Red Kayak

by Priscilla Cummings

  “They’re lucky,” Dad noted.

  “Damn lucky!” Carl added.

  But the next thing we knew, the two sheriff’s deputies who had stood quietly at the side of the room all morning were putting handcuffs on my two friends! J.T.’s mother wasn’t even allowed to hug him good-bye. The deputy shook his head and gently pushed her arm away even though she was reaching out and calling his name.

  “Hey, wait—” I started.

  Mom and Dad grabbed my elbows and rushed me out into the hallway then. They got me a drink from the water-cooler, and I didn’t realize until I took the cup that my hands were shaking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A “For Sale” sign appeared at the end of the DiAngelos’ driveway a few days later. We’d already heard that they moved out. At least they were together, I thought. They were living in Virginia, someone told Mom at work. She also found out that Mrs. DiAngelo would have a baby girl in December.

  I still ride my bike by their place once in a while. You can’t see the house from the road, of course. But I met a real-estate guy coming out the driveway one day in a black BMW. He stopped to put down his window and say hi. I asked him did he have a buyer yet, and he said, no. So I asked him how the garden was doing. The one by the pool with the rocks and everything.

  He smirked. “No garden there anymore.”

  I had a terrible vision then of Mrs. DiAngelo angrily ripping up the butterfly bush and the flowers I’d planted and heaving them all over the fence.

  “She took it with her!” He laughed. “Dug up all those plants, that big purple one, the stones—everything.”

  “She did?” I guess my mouth hung open after I asked the question.

  “Weird, huh?” the guy asked me. “I mean, why not just plant another one? I’ll tell ya, I see a lot of strange things, but—”

  “No,” I stopped him. “It’s not weird. See, it was a butterfly garden. Last spring, we planted it—”

  I should have known he wouldn’t understand. But before I even had a chance to explain, the guy was buzzing his window up.

  Like I said earlier, it’s fall now and high school has started. I do my homework and dribble the basketball around. I walk over to the river’s edge with Tilly. In fact, on my way there just recently I noticed how the path J.T. and I had tramped down through the soybean field was mostly grown in now, and yet you could still see it, a narrow sandy line between my house and his.

  I think a lot about J.T. and Digger. I wonder if they’re actually cutting down trees and sleeping in tents at that forestry camp. I wonder if it’s cold at night and whether the bugs are bad, and what the food is like and how much they’ve changed.

  I don’t suppose I’ll ever hear from them again, but Mom says otherwise. Maybe. One day after school, over at the Food Lion in Centreville, I ran into Kate, and she said J.T. was going to write to me. She said he was doing okay, that her dad was still waiting for a new kidney, but that her mom had hired some help at the farm. Kate’s hair was up in little braids that were tied with green and white ribbons, my old middle-school colors. She had her field-hockey uniform on and a bag of hamburger rolls in her hand. I wanted to ask her more, but Kate said well, she probably ought to get going. I said, “Me, too.”

  She looked back, though. When Kate walked off, she looked back.

  Dad’s still crabbing, but only every other day. Been a bumper crop of crabs these past couple weeks, but it’s only because the crabs are on the move now, before winter sets in. Dad lined himself up a good bit of carpentry work for the winter and started in on it early. Still, he says he’ll haul out those crab pots again in the spring. I can only hope that I will, too.

  Evenings, Dad and I are building us a boat, a little day sailer. We drew up the plans on the kitchen table, then hammered the frames together and laid the keel last night. When it’s done, we’re going to name it for my mother—she doesn’t know it yet—and call it either the Miss Dee or the Miss DeeLight. I don’t know, probably not the latter. Dad said that it made her sound like a porno star or something. He really had me laughing over that one.

  I’m sure it’ll take us all winter to finish the project, but I look forward to the day we catch our first breeze and go sailing down the Corsica. With any luck, I’ll bet we could sail that little boat all the way down to Queenstown and back in one afternoon.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank the dedicated paramedics of the Annapolis Fire Department’s first platoon, especially Lieutenant David Colburn Jr., Lieutenant Larry A. Snyder, and Fire-fighter Gail Ann Drapeau, for letting me spend time with them. For their generous help with the legal aspects of this story, I wish to thank Cynthia M. Ferris, master of the juvenile court, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and Assistant State’s Attorney Michael Bergeson—as well as attorneys John Hill and Alan Friedman. A special thank-you to waterman Kenny Keen, who took me out on his boat, Long Shot; to Tony Everdell, biology teacher at Gunston Day School on the Corsica River; to Bill Goldsborough, senior scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation; and to John Flood, a local conservationist. Finally, I thank my neighbor, Derek Watridge; my sister, Janet Smith; family friend and boat-builder, Michael Shultz; crackerjack gardener, Barbara Dowling, for her butterfly facts; my always perceptive agent, Ann Tobias; my very thorough editor, Rosanne Lauer; my husband and first reader, John Frece; and my teenage children, William and Hannah, for the details they unwittingly provided.