by Beth Vrabel
He sighed, flipping the wood around in his hand. I noticed he barely looked at his whittling. The wood was mostly covered in his hand. The knife just seemed to see on its own where it should dodge, where it should gauge. Mr. Hamlin shifted in his creaking chair. A bird called out over the water, and I pictured it swooping in and catching fish.
“Are there fish in there? If the lake is fake, I mean?” The water stretched so wide and long I couldn’t see the other shore. I could hear a motorboat in the distance. It seemed crazy to think this water hadn’t always been here, that water this deep and wide could’ve been put here by people.
“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Hamlin half-laughed. “They added fish same way they added water. By the truck-full. Toads, frogs, birds, all of ’em came along soon after.”
Mr. Hamlin said that when the lake was being filled, he already was a dad. He had held his wiggly baby in his arms, standing far back along the future shoreline as the trucks pulled in. They lined up around the land, the farmhouse still standing in the middle, where his grandfather had built it. One by one, each trucker pulled out a hose and sprayed fresh water onto the land. The water churned and spread, going from a puddle around the house until it lapped at the sides. Soon, the water seemed to suck down the farmhouse, gnawing up, up, up around its wooden sides. For a long time, only the peaked roof could be seen. By then, Mr. Hamlin said, he didn’t realize he was crying until his tears splashed against the baby’s sleeping head.
“I thought I had to have forgotten somethin’ in the house. I almost yelled at them to stop, to let me go back in, even though I knew I couldn’t.” Mr. Hamlin’s voice stayed steady and soft, like this was a bedtime story he had read aloud so many times he couldn’t be bothered making the various character voices anymore. I squeezed my eyes shut to picture it. “I knew better. We had combed through the house. Everything of value was packed up, waiting to be unpacked once our new house was built. Our new lakeshore house,” Mr. Hamlin chuckled.
That’s when he remembered, he said. The wall outside his old bedroom—where the nursery had been just a few days earlier. That’s where he had scrawled MIKE HAMLIN WAS HERE when he was seven. The knife had slipped and ended up stabbing his palm. “Still have the scar,” he said, holding up his hand. I pretended to see it.
He remembered, too, the spot on the edge of the brick hearth. That’s where he stepped every morning on the way to the kitchen. No real reason for stepping there. It just felt right when he did, not right when he didn’t.
The little herb garden on the patch of land just by the back door—that’s the only spot where he could still picture his mom, who had died when he was eleven. In his mind, she was moving among the raised bed with a small pair of scissors, humming while she thought of making her famous carrot and thyme soup.
He had wished he had taken the kitchen sink. It’s where his baby, the one he held in his arms as the water rose, had gotten his first bath. It’s where he had his first bath, too.
“All gone,” Mr. Hamlin said. “All at the bottom of this lake like a sunken treasure.”
This time, I was surprised to find myself crying. I scooted over and put my hand on Mr. Hamlin’s shoulder.
“Ah, stop blubbering,” he chuckled. “I got me a job at the Mill. Let the other twenty acres go farrow and became a paper man. That and this lake let me send that baby o’mine to college. Can you imagine it? That land never grew anything more than farmers. Never college kids. Never lawyers. Now my son helps people, defends them in court, makes sure there’s justice served. Wouldn’t have happened without this here lake.”
Mr. Hamlin looked up over the water. A small smile spread across his wrinkled tan cheeks. “My grandbaby, only fifteen but gonna graduate this year. College is next. Wants to own a farm, but one for horses and free-range chickens and pigs. Her daddy? He doesn’t want to hear it. He plans to sell the leftover land and settle me in a home.”
“A home? Don’t you have a home already?” I asked.
He smiled. “He means an old folks’ home, where I’ll get wheeled around, sponge bathed on Tuesdays, and have creamed carrots shoveled down my throat at every meal. No more whittling, no more young girls popping in out of the woods, no more nothing.”
“That sounds terrible!”
“I’m not doing it, don’t worry. He gets grouchier about it every year. Talks about how I fell on my hip last summer and no one knew I couldn’t get up for a day. He brings up my asthma, too.” Mr. Hamlin blew on the chunk of wood in his hand and chuckled.
I chewed my lip. “Maybe you could have someone check in on you?”
“My grandbaby, she checks in now and again. But her daddy and I don’t always see things eye to eye.”
“I’ll check on you,” I promised.
Mr. Hamlin laughed. “Gnome Girl, you remind me of Sarah, my grandbaby. Funny, isn’t it? She just wants to farm. All those brains. All those opportunities. And she just wants to have the rest of the old Hamlin land and work it again. Things go round, you know?”
He opened his palm to show me that lump of wood. Only now it was a top.
“Mr. Hamlin?” I asked as the laps of water ticked out a few minutes of silence. I pulled out an old reporter’s notebook of Mom’s—one that I found in the still-unpacked boxes outside her bedroom door—and a pencil from my backpack and flipped it to a blank page. “Can I write down your story?”
Mr. Hamlin chuckled. “You entering that contest, Gnome Girl?”
I nodded, my pencil already scribbling things about the lake and Mr. Hamlin’s house.
“Don’t know how my flooded house was a success, but you go ahead.”
Chapter Six
F or a long time, I sat by Mr. Hamlin’s feet and played with the wooden top on the dock. My mind spun along with the toy, trying to make sense of the sacrifice Mr. Hamlin had made by giving up his farm. I thought about how he didn’t realize how hard it would be to let go until it sank away. For some reason, it made me think of Mom.
Since Mom was a travel writer, I bet she could create a Sinkville contest entry in minutes, scouting out stories and pulling them together. Heck, she could probably do it with her eyes shut. (That idea sort of made me laugh out loud, making Mr. Hamlin shift in his creaky chair.) I should be working on the essay with her—after all, I had an expert right in my own house—instead of wandering around with a cane, leading a fat farting dog and talking to an old man with fake teeth.
The top whirled again. Was Mom really that same fearless reporter she once had been? She had traveled all over the world and it was no big deal. So moving to South Carolina shouldn’t have been, either, only it was. Going to the library made her exhausted. She hadn’t left her bedroom since. Why couldn’t she be strong for me? Why couldn’t she stop being so depressed?
“Mind goin’ over to the woods there about and g’ttin’ me another block of wood to work on?” Mr. Hamlin asked, scattering my thoughts.
He told me he wanted something interesting and small. He said I’d find something near the shore, where wood was softened by the water. “I’m not lookin’ to make anything special. Just want to keep my hands busy a while,” he said.
My cane tapped the debris along the water’s edge. I ignored the higher pitched taps of rocks. When I heard the quieter thud of the cane hitting wood, I bent down. A large pine branch had broken into pieces. I combed through the pieces on my hands and knees, piling a few beside me. Tooter, his leash dragging behind him, sniffed at the wood.
“Don’t you pee on these,” I warned him. I wasn’t sure exactly what Mr. Hamlin wanted, but they looked like they might be good for whittling.
I folded up the bottom of my shirt to cradle the wood and held it in place with my left arm. I held the cane in my right hand and zeroed in on Mr. Hamlin, who hadn’t stopped whistling since I stepped off the dock.
I had just stepped up onto the trail when Tooter growled softly toward the woods. Suddenly the branches in front of me split and out thrashed my brother. “James!” I
squealed.
“Alice?” He sounded shocked. His arm shot out to the side, the way Dad’s does when he brakes suddenly while driving. A girl pushed his arm aside and stepped forward. As she got closer, I saw it was Mr. Hamlin’s granddaughter.
“Hey!” she said. Now that she was closer, I could see she was holding a huge frog. “I know you. You’re the Williams Diner girl.”
“No, you’re the Williams Diner girl.” I smiled.
“You know her?” James asked, turning his head from the girl to me and back.
“I’m Alice,” I said. I put my hand out to shake. The girl shifted the frog to the other hand and shook my hand. Hers was cold and dirty.
“I’m Sarah,” she said. She didn’t even glance at my cane. I liked that about her.
I wasn’t sure, though, that I liked the look James gave her . . . or me.
“What are you doing here?” James asked.
I shrugged. “I got sick of the library so I decided to check out the lake.”
“Who’s with you?” James rushed forward, pushing back my sunhat and looking at my face. Then he ran his hand down my arms, pressing the white skin to make sure it wasn’t burned. It’s what Mom did whenever she worried I had gotten too much sun. Sunburns are a little tricky with me. Sometimes I don’t look red but my arms break out in hives later, like I’m allergic to the sun. But I had been sitting in Mr. Hamlin’s shade, so I wasn’t burned at all.
“I’m fine, James.” I pulled my arm back. “Got to get this wood back to Mr. Hamlin.”
I turned and walked toward the dock, fighting the urge to jump in the air a little.
Turns out, James spent less time at the lake than he did following Sarah around, at least according to Mr. Hamlin. Sarah had a thing for animals. Mr. Hamlin said she spent most of the summer going around catching frogs and watching birds. That is, when she wasn’t volunteering at Sinkville Animal Care, the local veterinary and animal rescue. His voice was different when he talked about Sarah. It reminded me of when I overheard Dad talking to other grown-ups about James scoring at basketball games.
We were now all sitting in rockers on Mr. Hamlin’s front porch. Once the sun was in the middle of the sky, it got too hot and too bright for the dock, so we had packed up and moved. Tooter lay beside me, staring suspiciously at the rocking chair and bristling a little every time it went back and then forward again.
After the lake swallowed Mr. Hamlin’s family farmhouse, he told me he had built a white bungalow with a wraparound porch. He rocked and carved on that porch, the chunks of wood I had gathered piled atop the pieces he already had stacked within hand’s reach by his chair. My rocking chair creaked three or four times for every steady groan emitting from his.
“What do you mean ‘he has it bad’?”
“Well, look at him.” Then Mr. Hamlin, without missing a beat, launched into describing how James was following at Sarah’s heels as she walked the borders of what was left of Hamlin’s farmland. “She’s looking at the land like its blooming. He’s looking at her the same way.”
I closed my eyes, imagining it. I felt myself smile. “What does it look like? The land when it’s a working farm?”
“Huh,” the old man said. “Working is the right word for it. That’s all I ever saw when it was mine. Nothing but weeds that needed pulling. Plots that needed plowing. Crops that needed harvesting. Nothing but work, work, work.” Creak, creak, creak from his chair. “But my papa? He saw nothing but possibilities, a circle of growth. He would stand on the porch and look over the growth like, well, like your brother is looking at my grandbaby.”
“He’s got it bad,” I echoed.
“Sure do.”
Much later, as the late afternoon sun stood just above the treetops surrounding the lake, James and I made our way home.
“What are you smiling about?” James smirked. I hadn’t even realized I was smiling until he said that. But once he did, I found I couldn’t stop. Finally I figured out what was making me so happy and it wasn’t just meeting Mr. Hamlin again.
“You found something you like about Sinkville,” I sing-songed. “Or at least someone you like. Ooo-la-la!”
“Shut up.” James’s cheeks flushed.
“It’s okay. You can like it here. I won’t tell.”
“Shut up,” James said again. His lips twitched like he was trying not to smile.
But with each step that took us closer to our Sinkville home, James’s face shuttered. Gone was the open face, soft eyes, and twitching lips of a boy maybe in love, and it was replaced with the slouching stance and bitter glares of my brother. As we reached the front door, his arm shot out, gripping me by the elbow. “Don’t tell Mom,” he said, his voice urgent.
“Tell her what?”
“About . . . you know.” His eyes darted so fast across my face that I would’ve sworn he was the one with nystagmus.
“Sarah?” I smiled at him. “I don’t think Mom would make fun of you. She’d be glad to know you’re happy. Ouch!”
James’s grip suddenly tightened. “No!” he said, but then he lowered his hand.
“James? James. Mom wants us to be happy. She told me.”
He shoved his hands through his hair, gripping the ends and shaking his head. “You don’t get it.”
“No,” I answered to his back as he shoved by me into the house. “I guess I don’t.”
Chapter Seven
Mom once told me that one of her travel assignments was to get “an insider’s guide” to boutique shopping in Paris. Mom knew she could go into any one of the shops lining the Champs-Élysées, tell the owner that she was a journalist, and soon be pampered like a queen. But she wanted to hold true to the insider’s aspect, to find out where a rich local woman would go and how she would be treated. So Mom sipped a fancy coffee at an outdoor bistro overlooking the paved footpath as wide as a road. She waited for the perfect example of a posh Parisian to pass by. She didn’t have to wait long.
Passing by on six-inch stilettos was a tall, thin woman. Her hair fell in perfect glossy waves down the middle of her back. She carried a purse slung over her shoulder that cost more than Mom’s transcontinental flight tickets. A small bag with tissue paper and the Cartier label swung from her manicured hand.
Mom trailed several feet behind the woman, making note of the stores she entered and those she skipped. When the woman turned off the main footpath, Mom quickened her step. A few moments later the woman emerged from an amazing perfumery. Mom jotted down the address, eager to check it out but not willing to lose her “insider.”
A few blocks and several boutiques later, Mom panicked. While she was scribbling notes about the last shop in her notebook, the woman disappeared! Mom turned in a slow circle, looking for the posh Parisian. Suddenly she heard a crass, “Hey! Hey, you!” in an angry Southern drawl.
Mom turned toward the yell and was face-to-face with the posh Parisian once more. “All of Paris,” (she pronounced it Pear-eee), “and you gotta follow me? You got a problem with ’Mericans?”
Soon Mom realized she had been following a stay-at-home mom from Georgia checking out the famous shopping boulevard for the first time. Even more ironic, the woman thought Mom was a Parisian.
“So much for an insider’s guide,” Mom had said at the end of her story.
For some reason, I recalled this whenever I tucked my Sinkville Success Stories notebook in my back pocket. Probably most kids’ contest essays would be on the paper mill or the town leaders. But maybe Sinkville’s best success stories weren’t so obvious.
One morning, James headed toward the lake and I inched toward the library doors with feet that felt weighted down like Mr. Hamlin’s drowned house. And not just because Tooter kept stopping to pee on each and every crack in the sidewalk. I swear, he peed more every day. The sun beat down on my sunhat and I felt my forehead bead with sweat. But I’d take two steps toward the library, then turn and take one step back toward the lake, even though my mind echoed with James’s hissed
warning that I needed to give him “some freaking space.” I guess I’d been spending a lot of time at the lake with Mr. Hamlin. I now had a gnome, a top, a rocking chair, and a boat sitting on top of my dresser. James seemed to think I was just spying on him and Sarah, though.
That was completely unfair. First of all, the obvious. Blind people aren’t known for their spy skills. Secondly, I liked that James was spending time with Sarah. The more time he spent with her, the less he concentrated on showing Dad that Sinkville stunk.
Sure, he was a complete jerk about pointing out the sunburn I had gotten yesterday. Mr. Hamlin was so into whittling that little boat—and doing such an awesome job of describing the real one in the distance he was using as inspiration—that I sort of ignored the fact that my skin was feeling a little bubbly. By the time we moved to the porch an hour later, my arms were pinker than Tooter’s tongue and just as bumpy. I had teeny tiny blisters all over. No big deal, really. But James must’ve pointed them out a half-dozen times at dinner.
“Did you know skin cancer is the fastest growing cancer among young people?” he had said, like he was talking about baseball scores. “So many people around here look like their skin is made of leather. And you know sun damage can never be reversed.”
His attempt failed, though. Dad didn’t jump up and start packing boxes. Mom didn’t cry for Seattle. In fact, she and Dad had a hushed conversation about a doctor’s appointment and an increase in medication. I thought at first they meant for me, but I soon figured out that Mom was talking about herself. It seemed to make both of them smile a little.
That night, Mom smeared my arms with aloe vera and made me promise to stay out of the sun the next day. “And wear your long-sleeve cotton dress,” she said.
I crinkled my nose and was about to say, “No way,” but then I had a better idea. “Okay. And you be sure to read the newspaper in the morning.”
She tilted her head at me, confused. But I had a plan of my own. I’d been getting up super early every morning and using my magnifier to read the part of the newspaper that had job postings. I started with just putting that section in front, but I had moved on to circling the listings that I thought she’d be great at doing, like dog grooming, delivering newspapers, and truck driving. There were even a few ads for freelance writing. I remembered what Dad had said about how going back to work stopped her depression when James was a baby and about how having a cause halted it when I was born. Maybe this would help now.
