The Forget-Me-Not Summer

by Leila Howland

  41. Big News

  That night, before dinner but after Lily had recounted how brave she’d been, Zinnie showed Marigold the play. They were sitting at the kitchen table, where Aunt Sunny had asked Zinnie to shell peas and Marigold to shuck corn. Aunt Sunny was placing a pot of boiling water on the stove, checking the chicken that was roasting in the oven, and humming. She said that a sea chat always put her in a glorious mood. Lily was playing with Benny on the mermaid rug. Zinnie handed Marigold her play, which was five handwritten pages held together with a blue paper clip, complete with a title page on which Zinnie had drawn a border of flowers.

  “How Forget-Me-Not Remembered,” Marigold said. She looked up. “Am I Forget-Me-Not?”

  “Of course,” Zinnie said.

  Marigold nodded and turned the page. Zinnie held her breath as she watched Marigold read. When she turned to page two, Marigold smiled. Zinnie wanted to ask her what line exactly was making her smile, but more than that, she wanted her to keep reading.

  The story Zinnie had come up with was personal, just as Dad had suggested. Forget-Me-Not was a flower growing smack-dab in the middle of a field of wildflowers. She was an ordinary flower. At least, she seemed so. She was simple and blue. She wasn’t ugly enough to be named Goatsbeard, like the flowers to her right. Nor was she beautiful enough to be called Ladies’ Tresses, like the flowers to her left. In fact, she was so ordinary that no one had ever bothered to name her.

  But then something happened. A butterfly told the flowers that their flower field was going to be paved over to build a supermarket. The flowers decided that one of them needed to volunteer to be cut by their friend the hummingbird, for when flowers were cut, they turned into fairies and were granted the powers of flight and human language. Some flowers needed to fly away, find people with hearts and imaginations, and explain that if their field was demolished and paved over, all the flowers would die. The problem was that once flowers became fairies, they could never go back to being flowers. The Ladies’ Tresses said that they were too beautiful and important to be cut down. The Goatsbeards were having too much fun to volunteer.

  Forget-Me-Not was the perfect candidate because no one would miss her if she were gone. So she volunteered to be cut down by the hummingbird. She sprouted her fairy wings and soared up into the blue, blue sky. She went on a great adventure. First she met a hilarious chicken named Gus. He was hoping to charm the supermarket owners into going vegan with his amazing dance moves. Along their journey, Gus made Forget-Me-Not laugh as he boogied his way into town. Finally Forget-Me-Not found a girl named Hope (this part would be played by Lily), whose parents were building the supermarket.

  With her newly acquired ability to speak the language of people, Forget-Me-Not persuaded Hope to come see how pretty the flowers were. Once Hope had set her eyes on the glorious field of wildflowers in full bloom, she convinced her parents not to raze it to build the supermarket. When Forget-Me-Not returned to the wildflowers to tell them all the good news, she also told them her stories about everything she’d seen. Even though Hope didn’t live very far away, Forget-Me-Not was still the only flower that had traveled beyond their patch of soil, and she regaled them with tales of the wider world. But of course the best part of the story was Gus.

  The other flowers couldn’t believe how funny that dancing chicken was or how entertaining Forget-Me-Not had turned out to be. “You are extraordinary,” they all said to Forget-Me-Not. “Why didn’t you tell us you were such a hot tamale?” the Ladies’ Tresses asked. “We’ll never be able to forget you now because you saved us!” the Goatsbeards added. Forget-Me-Not responded by telling them that she had always been like this. “You can call me and all the flowers who look like me Forget-Me-Not,” she said, “so that when you say the name, you’ll remember that everyone has something unforgettable inside.”

  Zinnie watched as her sister turned back to the cover page and read the play again. Zinnie had to sit on her hands, she was so excited. When Marigold finished reading it a second time, she sat up straight and took a deep breath. “I’m going to start memorizing my lines.”

  Marigold liked it!

  Just then there was a knock at the door. “Heavens, I wonder who that is,” Aunt Sunny said. “My hair’s a fright. Always is after a sea chat.” She combed her hair with her fingers, took off her apron, and went to answer the door. “Oh, well, if whoever it is thinks I’ve got bats in the attic, so be it.”

  “There are bats in the attic?” Lily asked, but Aunt Sunny had already turned the corner into the living room and was headed toward the front door.

  “It’s an expression,” Zinnie explained.

  “Girls,” Aunt Sunny called from the hallway, “Jean is here, and she has some news for you.”

  Marigold, Zinnie, and Lily ran to the door. Jean was standing in the doorway, looking like she was about to jump ten feet in the air.

  “I could’ve called, but I couldn’t stand it—I had to tell you in person,” Jean said, and bit her knuckle out of excitement.

  “What?” Zinnie asked. Jean looked like she was going to explode.

  “Mr. Rathbone is going to judge our contest,” she said, raising her hands in triumph.

  Marigold squealed. Lily clapped, though she wasn’t sure exactly what was happening. Zinnie stopped breathing. Philip Rathbone, the famous director, was going to personally see her play! Maybe he would want to make her play into a movie, too!

  “And . . . ,” Jean said.

  “There’s an and?” Marigold asked, flapping her hands like little wings.

  “And he’s going to be filming a portion of Night Sprites right here in Pruet! He said he would let the winner have a walk-on role.” The sisters grabbed hands and started jumping up and down. Jean turned to Aunt Sunny, who didn’t look nearly as happy as her nieces. “This is good for the local economy, Sunny. There’re going to be jobs, not to mention the tourism it will inspire. And my goodness, could we ever use a large donor to help us repair the casino. That roof is a liability.”

  “Does he have the correct permits?” Aunt Sunny asked.

  “Yes,” Jean said. “He crossed all of his ts and dotted his is. In fact, he said he would judge the contest so that he could get to know this community better. He understands he’s not that popular with all the natives.”

  “Is that what he called us?” Aunt Sunny asked, a hand on her hip. “The natives?”

  “That’s what I called us,” Jean said. She linked arms with her old friend and gazed at the sisters, who were still jumping up and down like popcorn in a bag. “Would you look at these three?” Aunt Sunny couldn’t help smiling.

  The oven timer went off.

  “Come on, girls,” Aunt Sunny said. “Even Hollywood starlets must eat. Jean, won’t you join us? The silver queen corn is sweet as candy this year.”

  42. Ceiling Stairs and Doll Tears

  Rehearsals began the very next day at Miss Melody’s School of Dance. As a Night Sprites fan herself, Miss Melody was happy to volunteer her studio. But they had to take the day off a few days later when a heat wave started. It was just too hot to do much of anything. Neither Miss Melody nor Aunt Sunny had air conditioning; hardly anyone in Pruet did. Aunt Sunny’s house seemed particularly hot. Even with all the fans in the house whirring like propellers, it seemed impossible to cool down, especially for someone with a wild head of hair like Zinnie’s, which she was certain trapped extra heat around her head. It got hot in Los Angeles, but it always cooled down at night. Not here. This was a different kind of heat: thick and sticky, even after the sun had set. Aunt Sunny hadn’t even bothered cooking dinner. It was too hot to turn on the oven, she said, so they ate tuna fish sandwiches and fruit salad. Now Marigold was doing the dishes (it was her turn), and Zinnie, Lily, and Aunt Sunny were finishing up their ice cream.

  “Where do you think I can find costumes for my play?” Zinnie asked Aunt Sunny.

  “I have lots of stuff up in the attic,” Aunt Sunny said, pointing to the cei
ling. “Old clothes, some ancient toys, relics from the past, all kinds of good things.”

  “Toys?” Lily asked as she picked up her bowl to lick it.

  “Can we go up right now?” Zinnie asked, placing her cold ice cream spoon on her warm forehead.

  “It’ll be hotter than hades!” Aunt Sunny said.

  “We’ll only stay ten minutes,” Zinnie said. “I promise. Please? Costumes really help the actors get into character.”

  “Ten minutes,” Aunt Sunny said. “I don’t want us to get heatstroke.”

  Three whole days had passed since Jean’s big announcement about Mr. Rathbone, and Zinnie had been thinking about her play pretty much nonstop. She thought about the play when she went to the town beach in the morning and to the library in the afternoon before rehearsal started. And she planned every rehearsal down to the minute. Zinnie had checked out a book about how to put on a play titled Seven Steps to Putting on a Play. The librarian had told her the book was meant for high school kids, but Zinnie assured her that she was an advanced reader and found a quiet table to do her research. Marigold didn’t mind hanging out at the library. For one thing, it was one of the only places in town that were air-conditioned. And for another, the girls had finally discovered the nook in the back that had computers with actual, modern, twenty-first-century Wi-Fi.

  They both wrote their parents emails full of updates about the play and Lily and her swimming lessons. Marigold had even emailed Jill Dreyfus about Mr. Rathbone, but when she received a quick reply stating that while she loved Marigold’s enthusiasm, the casting director for Night Sprites was “no longer auditioning young actresses” and to “have fun on vacation” and to “call when you’re back in town,” Marigold decided not to be too pushy. She didn’t want to mess up her relationship with her new agent. Besides, once Mr. Rathbone saw her onstage in Zinnie’s play, he’d find a part for her. She was sure.

  While Marigold emailed Pilar, telling her about her sailing adventures and how she was going to perform for Philip Rathbone, Zinnie studied her book. With the play only a week away, she wanted to see the big picture of what was ahead of her, so she decided that for now she would just read the chapter headings. She could check the book out and read the rest of it back at Aunt Sunny’s. According to the book, step one was finding a play. Step two was hiring a director. And step three was securing a date and location for the performance. Zinnie felt a jolt of confidence. She’d already taken care of the three first steps! The fourth step was choosing the actors, and she was almost done with that as well.

  Zinnie had cast herself as the narrator. She decided she would be dressed in black and read her lines from a stool off to the side. She had seen a production at the high school done this way and thought it had been very dramatic and effective. And of course Marigold was Forget-Me-Not. Lily played Hope. She had only two lines: “Greetings, fairy,” and “Mama and Papa, you must not build that supermarket or the enchanting flowers shall die!” Zinnie was a little worried about Lily’s being able to remember all that, but Aunt Sunny told her that she was just going to have to have faith.

  Luckily, Zinnie had convinced Miss Melody’s modern dance class to be the chorus of wildflowers, letting them flip coins for who got to be the Ladies’ Tresses, Hollyhocks, and Morning Glories and who got to be Goatsbeards. They had only a few lines, which she gave to the two bossiest girls, who were both named Sophie. Zinnie figured that it was important to have the bossy girls in her corner.

  The only problem was trying to find someone to play Gus, the dancing chicken, a role Zinnie was convinced was going to be a star maker. Marigold couldn’t do it because (a) she wouldn’t be caught dead playing a chicken onstage, let alone a dancing one, and (b) she was onstage at the same time as Gus, so it would be physically impossible. Lily could barely handle one role, let alone two. And none of the dancers would even consider it. Zinnie had asked every single one of them during rehearsals. They thought it was a funny part, but they had no interest in dancing for laughs. They danced only for applause. “If anyone’s going to do it,” tall Sophie said, “it’s going to be a boy.” Zinnie knew only one boy in Pruet, and that was Peter. She didn’t have a good feeling about his saying yes, so she’d sort of put casting Gus on hold while she’d moved on to step five, finding costumes. Step six was rehearsing the play, and step seven was performing it. She couldn’t exactly check those off her list in advance.

  “Stand clear!” Aunt Sunny said as she climbed up a step stool. Zinnie, Marigold, and Lily stepped back and watched as Aunt Sunny pulled a latch on the ceiling and lowered a set of stairs to the floor below. When Zinnie had begged Aunt Sunny for a trip to the attic just moments before, she hadn’t anticipated a secret ceiling staircase.

  “It’s like something from a book,” Zinnie said as she climbed the stairs to the attic, where the temperature was definitely warmer. She felt her hair expand an extra inch in the attic heat as she wondered what other clandestine features Aunt Sunny’s house might have. Was there a passageway behind a painting? A trapdoor in the kitchen? A tunnel under the vegetable garden?

  “Where are the old clothes?” Marigold asked as she stepped into the attic. “Do you have any cool vintage stuff?”

  “Are there any bats up there?” Lily asked, before she followed them up.

  “No bats. Watch your heads now,” Aunt Sunny said as she pulled a string to turn on a light and the girls filed past her into the small attic room. There were two tiny windows, one at each end, and Aunt Sunny promptly opened them both. The ceilings were so low and slanted that Aunt Sunny and Marigold could stand up straight only if they were in the middle of the room, where the ceiling peaked. Lily quickly spotted an old-fashioned doll with an elaborate dress, a porcelain face, and blond ringlets.

  “That was my mother’s,” Aunt Sunny said. “You may play with her if you like, but she’s very old, so you must be careful.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Lily said, cradling the doll in her arms. “Her hair is like mine.”

  “So it is,” Aunt Sunny said. “Marigold, why don’t you start with that wardrobe?”

  Marigold opened an old armoire and began to look through it.

  “She looks sad,” Lily said, staring at the doll. “I think she misses someone.”

  Zinnie thought the doll was more scary than sad with its unsmiling painted-on lips and jowly cheeks, but Lily wasn’t frightened. She began crooning one of Berta’s Spanish lullabies into her ear.

  “Aha,” Aunt Sunny said, lifting an old hatbox off a shelf. “These may come in handy. They’re from the days when teachers actually dressed up for work.”

  Zinnie opened the box to discover a collection of silk scarves. Immediately she knew they would make perfect costumes for the chorus of wildflowers. The Ladies’ Tresses, Hollyhocks, and Morning Glories could wear the pink and purple and red ones, and the Goatsbeards could wear the brown and gray and green ones. She wasn’t sure who would wear the mustard-yellow ones, of which Aunt Sunny seemed to have a surprising number.

  “Um, this is full of winter clothes,” Marigold said, holding up an old coat.

  “Check the drawers,” Aunt Sunny said.

  “This doll is really sad,” Lily said.

  “I think the singing is helping,” Aunt Sunny said.

  Lily began to sing the song their mother sang to them when they couldn’t get to sleep. “‘Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home,’” she sang.

  “Um, is mustard yellow your favorite color?” Zinnie asked, holding up no fewer than six Dijon-colored scarves.

  “Heavens, no, but it was all the rage in the seventies,” Aunt Sunny said, removing a long blue skirt from a wardrobe and holding it up in front of her. “What about this for Forget-Me-Not? It’s simple and plain and certainly blue.”

  “No!” Marigold said. “I mean, I think we should go for something more modern.”

  “We’d better keep looking,” Zinnie said, not wanting to upset her star. “But Marigold, I warned
you it has to be plain. That’s what’s in character for Forget-Me-Not!”

  Marigold started to protest, but the conversation stopped when they heard Lily softly crying.

  “Lily, what’s wrong?” Zinnie asked, turning around.

  “I want to go home,” Lily said. “I miss Mom and Dad! I miss Berta!”

  “Oh, Lily,” Aunt Sunny said, closing the chest she had been searching through and rushing over to Lily, “you will see them soon, I promise.”

  “It’s not the doll who’s sad, is it?” Marigold asked.

  “It’s me, too!” Lily said, clutching the doll. “It’s both of us!”

  “We’ll be home in a just a little more than week,” Zinnie said.

  “Is there anything that might make you feel better, dear?” Aunt Sunny asked.

  “Maybe some champurrado,” Lily said, wiping away a tear.

  “The Mexican hot chocolate,” Zinnie said to Aunt Sunny.

  “Isn’t it . . . a bit warm for that?” Sunny asked, dabbing her brow with a hankie. “It’s eighty-five degrees out. Perhaps ninety up here.”

  “It’s more of a Christmastime drink,” Marigold said. “Berta made it special for us before we left because she knew we were going away for so long.”

  “I could make fresh-squeezed lemonade,” Aunt Sunny offered.

  “It’s the only thing that might make me feel better,” Lily said, wiping her tears. “The only thing in the world!”

  “Then champurrado it is,” Aunt Sunny said.

  43. Champurrado and Shooting Stars

  They brought the doll downstairs so she wouldn’t be lonely anymore, opened all the doors and windows, turned the fans up to high, and went to work. Though it took the sisters almost ten minutes on Aunt Sunny’s old computer, they found a recipe for champurrado on the internet. Marigold tried to reach Mom and Dad in hopes that they could reassure Lily, but Mom’s phone went to voice mail immediately, and the person who answered the emergency landline in Big Sur said that Dad was up in the tree.