Summer at Meadow Wood

by Amy Rebecca Tan

  “For the garden,” Vera said, and opened her hands to reveal two wet earthworms squiggling on top of each other. “For Earl.”

  “Worms?”

  “Lumbricus,” Vera said, then began her mini lecture on gardening science. “Earthworms are crucial for healthy soil construction. Their tunneling naturally tills the earth, creating air pockets and water space for plant roots. Earthworms also break down organic matter, fertilizing the soil so it’s easier for plants to thrive.”

  “So . . . they’re good for the garden,” I summarized.

  “They’re great for the garden!” she expounded.

  “Well, then, what are you waiting for?” I teased. “Get those babies in the ground.”

  Vera jogged over to the closest zucchini bed. “I can put them here where it’s shady and they’ll burrow down. Wanna see?”

  “Sure.”

  I crouched down next to her, and we watched the worms snake and slide and push and turn into the soil until they disappeared entirely.

  “I can get more,” Vera offered. “I bet I can find a ton under the cabin.”

  “I bet you can’t,” I challenged her.

  She grabbed a trowel, ran to the shaded side of the cabin, and started to joyfully hack at the ground.

  I returned to my weeding by the tomato plants but was immediately interrupted by Vera shouting, “Bingo!”

  She skipped to a different zucchini bed and gently placed two worms under a canopy of leaves, humming to herself as she watched them disappear into their damp, dark world. “Gardening is so much fun! Those tomatoes are part of the nightshade family. Did you know you get more nutrients from cooked tomatoes than you do from raw tomatoes? And these zucchinis are huge! My mom makes delicious zucchini bread. I usually eat it all summer long.”

  “We can send you home with a few zucchinis if you want, so your mom can bake for you,” I suggested.

  “Yes, please!” Vera ran back to the hole she’d made under the cabin. “I wish I was in senior camp so I could do farm all summer long. It’s better than the nature hut.”

  “If you hadn’t called me to Chicory that first week and made me miss sign-up, I wouldn’t have known about farm,” I told her. “So I owe you big-time.”

  “No, I owe you. You’ve been a superior camp sister. My canoe friend Jor—I mean my friend Jordyn’s camp sister borrowed her only sunscreen and never gave it back and now Jordyn has a burn on her shoulders that’s peeling and gross. You didn’t do anything like that.”

  “Most camp sisters don’t do anything like that.”

  “Well, I say you and me are even.” Then she shouted, “Another one!” and lifted a long tan worm up from the ground.

  “You are the worm whisperer, Vera.”

  She bowed. “You know, I was going to ask you if we could go to Rocky today, but I think I’d rather be here instead.”

  “To find worms?”

  “Yes, or to just sit here and look at all the plants.” She put her hands on her hips and took a deep breath. “It’s very relaxing, you know.”

  I rested my dirty hands on my hips the same way and breathed in the scent of earth and water and sun.

  “Yeah,” I said back. “It really is.”

  Day 50—Saturday

  Chieko shook me gently for the first time ever, rocking me awake in the dark while my bunkmates slept.

  I sat up in bed, bleary-eyed and confused. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Chieko answered quietly. “It’s market day. You have to get up.”

  I stared at her. “There’s no market.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “No, there isn’t. Earl’s in the—”

  “Shush,” Chieko cut me off. “You still have market. Hurry up. They’re waiting for you.” She pulled back my covers and swung my legs to the side of the bed in one motion. Then she pulled me to my feet and steered me toward the bathroom as if I were blindfolded.

  Which I kind of was, because I was still half-asleep.

  “Who’s waiting?” I stumbled along, rubbing my eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s what Earl would be doing right now if he could, right?” she half asked, half told me. “You can’t let all his hard work go to waste. Go sell his stuff. And take a minute to brush your nest of hair first, okay?”

  The thought of being at the farmers’ market without Earl filled me with sadness.

  “Go,” Chieko said, and gave me a push, then hurried back to her own bed.

  I went through the motions of getting dressed, brushing my teeth, and even fixing my hair, which meant I ran a comb through it before pulling it into a high, tight ponytail at the back of my head.

  When I was ready, I went to the counselor room and tried to explain it to her again. “There’s nothing to sell, Chieko. I didn’t pick much yesterday. I mostly watered and weeded all day. And it’s too late now.” I grabbed her wrist and turned it toward me so I could read her watch. “It’s after six.”

  “It’s already done,” she said.

  “What’s already done?”

  “The picking, or harvesting, whatever. They did it for you.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I demanded, now fully awake and fully confused.

  “Some guy and his cutie-pie son. Just go outside already.” She hunkered down lower in her bed and kicked me toward the door with her foot.

  When I stepped outside, the dawning sun gleamed its golden light into my eyes, and I swear I saw a vision of Angel standing on Meadow Wood ground before me. I blinked several times and looked down at the packed dirt to refocus my eyes. When I looked up again, Angel was still there, not a vision but the actual person, and he was walking toward me.

  “We heard. We’re really sorry,” he said.

  He was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt with the word PEACE printed across the chest. I kind of missed the Ramos Family Flowers apron. He pulled me in for a hug and my face rested for a perfect moment against his shoulder, the soft blue cotton and the smell of his skin as reassuring as a second chance.

  “We did our best in the garden and have it all packed. Brenda gave us the go-ahead,” Angel’s father said abruptly. “Truck’s ready to go if you are.”

  I was just about to thank him when we heard a high voice in the distance yell, “Wait! Vic! Wait for me!”

  We all turned toward the sound to find Vera running at us, her hands fisted and swinging like maracas.

  “Don’t leave!” she shouted, panting her way toward us, so light her feet made only the slightest sound each time they touched ground.

  Angel and his dad both looked at me with bewilderment on their faces.

  “Vera, what are you doing?” I bent down to her eye level once she stopped in front of me, panting for breath.

  “I want to go with you. I want to go to the market. Please take me,” she begged as she patted down her bedhead hair and straightened her rumpled nightshirt.

  “I don’t think I can. I’d need permission,” I told her.

  The door to Yarrow creaked open and Chieko appeared. “I can take care of that,” she informed us. “Just give me five.”

  An hour later we were all set up, our tables covered in the glory of Meadow Wood’s fresh August produce: green squash, red and yellow bell peppers, and tomatoes. The morning air smelled like ice water and the market was already busy, shoppers flowing up and down the aisle in a steady stream, pushing strollers and walking dogs, some singing along to songs pumping through earbuds.

  Angel’s dad napped in the truck while the three of us ran the stand, making change and bagging groceries and accepting warm wishes from the people who had heard about Earl’s heart attack. Every time his name was mentioned my eyes welled up a tiny bit, and even though Angel was busy bagging food or counting out fives and ones, he’d find a way to bump me lightly with his hip or his shoulder to let me know he was there.

  Vera single-handedly changed the name of the whole operation by shouting at every shopp
er, “Earl’s Produce, grown with love, picked by hand. Get your Earl’s Produce, here and only here!”

  And it worked, too. People couldn’t pass by a precocious seven-year-old with tangled hair and sleep still in her eyes. She made a ton of sales.

  She also made the most of the opportunity to discuss the health benefits of plant foods with customers. She told more people than I could count about “the common misconception that orange juice is the best way to get vitamin C when it is fully understood by nutritionists that red bell peppers provide more per unit.”

  As the hours passed and the sun grew higher and hotter, Angel peeled off his sweatshirt to reveal a Ramos Family Flowers T-shirt underneath.

  I watched Vera read it, then tap Angel on the arm to ask, “Are you a Ramos?”

  “I am,” he answered. “Angel William Ramos, at your service.”

  Vera stared at him. “Is William because you were named after the flower sweet William?”

  “Yes, exactly.” He broke into a grin. “My mom picked it.”

  “Where’s your flower stand?” Vera switched topics.

  “We didn’t set up today. We wanted to do this instead.” His eyes met mine and I felt a spark between us, a quick moment of something shared.

  “Your business can withstand a day without market income?” she inquired, her arms crossed in front of her chest like a tiny investment banker.

  Angel cracked a smile. “We’ll be okay,” he assured her.

  “What kind of flowers do you sell? Do you sell sweet Williams?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you sell chicory?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a member of the daisy family,” Vera said. “It’s an herbaceous plant. You can eat the leaves and you can use the roots to make coffee, non-caffeinated, which is an important alternative to have. You should consider it.”

  “Do you drink coffee?”

  “No,” she answered immediately. “I’m seven!”

  “It’s easy to forget that,” Angel replied, shooting me a look over Vera’s head.

  “What about yarrow?” she asked.

  “As a dried flower, sure. It’s great for cutting and drying.”

  “And then it keeps forever, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Vic is a Yarrow,” Vera said. “So, symbolically speaking, you could keep her forever.”

  “Vera,” I snapped at her, a blush exploding on my cheeks.

  Angel blushed, too.

  I quickly changed the subject. “What’s your top seller? Roses?”

  “Always roses.” Angel nodded. “Which I hate working with, ’cause of the thorns. But that’s what everyone wants.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said, feeling a wave of Chieko wisdom pass through me. “Roses are classic and thorns don’t lie.”

  “And a rose petal is meaningless without a thorn beside it. The beauty is in the contrast. One has no impact without the other.” Vera shared this insight like she was just listing what she ate for breakfast.

  “Are you, like, the smartest kid in the world?” Angel asked her, a look of awe on his face.

  “I highly doubt it,” she answered, “although I do like to think I’d give that kid a run for their money.”

  Angel and I cracked up and Vera raised her arms in question, like she couldn’t figure out what was so funny.

  I stopped laughing to sell three bell peppers to a woman with a baby strapped across her chest and then, as if on cue, my stomach grumbled like an animal trapped in a well.

  “Feeding time,” Angel declared. “I’ll be right back.”

  He returned ten minutes later with a bag of steaming doughnuts and a jug of peach cider. We pushed all the produce we had left to the front of the table like a wall and then sat in the folding chairs behind the stand. We poured paper cups full of cider almost too sweet to drink and took our time chewing our way through the warm cinnamon goodness of Hoefel’s special recipe, letting the cake melt in our mouths like a gift from the doughnut god.

  When the stand beside us began to pack up, we realized it was almost noon. They broke down their tent, folded up their table, and swept their space like a choreographed dance, but I wasn’t ready yet to go.

  I had Vera sitting on my left, her legs swinging aimlessly, still not long enough to reach the pavement but getting close. She was licking the sugar off her fingers while carefully observing the shoppers strolling by.

  I had Angel to my right, his legs stretched out in front of him, his feet planted on the ground. I watched him take another sip of his drink and realized how well we matched, as far as calloused hands and farmer tans and split-up parents were concerned. There was something special between us because of all we had in common, and it felt good knowing that no matter what happened after camp ended, we would always be connected that way.

  I imagined what the three of us looked like sitting in a row in the parking lot under the Meadow Wood tent—Angel with his piercing green eyes and crew cut next to me with my frizzy high ponytail and dirt-lined fingernails next to Vera with her doughnut-crumbed face and butterfly nightshirt tucked into shorts. We were as mixed and random as a meadow of wildflowers.

  Earl would have gotten a big kick out of it, I was sure.

  “Vic,” Angel said, and broke me out of my thoughts.

  He reached for my hand, his warm clasp familiar and soothing to me.

  He didn’t say anything else.

  He just held my hand and I held his back and we watched the market slow and empty until the lot was almost bare.

  Day 50—Saturday Evening

  I knocked on Brenda’s cabin door, a thick stack of cash in my hand and a small lump in my throat. I heard shuffling and footsteps and then the inner door opened. Her eyes looked puffy and her hair was down. I knew immediately that I had woken her up.

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were sleeping.”

  “It’s okay, I’m glad you knocked.” Brenda rubbed some of the tired off her face. “I didn’t mean to nod off but, well, it’s been an exhausting few days.”

  “I just wanted to give you this.” I held out my hand even though there was still a screen between us. “It’s from the market.”

  Brenda pushed open the screen door and pulled me to her in a big hug. “Thank you, dear.” When she let go, she said, “Come on in.”

  She placed the money on her desk and looked out the window to the garden. “Earl loves working the farm with you, Vic.”

  The lump in my throat doubled in size, and my eyes started that prickly feeling they get right before tears come.

  Brenda sighed and then smiled with every inch of her face. “He loves the garden and he loves the market. He’ll be so pleased you went today. I’ll tell him first thing.”

  Everything I was holding inside about the night of the social spilled out at once.

  “I’m so sorry, Brenda. It shouldn’t have happened. What if I was at the social? Maybe I could have stopped it. What if I’d stayed with Jordana? What if I saw those boys get into Earl’s cart? What if I—”

  “Stop,” Brenda cut me off. “I’ve got a whole closet full of what-ifs, Vic. You know what I can do with them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Absolutely nothing.” Her words dropped like a hammer.

  She paused for a moment, then continued, “What if is a waste of time. What now is the question we should be asking.” She lowered herself into the wooden rocking chair by the window. “That’s the question we can do something with. What now?”

  The room was quiet outside of the creak of the chair.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I don’t know, either,” she said, “but I’ll figure it out. There are three days of camp left. Then I have Holly and some kitchen staff staying to help close up. The last two weeks of August are for cleaning and maintenance and reminiscing about the season. Earl can only help with the reminiscing, I guess.” Brenda smiled.

  I scanned the worn f
loor, the frayed edges of the throw rug, the stains that were probably older than me. And an idea popped into my head. It was crazy, but I said it anyway. “Let me stay.”

  “What?”

  “Let me stay here, with you. If I don’t leave camp on Tuesday with everyone else, I could help with all the Earl jobs. And my brother, Freddy, could help, too, if you’d let him. He’s a really good worker for an eight-year-old.”

  “I don’t think so, Vic,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Freddy and I could live in Yarrow together and eat in the dining hall and we’d just go from cabin to cabin, or however you do it, and help you clean and pack things away.”

  “Not all the work is appropriate for kids.”

  “But some of it is,” I gambled. “And what about the garden? I know more about that than anyone. Someone has to take care of it.” I was gaining momentum, my plan growing the more I talked. “I could even get another Saturday in at the market. Maybe two, if you’ll drive me. It would help not to have all that food go to waste, ’cause you won’t have any campers to feed it to. Please? I want to help. I want to stay.”

  It would be like doing work to pull oneself out of the depths, I thought. Good, helpful, important work. It was one of the best things I had learned all summer.

  “You can ask your mom,” Brenda said. “I’d love your company, of course, and it’s a generous offer, but I doubt she’ll go for it.”

  “She’ll go for it.” I could convince my mom. She was the one who wanted Freddy and me gone in the first place. I was certain I could get another week or two out of her.

  “I can’t believe you just turned my words on me. What if your mom lets you stay? That’s a good what-if. That’s one I can do something with.”

  “I think there are a lot of good what-ifs out there,” I said.

  “Just don’t let me see a What If flag on the pole tomorrow morning, okay? I’ve had enough surprises.”

  “I didn’t even think of that. You’re thinking like an Aster,” I pointed out.

  “Dear, I was a camper for years before I was a director. And the camper in you . . .” She looked across the room at the bookshelf lined with Meadow Wood yearbooks. A soft smile spread across her face. “The camper in you never dies.”