A Summer of Sundays

I LIKE
the middle of brownies, and the center of a chocolate chip cookie. The gooey middle of a just-out-of-the-oven cinnamon roll is as close to heaven as you can get.

But being the middle child is no gooey-cinnamon-roll center, that’s for sure. And if someone tells you anything different, well, he’s either a grown-up who wants to make cooked broccoli sound oh-so-delicious or he’s a grown-up
and
he was an only child. And an only child has no idea what it’s like to be third in line for the bathroom.

But I do.

Being the third kid of six, stuffed in the middle, well, you get awful lost, especially when you’re a cookie-cutter cutout of all your siblings. Same muddy-water hair. Same brown eyes. Same little notch in my left ear. Just like all my brothers and sisters.

I’ve been called the “third of six,” the “third Fowler child,” and the “third girl.” I’ve also been called “May” (the
oldest), “Emma” (the second oldest), and even “Butters” (our dog). Then there’s the common, “You’re CJ’s sister,” or “Are you related to Bo?” or “Oh, you look just like your brother Henry.” I’ve been called all those names way more than Sunday Annika Fowler, which is the name my parents gave me almost twelve years ago.

But really, I answer to whatever. It’s much easier than waiting around until they figure out which one I am.

Yep, being the middle child is definitely not gooey delicious like cookies or brownies or cinnamon rolls. Being the middle is half in and half out, too young and too old.

Being the middle is being forgotten.

But this summer, all that was going to end.

ALL
nine of us—six kids, two adults, and one droopy-eared dog—stood by our big blue van, waiting for Dad to close up the packed trailer and start the car so we could begin the four-hour journey to the barely-there town of Alma.

Dad had been working there all summer long remodeling the library. Work had been pretty scarce for him, so he had to take whatever he could get, even if that meant moving away from us for a few months. He called every night and sent us pictures of the library as he put in new floors, windows, and trim. We sent him pictures of us right back. But seeing his face on a screen wasn’t the same. His empty seat at the dinner table and the lonely spot in the driveway where his truck was always parked felt like a big gray cloud hanging over us.

After a month and a half, he called Mom and told her that he couldn’t stand being away from us for one more second. Personally I found that hard to believe. But he
didn’t have to sleep in the same room with Emma or hear CJ talking about poop all day or listen to May whine about driving or watch over Henry, so maybe it was true.

“We’ll spend the end of summer together,” he’d said over the speakerphone. “And you can all help me get ready for the reopening of the library.”

May and Emma had whined and cried and pleaded to stay behind, then whined and cried and pleaded some more.

It hadn’t worked.

Me? I couldn’t wait to go to Alma and work on the library.

There wasn’t a place I could think of that was more magical than a building bursting with books and stories and words. A place where the quiet was so thick and warm it felt like a blanket. And who knew, maybe in a small town like Alma I’d stick out a little more.

CJ, Bo, and Henry were just as excited as me, except for a different reason: building a new fort. On the day we were leaving, I watched CJ stow away in his backpack: his walkie-talkies, a length of rope, a small shovel, duct tape, and the beginners carpenter set he’d bought at a garage sale the first week of summer. He’d built a too-small doghouse and an unfinished fence with it, changed the locks on the house, nailed a few windows shut, and now all the closet doorknobs fall off. I had watched as he put his
backpack—lumpy and obviously heavy—inside the trailer. From the looks of the laundry on his bedroom floor, he wasn’t planning on changing his underwear or socks very often.…

May trudged down to the car and gave one last try. “It’s summer vacation, and Mom is supposed to help me learn to drive. I’ll die if I don’t get my license this summer. It’s so not fair.”

“Well, as far as I can remember, May,” Dad said, tossing a pillow into the backseat, “they do have roads in Alma. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of ‘death by lack of license’ before. I think you’ll survive.”

“If you’re going to force me to go against my will, then I refuse to leave without this,” Emma said, setting her precious sewing machine and a box of supplies by the growing stack of suitcases. “But it looks like there’s hardly any room left.

Dad smiled and picked it up, slipping it in between the seats and giving the white plastic cover a quick pat. “Looks like it fits. Now tell your mom we’ll be ready to leave in an hour.”

Anxious to get on the road, I dragged one of the suitcases to the trailer, and Bo picked up a smaller one, lugging it after me. “Here you go, Dad,” I said.

He turned and smiled, taking the suitcases. “Wow, Bo, you sure are strong. Thanks for the help.”

“I helped, too,” I said, seeing as the suitcase I carried was twice as big and three times as heavy.

He tugged my ponytail. “I know, Sunday. But Bo’s a lot younger than you and he’s—” Dad glanced over at CJ, who was trying to secret something away in the car. “Oh no you don’t, CJ. You are not bringing that saw. Besides, I have all my tools there. I can cut a board for you.”

Mom walked up then, catching the end of the conversation. “Cut what? What saw? Do I even want to know?”

CJ sulked back to the house with the saw, and Dad waved off the incident. I wondered if he had gotten his fill of us already and was rethinking the whole plan.

But after stuffing suitcases, pillows, our dinner triangle, one dog, six kids, Mom, and anything else my siblings and I managed to cram into the trailer, Dad started up the van and we were off, chugging along down the highway.

Dad pulled off the interstate two hours later and stopped in front of a gas station. “All right, everyone, I need to check the trailer and fill up on gas. Be back to the car in five minutes. I’d like to get to Alma by mid afternoon.”

As my brothers and sisters filed into the convenience store to grab candy bars or gum or chips or drinks, I went to the single dirty bathroom outside of the gas station and waited in line. As I finally clicked the lock to the restroom
door, I heard my brothers and sisters talking, laughing, and arguing on their way back to the car, and I hoped that someone remembered that I liked Reese’s Pieces the best.