Fifteenth Summer (20 page)

I nodded.

But every time Josh brought his paddle forward, mine seemed to go backward. And vice versa.

And then somehow I was paddling twice as fast as he was, but when he sped up, I slowed down.

The upshot was that our rowboat was spinning around in circles, and I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t row anymore.

“I hate to say this,” Josh gasped between laughs, “but I think you have no future as a coxswain.”

“
Now
do I get to read my book?” I joked. I stood up to turn around so I could settle back into my nice waterproof nest.

But the boat was still twirling a bit. So Josh, trying to be helpful, dug an oar into the water to stop it.

Which tossed me off balance, and well, you can guess what happened next.

Splash!

It took Josh about two seconds to jump in after me.

“Are you okay?” he cried.

My feet found the bottom of the pond, and I stood up. The water only reached my shoulders.

“I think I’ll make it!” I replied, laughing as I wiped water off my face. “I’m not even ruining any clothes.”

I reached down and peeled my soaked cover-up over my head and tossed it into the boat.

“But thanks for coming to my rescue,” I said, giving Josh a light kiss on the lips.

“Anytime,” Josh said, giving me a bigger kiss in return.

I turned to float on my back. My fingertips grazed his torso as I fluttered my hand to keep myself balanced.

“It’s so peaceful in here,” I said. “So different from the big lake. I could stay out here forever.”

Josh said something, but with my ears underwater, it was garbled. I splashed myself back to a standing position.

“What was that?” I asked.

Josh looked down at the water for a moment, pensive, “I said ‘I wish you would.’ ”

My easy smirk faded.

“When do you leave again?” Josh asked.

Automatically I waved my hand—a
Not for forever
gesture. Because that’s how this summer had seemed for so long—like an endless stretch of days, each longer and hotter and lazier than the last. The ending felt so distant, I’d stopped believing it would ever arrive.

But now that Josh had asked me to think in terms of the calendar, my eyes widened.

“We leave the third week of August,” I said. “We’ve got to give Hannah time to get home and pack and fly back out for school in September.”

Josh looked down at the water. Our hands flittered back and forth beneath the surface, keeping us upright.

“That’s about a month away,” he said.

“A month,” I said. My voice sounded craggy suddenly.

“Well, that’s better than weeks,” Josh said, and I could tell he was adding brightness to his words, the way my mom perked up faded fabric in her quilt by edging it with sunshine-yellow thread.

“
Much
better than days,” I added.

It didn’t feel quite real that these rowboat, beach, and blueberry days . . . were going to end. That my life was going to go back to slamming locker doors, and spiral-bound notebooks, and babysitting, instead of slinging mayonnaise and reading nothing but novels. And being with Josh.

It didn’t seem real, and yet, when Josh pulled me to him, there was a new urgency in the way we kissed.

I let my hands linger on his bare shoulders, trying to memorize all his curves and angles.

He lifted a hand to smooth back my hair and sent water trickling down my face. It felt like tears.

I let my feet leave the soft, loamy mud at the bottom of the pond so that I was afloat, held in place only by Josh’s arm around my waist.

And we kissed as if we had all day. If we pretended the day was endless, then a month was nothing to fear.

S
uddenly signs of summer ending were everywhere. The days were getting hotter, but they were also getting shorter.

My dad started working less as his clients got ready to make the “great migration” to their August vacations. And Hannah started taking long afternoon naps, as if she wanted to cram in as much sleep as she could before she started pulling all-nighters at U of C.

Finally, on a day when she knew I wasn’t working at the Mels, my mom pulled the stack of tin buckets out of the hall closet.

The buckets meant blueberry picking. And blueberry picking meant—inescapably—that it was the last week in July.

This was the week we always went picking when we were in Bluepointe, because it fell right before the berry season peaked and the orchards got crowded. Late July was also when the berries were still small and tart. None of us could stand a super-ripe, sweet, squishy blueberry. It must have been genetic.

“Mom,” I said as she clanked the stack of buckets onto the kitchen table. “Is it okay if I invite Josh to go picking with us? I’m working the next few days, and I’d really like to hang out with him.”

My mom frowned and glanced at the other end of the table, which had pretty much been permanently overtaken by her baby quilt.

“I don’t know, honey,” she said. “We’ve always gone with just us.”

I followed her gaze to the quilt top. It was really starting to take shape, with cone-shaped swatches of fabric making a shell-like spiral in the center, framed by small squares. It was amazing, but I knew I didn’t see in it what my mother saw. She looked at it and was carried back to the powdery smell of our baby heads, and the satin feeling of our baby skin, our fuzzy never-cut hair, and our mouths that looked like little rosebuds.

I just saw a bunch of cute old onesies.

“Listen,” I said, “if you want, I won’t invite him. But . . . everything’s different this summer anyway.”

Mom’s eyes got glassy for the first time in a while—at least that I’d seen. I felt guilty.

But I also wanted her to say yes.

She nodded slowly and said, “See if he wants to come. Tell Hannah she can ask Liam, too, if she wants.”

Abbie had just walked into the kitchen to pull a snack out of the fridge when Mom made that proposal. She snorted.

“I can guarantee Fast—I mean Liam—doesn’t want to go on a family berry-picking outing with us,” Abbie said. “He prefers to see Hannah alone. At night. Where nobody can see anybody’s
necks
.”

“Abbie!” I growled, looking shiftily at Mom.

My mom rolled her eyes.

“Do you think I didn’t see that hickey on Hannah’s neck?” she asked us. “And did you think I didn’t already have a discussion with her about it? Please. Always remember”—she looked
straight at me then, and her eyes did
not
look glassy anymore. Instead they were her steely
Don’t mess with me, I’m a teacher
eyes—“there’s not much about you girls that I don’t know.”

I think she did know how I felt about Josh—which was why she’d said he could come blueberry picking with us. I flashed a grateful smile and trotted toward my room to start getting ready while I called him.

Before I could finish dialing, though, my phone rang! I didn’t even check to see if it was Josh.

“Hiiiii,” I crooned into the phone.

“Chelsea? You sound weird.”

“Emma!” I blurted with a laugh. “Um, I thought you were—”

“Josh?” Emma said. “Wow. So things are good, huh?”

I could tell by the flat tone of her voice that she had not called me—at six a.m. California time!—to dish about my boyfriend.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, flicking on my closet light and stepping inside. I pulled out a dress I’d been thinking would be perfect for blueberry picking—very 1940s housedress, but in a cute way—and tossed it onto my bed.

“Nothing!” Emma replied quickly. “Tell me about Josh.”

“Well—”

“It’s just that— Oh, Chelsea! I’m totally wrecking things!”

“With Ethan?” I said. I pulled out a pair of red-and-white pedal pushers and tossed those onto the bed too. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know!” she said. “I just love him so much. And I don’t have a lot of time, what with the intensive and rehearsals for
Don Q
on top of that.”

“So, you’re dying because you don’t have time to see him?” I said.

“When I have the time, he doesn’t,” Emma said. “And when I don’t have the time, he does! Supposedly. I’m starting to think he’s just making that up. I think I’m getting on his nerves. But I can’t help it. I think about him all the time. I can’t sleep! I almost want to quit the Intensive so I can have time for him. Maybe that would help?”

“Emma, no!” I gasped, dropping the tank top I was holding. “What are you talking about? That’s crazy!”

“I know, but love makes you do crazy things,” Emma said. “
You
know.”

“I guess?” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I
did
know what she was talking about.

“Okay, like, how do you handle it when you want to call Josh for the third time that day?” Emma asked.

“Um, I don’t think that’s happened,” I said. I sat on the edge of the bed and frowned in thought. “But I guess I would just . . . call him?”

“And what would he do?”

“Well, if he was working, he’d probably let it go and call me back later?” I said. I wasn’t really sure what she was driving at.

“See?” Emma said. “Ethan, too! Doesn’t that make you crazy?”

“No,” I said. I was starting to feel weird. Was it
supposed
to make me crazy? “Listen, Josh and I talk every night before we go to bed. So, I know I’ll talk to him then.”

“You dooooo?” Emma said yearningly. “That’s soooo romantic.”

And she was right. It was. But it was also what Josh and I had done since the day after our first kiss. We’d just fallen into that
sweet pattern, and I’d already gotten used to it. I hadn’t known it was so revolutionary. To me—to us, I was pretty sure—it was just the natural thing to do.

I wondered if I was truly crazy about Josh if I wasn’t feeling
crazy
about Josh. Being with him made me feel kind of floaty and giddy. And I had noticed that everything seemed a little more intense since I’d started dating him. Like my dad’s bad jokes started to seem funny, and kittens or cute commercials on TV made me go all crumple-faced and sappy. And food tasted really delicious.

But did I feel crazy or desperate the way Emma did? I didn’t think so.

I guess it helped that when I called Josh after hanging up with Emma, he sounded so happy to hear my voice. And when I invited him to go berry picking, he dropped what he was doing to say yes. (He literally did! I heard a big stack of books hit the counter with a thud!)

I couldn’t stop smiling as I hung up the phone and plucked the 1940s frock off the pile on the bed.

If Emma had it right, being with Josh was supposed to make me act either cagey or crazy. And falling for Josh was supposed to make me feel lost.

But instead I felt found. And if that meant I was doing this relationship thing wrong, I decided not to care.

N
ot surprisingly, my family always went to the same blueberry farm: Chloe and Ken’s U-Pick Farm and Art Gallery.

“Oh, yeah,” Josh said when we told him where we were
going. “I know them. Did you know they’re selling free-range eggs now?”

My dad clapped his hands and laughed.

“Of course they are!” he said. “And I bet they’re miserable about it.”

“Totally miserable!” Josh said with a grin.

Ken and Chloe desperately wanted to be brilliant starving artists who made a meager living with their blueberry farm. Instead they were wildly successful blueberry farmers who made really bad art. Chloe worked with clay—wobbly vases that looked like she’d caught them in midair just as they’d careened off her potter’s wheel, or little animals with drunken, hooded eyes and buck teeth. Ken was always carving up wood. He made sculptures and woodcuts, all of them splintery and angry.

It seemed like the more frustrated Chloe and Ken got as artists, the more their farm thrived, just to spite them.

Sure enough, when we pulled off the flat, dusty dirt highway, their rows of bushes were fluffy and heavy with berries. Cute little white hens clucked and pecked around the bushes. Up on a hill just behind the rows of blueberry bushes, several rows of boxy hives were swarming with so many honeybees, you could see the clouds of them from the driveway.

When we got out of the car, we were met by Ken, looking long-faced in paint-smeared overalls.

“The place looks good, Ken,” my dad said. “Won’t you
please
take my card. You need an accountant to manage all this money you’re making!”

Ken winced. My dad had said that as if it were a
good
thing.

“We started raising these chickens,” he said morosely. “People
really
like the eggs. And, well, the chickens fertilize the berries, so
they’re
doing really well. And the bees are making so much honey, we had to add fifteen more hives.”

Ken hung his head and sighed.

“Oh!” Mom said. She had her perky voice on, and she was pointing at a tall, crooked log planted vertically in the ground. “Ken, I see you’re doing something new. Um, is that a totem pole?”

“Chainsaw carving!” Ken said, perking up. “Let me tell you about it . . . .”

My sisters and I looked at each other in alarm.

Run away!
Abbie mouthed.

I grabbed Josh by one hand and a stack of buckets in another, and the four of us dashed into the nearest thicket of bushes, all of us snorting with laughter.

“Quick,” I whispered, “before we get sucked into the vortex of bad art.”

We headed for the back of the orchard, twice almost tripping over lazy chickens.

“I think we’re safe,” Hannah said with a laugh. She plucked a few berries from a bush and dropped them into her pail.

“Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk,” she said.

“Ah,
Blueberries for Sal
!” Josh said. “That’s a big favorite at the kids’ story hours at Dog Ear.”

Of course, thinking about the children’s story hour at Dog Ear made me remember our weird, wonderful first kiss. And
that
made me want to kiss him right then.

I gave Josh a shy glance and caught him giving
me
a shy glance. His Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing.