sighed, and Mr. Gull planted his little boy on his hip. They turned to leave.

  “Wait,” I said. “There are some adjustable screens in the shed—the old-fashioned kind you slide open to fit the window? Maybe one of those would work.”

  George and the Gulls followed me to the shed, but halfway there, George’s phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket to look at the number. “You go on ahead. I have to take this,” he said. “It’s the boat.”

  We found the screens and brought the cleanest one over to Gull’s front doorway and fitted it in place. It was a little short, but it would do. “Make sure he doesn’t chew on the top,” I said. “See how it’s a little rusty there? Maybe you could wrap a beach towel around it.”

  I left the Gulls installing a second screen across the back door to the deck, and headed back over to George. I had to finish it now, while we had a minute alone.

  George was just snapping his phone shut when I got there. “I have to go,” he said. “Emergency at the boat.”

  “The bilge pump?”

  “Yeah, but worse. Electrical fire. Johnny Baker’s in the emergency room with second-degree burns. I don’t know any more. I’ve got to go down there now, and I’ll be back…” He looked at the mower and then his watch. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. Did that screen do the trick?”