“It did,” I said.
“Good job. You know, you fit in here. You can think on your feet, and you don’t get too riled up. Louise must be so glad you’re here. And so am I. This year, I don’t know what I would have done if you weren’t here, with Louise laid up and all. Well, I’d better be off to the boat.”
“Don’t worry about anything here,” I said. I suddenly felt elated, like I could lift right off the ground. “We’ll take care of everything. You can count on us.”
George turned. “I know that. I always do.” Then he hurried into his truck. A cloud of dust and shells spat up as he spun away.
I ran back into our house. “Angel!” I yelled, pounding up the stairs, hoping I wasn’t too late.
She was there at the foot of her bed, folding T-shirts into crisp origami packets. “You told him?”
“Nope,” I said. “We can’t go. He needs us.”
The smile on Angel’s face got wider and wider as I explained. “He really needs us,” she agreed. “And it’s not like Louise is going to get any…”
“No. A little longer won’t make a difference to Louise.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Until he doesn’t need us, I guess.”
“Perfect,” Angel said.
I went outside and stood over the mower. I remembered that I’d seen George do three things to start it. I thumbed the rubber button on the top of the handle a bunch of times like he had, flipped the choke lever forward, and then leaned over and gave that starter cord the yank of its life. The mower roared up, startling a cloud of blue butterflies and a pair of crows and filling the air with the smell of gasoline. The smell of going somewhere I’d never been before.
I discovered I liked mowing. Seeing the lawn grow neater, stripe by stripe—as if I were ironing wide green ribbons with the mower—calmed me down the way cleaning did. It helped me see things clearly. And what I saw was this: It didn’t matter that my mom and I weren’t going to inherit this house. Louise hadn’t owned it either, and yet it was hers. It was hers because she kept it clean, because she had painted the cabinets yellow, because she baked pies in it and grew a garden beside it and tended those blueberry bushes. She’d tied herself to this place.
I’d been tying myself to this place too, and so it felt like mine. I’d been taking care of the cottages, and the blueberry patch, and the families who came to stay, and now here I was mowing the lawn. I’d tied myself to all of it.
And then something struck me—so obvious I couldn’t believe I’d missed it: The person George hired to replace Louise was going to have everything that mattered.
I knew who that person had to be. I just had to get her the job.
George called that night, and I was ready.
“Oh, right. Bingo. With Anita,” he said when I told him Louise wasn’t home. I didn’t disagree.
“When she gets back, you tell her I’ve got a big mess on my hands. I’ve got to tear out the fried wiring and replace it, then put in a new pump. Johnny Baker’s going to be fine, but I need to find someone to fill in for him for a week or two, train him to the gear…. I won’t be available much. I’ll send someone over to finish the mowing.”
“I already did it,” I said. “George, guess what? My mother’s coming here soon—”
“You did it? You mean you mowed the lawn?”
“Yep, but about my mother—”
“You got the mower started? You gotta be strong to do that. Don’t tell me you were wearing those flip-flops!”
“No. Sneakers.” I sighed. This was going to be trickier than I’d hoped.
“Boots are better. And long pants, always—the mower chips up stones and shells all the time. Tell me you wore long pants.”
“Shorts,” I admitted.
“Well,” he said. “As long as you’re all right. Next time, though: boots and long pants. And safety glasses—don’t want you to lose an eye. But thank you. You’re a one, Stella by Starlight. You’re a one. Oh, hey, I almost forgot. You wanted to tell me something about Louise.”
“Oh, I…it’s not important. Never mind. But George…you know, my mom’s going to be coming here pretty soon. By the end of the summer.”
“That so?”
From just those two words, I knew that Louise had told him some things about my mother, and that none of them were good.
“She used to be kind of flighty, I know, but she’s doing much better now. Really responsible.”
“That’s good. Well, thanks again for the mowing. You’re a one, all right.”
“Wait. It’s been tough, you know,” I said in a rush. “I mean, can you imagine? Losing your father when you’re little, then your mother, then not having a place to live….”
“I do think that’s tough,” he said slowly, as if he had to choose each word carefully. “I said so to Louise when she told me.”
“She told you how hard it’s been for my mom?” I hadn’t expected this.
“Your mom? No, she was talking about…”
There was a long silence, but I heard the word that George didn’t say. “Me?” My voice was so small, I almost didn’t recognize it. “What did Louise say about me?” I asked, bigger and louder.
I heard George sigh. “All right,” he said after another long pause. “Exact words. She said, ‘That girl doesn’t have a father or a mother or a home. She needs some taking care of, and I’m the one who’s meant to do it.’”
When I hung up with George, I went to my room, closed the door, and lay down on my bed. Everything Louise had told George was true—I didn’t have a father or a mother or a home right now—but it still didn’t seem to have much to do with me.
My home—my grandmother’s home—well, I used to miss that. A lot. But since coming to Louise’s, I hadn’t.
And I didn’t actually miss my parents.
My mother? All my life, she’d been coming and going. She’d be back soon, because the court told her to take those classes and get us a home. She always came back.
And I didn’t miss my father, because you can’t miss someone you don’t remember—I’d been only two when he left, and two-year-olds aren’t known for their great memories. My mother refused to talk about him, and I only found out the two things I knew about him—that he played the trombone and that he had named me—by accident.
I closed my eyes to replay the memory. A lady had come to visit my mother. I was fascinated with her fingernails—they were long and painted a silvery purple. My mother had shooed me inside and plopped me in front of the television, turned up loud, then joined the lady out on the porch, carrying a pitcher of something frosty and pink. I could still hear them laughing and talking over the program.
“So what do you hear from your trumpet player?” Silver Nails asked, and something in my four-year-old self knew to pay attention. I slipped over to the window and listened.
“Trombone player,” my mother said. “And wasn’t that just perfect? He thought he could slide in and out of my life, in and out like a trombone, leaving nothing but pretty music.”
“Does he ever try to see…” Somehow I knew Silver Nails was tilting her head inside, toward me.
“Uh-uh. I didn’t even tell him we were moving up here. Why bother? The limit of his fathering skills was naming her.”
“He named her? Oh, I wondered,” said Silver Nails.
“Some old-time song he knew. ‘Stella by Starlight.’ Said it was his favorite. I suppose it could have been worse—he also loved one called ‘Minnie the Moocher.’ Huh…Stella!” The way my mother said it that afternoon, my name felt like a slap to my cheek. “Stella is burdensome enough—I don’t think I could take having a kid named Minnie!” Then they clinked their glasses and howled like that was a good one.
I wasn’t laughing, though. I couldn’t have known what the word “burdensome” meant at four, but my heart hurt from it all the same.
Now, I sat up as it occurred to me: Katie Sandpiper was four—exactly the age I had b
een then. I got up and knelt by the window and looked down over the cottages. I tried to imagine Katie listening to her mother howling with laughter over her name, saying things like that about her father. Even when I pictured Katie in my old house instead of the perfect cottage below me, I couldn’t imagine it.
And then I realized something. These perfect cottages didn’t make the families happy. It was the other way around: The happy families made my cottages perfect. That was the magic.
I went back to my bed. I lay very still and called up my movie, because just then I really needed to picture my mother peaceful and happy to be home here with me. I closed my eyes and rolled it out: my mother coming into Louise’s kitchen, hanging her jacket over the chair and sighing. But a weird thing happened. My mother still wore the “I won the daughter lottery and I’m staying right where I am” smile, but this time, she was the one at the stove, and I was the one leaning in to see what was cooking. And the pot was full of orange food.
CHAPTER 23
“We eat relish,” Angel said from her perch on the counter Monday morning. “Relish and Froot Loops dust. It’s crazy that we’re so happy to be here.”
It wasn’t crazy, though. Now we belonged here, because George was counting on us, because he needed us. And maybe we were happy because somehow Angel and I had become friends.
“Do you ever wonder what it would be like if Louise hadn’t died?” I asked. “I mean, I wish she were still alive, of course. But if she hadn’t died, do you think you and I would still be…oil and water?”
“Maybe,” Angel said. “It’s too hard to think about, because everything is different now.”
I agreed. Everything was different now, and the difference was that it all felt right.
Except that we were starving.
In the afternoon, I tried the pizza trick again.
This time, Mama herself answered. I gave her the order, read her the card number, then told her our address.
“Pickup only. Delivery kid quit. Teenagers…hey, how old are you anyway?”
I hung up. When I told Angel what had happened, she leaped up as though it was exactly the news she’d been waiting for. She grabbed Louise’s car keys from the hook and jangled them in front of me. “Let’s go get that pizza.”
“Are you crazy?” I cried. “We’d be arrested in a minute.”
“No,” Angel insisted. “I’ve been practicing in the driveway. I’m really good now.”
“Even if you could drive, somebody would see a kid driving and call the police.”
Angel smiled. “Wait here.”
I had to laugh: Angel came back wearing one of Louise’s flowery blouses, and she had painted big red lips on. I stopped laughing when she tucked her hair up under Louise’s straw gardening hat. It could work.
“Well, you really can drive?” I said. “Show me.”
We got into the car and buckled up. Angel clicked the key into the ignition and the engine started smoothly, which I thought was a good sign. She looked over her shoulder before she backed up, which I thought was another good sign. She winked at me and stepped on the gas.
The car leaped. Forward into the privet hedge. We bucked to a stop.
“Cancel that idea,” I said. I went inside and sat at the kitchen table to think. Angel came in and hung up the key without a word. She pulled up a chair beside me.
“We can’t get to a store and we can’t order pizza and it’s five more days until changeover,” I said.
“Why isn’t there a restaurant around here? Why do we have to live in the middle of nowhere?”
“Well, actually, there is,” I said. “It’s on a side street near the beach.” I’d noticed the sign walking home one day and checked it out, hoping they’d have a Dumpster outside—restaurants threw out a lot of perfectly good food. The restaurant was in an old captain’s house. It had a widow’s walk and a wide porch and a whale weather-vane, but no Dumpster. “But it’s fancy.”
“We’ll change our clothes,” Angel said. She looked down at Louise’s blouse. “Or I can keep it on….”
I shook my head. “The menu was in a glass case outside. The cheapest thing is sixteen dollars.”
“Let’s go,” Angel said. “I’d pay sixteen dollars for a meal today.”
“It was a salad, Angel. Probably three bites of something you wouldn’t eat. Besides, a place like that isn’t going to let two kids come in without asking questions.”
And then I had an idea. “Do you know how to fish?”
I watched Angel’s face carefully, but she seemed all right with the word. “No,” she admitted. “But…how about clams? We could dig clams.”
We grabbed a wire basket from the shed, and twenty minutes later, Angel and I were out on the flats at the end of Mill River Beach with the regular clammers. Including the boy.
“Now what?” Angel asked.
“We do what they’re doing, I guess.” I got to my knees and started scooping sand with my hands, making a pile beside me, just like I’d seen the clammers do so many times. I dug and dug, but I never ran into a clam.
“You’re scaring them,” Angel said. “You should sneak up on them.”
I looked around. Nobody seemed to be sneaking up on anything. Clammer boy was sitting back on his heels, watching us. “We’re clamming,” I called over to him, my idiot mouth taking over. “We’re going to make chowder. For our family.”
Angel elbowed me to shut up, but it was no use—my blabber instinct had kicked in full power. “They’re waiting for us at home. Our family. Waiting for the clams. To make the chowder.”
Clammer boy got up and rinsed his hands in the water, then walked over to us. “These are the wrong clams.” He looked more closely at the heaps of sand around me. “Well, if you’d found any, they’d be the wrong clams.”
“What are you talking about, the wrong clams?” Angel asked, her hands on her hips, as if he’d insulted her.
“These are soft-shelled. Steamers. You want quahogs.” He waved at the inlet. “Over there.”
“Under the water?” Angel asked.
He nodded. “You need a rake.”
“No, we don’t,” Angel snapped. “Our family likes a special kind of chowder. Made with these clams. Can you just show us how to catch them?”
Clammer boy looked like he was about to set Angel straight about soft-shelled clams, but one look at her face convinced him that would be a bad idea. He dropped to his knees and forked his fingers into the wet sand. “Go in slow, so you don’t cut yourself on anything, then scoop out fast. There are plenty of holes here, which means plenty of clams. You just didn’t go deep enough.” He dug a hole the size of a basketball. “Now feel around for a smooth tip…. There’s one!” He tunneled his fingers in deeper and tugged out a gray-and-white oval clam. “Anything under two inches, put it back.”
“Great, got it!” said Angel. “We can do it now, thanks!”
He left, and I felt sad for a moment. Which was ridiculous. Then Angel and I got to work. It felt good to kneel in the wet, gritty sand and pull out clams. The sun was warm on my back through my shirt, and the sounds of gulls and waves wove themselves into a kind of song. I noticed Angel never looked up to gaze at the water the way I did, but on the other hand, she didn’t seem all that eager to leave. After maybe forty-five minutes, our basket was full of clams, and Angel and I were full of new hope.
“There was some cream left in Plover,” I said, walking back down the beach. “And onions in the garden. I really could make chowder.”
“Or fried clams,” Angel said, dreamily. “I love those. Jesus querido, we are saved!”
Halfway back, we came upon a flock of gulls sitting on a narrow bar of sand. “Angel,” I said, pointing. “That thing you did, where you lifted your arms…”
Angel nodded. “And they flew. My father taught me.”
“How do you do it?”
Angel shrugged. “I get as close as they’ll let me, then I pretend I’m one of them. And I think, ‘
Let’s fly,’ and I raise my wings.” She dropped her head. “Never mind—that sounds stupid. Just sneak up on them, then raise your arms.”
“Show me,” I asked.
Angel shook her head and took the basket of clams from me. “You.”
So very slowly, step by step, I walked through the shallows to the sandbar. One step up onto the bar, though, and the birds shifted. I stopped. The birds resettled. And then I spread my arms high, as if my hands suddenly needed to burst into flight. I thought to those birds, Let’s fly!
And they did! Just like when Angel had done it, all the gulls rose at once, their wings taking flight with my arms. I turned to grin at Angel.
She gave me a smile back, but it was half sad. “Every time I do it,” she said, “I’m always sort of disappointed I don’t fly up with them. That they leave me and I’m always stuck here on the ground.”
She laughed then, and we each took a side of the bucket’s handle and lifted our heavy dinner. We walked the rest of the way down the beach, talking about nothing much. It felt so good, I even made a joke about it. “Have you noticed we’re talking, Angel?” I said. “I saw something like this on an episode of Friends once.” And Angel even laughed at that, after she fake-punched my arm.
When we got to the stretch of sand next to the parking lot, we were still talking. Neither of us paid much attention to the man in the tan uniform who emerged from a van and walked toward us.
“Evening, girls.” He tapped a badge on his shirt pocket. “Shellfish warden. Looks like you’ve got yourself a nice mess of clams. Could I see your license?”
“License?” Angel and I asked together.
He nodded. “You need a shellfish license to take clams. Guess you’re not from around here, are you?”
“We live in Spring Valley,” Angel said. “Both of us. It’s in…New Jersey.”
“Well, tell your parents that here on Cape Cod you need a permit before you can go clamming.”
“Okay, we will. Thanks, officer.” Angel turned for the road.
Summer of the Gypsy Moths Page 13
