Sun & Spoon (4 page)

“That belonged to Great-Grandma Tuttle,” Pa said. “She used to knit mittens. That bag's been out here for as long as we've lived here.”

“Where's the driftwood from?” Spoon asked.

“I found it at Lake Michigan, ages ago when we were on vacation. I liked how gnarled, yet smooth it was. And the shapes fascinated me. They looked like fantastic creatures from an imaginary land.”

“I also got a book of nursery rhymes,” Joanie said proudly. She pulled a book called
Ring O' Roses
out of the knitting bag and hugged it to her chest. “I know it's too little for me, but I love the pictures anyway. And don't forget my skate key,” she added.

“Some haul,” Spoon said.

“Is there anything you want, Spoon?” Pa asked, tilting his head, surveying the garage.

Spoon curled his toes in his sneakers. “Nah,” he said, lowering his eyelids. “I don't need anything.”

“Well, gather your things, Little Geyser,” Pa said. “You two had better get home before your parents send out a search team.”

They said their good-byes.

“See you soon,” Pa called one last time, waving.

“Today is Friday,” Joanie yelled back. “So we'll see you Sunday for brunch. Maybe even before that.”

More waving.

“This was a good day,” Joanie said to Spoon as she lugged her suitcase in one hand and her knitting bag in the other down Pa's long driveway. The knitting bag dragged along the pavement. “I got lots of things.”

“Yeah,” Spoon said. I got lots of things, too, he thought. Fifty-two suns. “I'll carry your suitcase for you.”

“You will?”

Spoon nodded.

She handed it over and readjusted her shoulders. “Thanks.”

“Sure.”

Now Joanie held the knitting bag with both arms. “Good baby,” she said to it, stroking the brocade with her thumb.

On the way home Spoon looked down, patting the bulge in his pocket, checking to make sure that the cards were still there. Already he felt closer to Gram somehow. They were lucky cards. He was positive. The thought sent a current through him. And as Spoon stepped onto his own front porch, one leg lifted high to take two stairs at once, it felt as if the suns were smoldering, burning a hole in his pocket.

T
HERE
WERE THREE POSTCARDS
waiting when Spoon and Joanie returned from Pa's house. One was from Charlie, one was from Evie, and one was from Don and Douglas.

Charlie's postcard read:

Dear Mom, Dad, Spoon, & Joanie
,

It has been sunny every day. Even on the coast.

We saw the sea lion caves today. It I got a present for everyone. Except Spoon. (Just kidding!) (Maybe!)

Sincerely,

Your favorite son & brother,

Charlie

Evie's postcard read:

To all,

Charlie and I have been enjoying each other's company. We started at Coos Bay and have been heading north along the coast. How beautiful! I realized all over again why I love Oregon so much. Last night's sunset was glorious
—
both the sky and the water were flame red. We'll call again soon.

Much love,

Evie

Don and Douglas's postcard read:

Hey Spoon,

Devila and her friend Julie got sunburn all over. They are the color of baby gerbils. GROSS! See you soon.

Don

You should have come with us. A kid we know from another cabin broke his arm riding his bike off a ramp we made.

Douglas

Before Spoon had finished reading the last message or bothered to look closely at the pictures on the fronts of the postcards, he realized that the word
sun
appeared on all three cards in some form. Sunny. Sunset. Sunburn. He took this as a sign. A sign that taking the cards was the right thing to have done, and that Gram, in some mysterious way, approved. He wasn't even bothered by Charlie's snide older brother comments. A knowing smile lit up his face.

“Why are you so smiley?” Kay asked. She was sitting at the kitchen table. She had already read the postcards and was working her way through a pile of catalogs and bills.

Spoon just continued to smile.

Kay tore open an envelope and scowled at a credit-card bill. “Really. Why are you so smiley?”

“No real reason,” said Spoon.

“That's the best reason,” said his mother.

Before dinner, Spoon bounced his basketball to Hillington Green. His destination was the basketball court on the west side of the park. First he practiced free throws, and then he practiced his fancy dribbling, scissoring the ball back and forth between his legs. Since April, he had been trying to teach himself how to spin his basketball on one finger like a top, but he was a long way from perfecting this skill and so he only practiced it at home, in the basement, when no one else was around.

Spoon's father could do it expertly. Scott was able to get the ball twirling so fast Spoon could barely make out the seams. Charlie bragged that he could do it, too, although Spoon had never actually seen him, and therefore was suspicious. Whenever Spoon asked Charlie to prove it, Charlie responded with a lame excuse such as, “My finger's sprained,” or “I'm not in the mood right now,” or “I've already done it twice today.” Nothing would have pleased Spoon more than to greet Charlie on his return from Evie's by strolling in front of him with his basketball turning madly on his finger.

Bored with dribbling, Spoon started taking long jump shots. After several misses, he touched the bulge in his pocket for good luck before he released the ball. He had sunk three baskets in a row when he decided not to press his luck.

Sweat was dripping into Spoon's eyes, and he felt sleepy. His arms and legs ached—from working at Pa's, from playing basketball, from growing. He pulled off his T-shirt and wiped his face. Then he walked off the court and lay down in the grassy shade beneath a picnic table. He wrapped his wet T-shirt around his basketball and used it as a pillow. Soon he was sound asleep.

Spoon dreamed. He and Charlie were playing double solitaire on the sloping lawn at Hillington Green. They were sitting cross-legged, facing each other, the cards between them on the grass. The sun was shifting haphazardly across the sky. One minute Spoon's shadow was long and thin and pointing north, and the next minute it was merely a dark puddle under his knees. One minute the sun was before him and he had to shield his eyes, and the next minute he could feel the sun behind him, on his neck like a fiery spotlight.

Joanie emerged out of nowhere. “Who's winning?” she asked.

“I am,” said Charlie.

“You are not,” said Spoon. “I am.”

“So what?” said Charlie. “I beat you at everything else. Cards is just luck. Everything else takes skill.”

“Liar,” Spoon mumbled.

Suddenly Joanie was gone, and Gram stood in her place. She was wearing her old familiar red gingham blouse, jeans, and Birkenstocks, and sipping orange soda with maraschino cherries from a tall, clear glass. “Make sure you drink enough on days like this,” she said. Her voice was muffled, as if she were speaking through folds of cloth. “How's Pa?” she asked.

Spoon looked to Charlie for an answer, and when he looked back, the sky had darkened and Gram had vanished.

Spoon woke with a dry mouth. He could barely recall the dream's details, and as each moment passed, more and more of the dream slipped away. But he clearly remembered seeing Gram, and so he shut his eyes to try to bring her back. Although it had no shape or weight, with his eyes closed he sensed her presence again.

Cutting slowly across the green toward home, he thought: The cards are working.

B
EFORE
HE FLOATED
off to sleep that night, Spoon put the cards under his pillow. And early the next morning, Saturday morning, Spoon dreamed of Gram again. The entire family was seated around Gram and Pa's dining-room table. Gram stood, serving soup from a large pot into mugs with a ladle. The level of the soup in the pot never changed. The ceiling had been lifted off the room, and the sky could be seen in its place. Except for a black egg-shaped cloud, the sky was china blue. Rain fell from the cloud far, far in the distance.

Gram's cheeks were full and round, her voice golden. “Stomachs have no teeth,” she said as she handed Spoon his mug. And then she said, “Not just anyone can wiggle their ears, you know. It's something you're born with.”

A thunderclap interrupted the meal. The suns on the walls shook. Another thunderclap. Another.

Spoon jerked awake to find Joanie opening and closing his door.

“It's seven o'clock, aren't you
ever
getting up?” Joanie said, slamming the door one last time. She stayed in his room, leaning against the door, holding on to the doorknob behind her back.

Yawning and stretching, Spoon tumbled out of bed. He padded over to Joanie.

“What are you going to do today?” she asked, her typical morning question.

Spoon knotted his hand into a fist and gave his sister a noogie—a gentle one, though, not a serious one that would make her cry. “We'll think of something,” he said. But he already knew what he had in mind.

Between the time when the new dream was still fresh and when Spoon was giving Joanie the noogie—just seconds—the idea for the notebook had popped into his head. Complete. As if one of his teachers had assigned it as a project with specific instructions to follow. He wondered if the notebook had been in the dream, too, and he simply couldn't remember it. Or if Gram was somehow guiding him, telling him what to do.

“Meet me in the kitchen,” Spoon told Joanie. Lightly he brushed her out of his room, dressed, retrieved the deck of cards from under his pillow, put it in his pocket, and sailed downstairs.

Joanie had eaten earlier, but she had another small breakfast with Spoon. Outside, Scott and Kay moved up and down the garden under large straw hats. They're thinning the rows and weeding, Spoon guessed. The hats bobbed like boats on a green sea.

“Well . . .” said Spoon, drawing his attention away from his parents and back to his sister. He gulped the leftover milk in his cereal bowl so that it had no taste. “We're going to make notebooks.”

Joanie had licked her pinkie and stuck it into the sugar bowl. She sucked the sugar off her finger and replaced the lid.
Clink.
“Notebooks?”

“Yes, notebooks.”

Joanie smiled, plain and clear, but then her expression changed. She seemed to be considering something, her forehead creased with bewilderment.

It struck Spoon that usually it was he who was perplexed by Joanie and the things she said, not the other way around.

“Why?” Joanie asked.

I may have dreamed it, Spoon nearly replied. “Just because.”

“Is this a trick?”

“No.” Spoon said it almost like a question. “And they'll be secret notebooks,” he added, thinking as he spoke. “I won't tell you what's in mine, and you don't have to tell me what's in yours.” That way, he reasoned, Joanie could feel included, she wouldn't be a pest, and he could still get something accomplished and keep it private. He was covering all his bases. “Let's get moving,” Spoon said. “I'm going to say hi to Mom and Dad and then we can begin.”

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Joanie asked. Wedges of sunlight patterned her face, her hands. “I didn't even have to try to make you nice to me this morning. Usually it takes awhile. And yesterday you carried my little bones home from Pa's.”

Spoon shrugged. He didn't think he could put it into words. He didn't bother to try.

“This one's for you, and this one's for me,” Spoon said. He handed Joanie a blue folder and kept the other one, an orange one, for himself. Both folders held a dozen or so pages of lined paper, bound by silver clasps. Spoon had used both of the folders for science projects during the last school year. The blue one had read
CLOUDS,
and the orange one
THE PROPERTIES OF LIGHT,
in inch-high block lettering. Using a fat pink eraser, Spoon had done his best to get rid of the colored-pencil titles, but the eraser had left pale streaks and tore the paper a bit so that it looked as though the letters had vaporized, leaving ghostly messages.

“You can cover the marks up,” Spoon instructed. “Use the crayons and markers.”

Joanie nodded.

“Technically,” said Spoon, “these are folders with paper, but we're going to call them notebooks.”

“Right,” said Spoon.

They were lying on their stomachs on the screened back porch—the coolest place to be this time of day. The porch was at the west end of the house, soaked in shadow. Spoon's family didn't have air conditioning. His parents said it was a waste of energy and that people in general were becoming too soft. No matter how much Charlie or Spoon complained, Scott and Kay remained firm in their position.