Watermelon Summer (19 page)

 

    So I showed up, tear-streaked, on Arvil's doorstep,
and he let me in, fed me, and drew the whole story out, one tortured
word at a time.  Then my neighbor led me out into the garden for
some weeding therapy, followed by a round of churning homemade blueberry
ice cream in an ancient wooden bucket with a hand-turned, metal
crank.  After we'd polished off a couple of bowlsful apiece, I was
starting to feel a bit more human.

 

    Just in time for the phone to ring, marking the
second round of disasters.  Arvil had gone inside to answer and I
was sitting on the porch, gazing across the valley that housed Greensun,
and trying to remember all of the good times Kat and I had
shared.  But my mother's name caught my ear, and I went inside to
see why she'd called Arvil.

 

    My neighbor held up his hand to ask me to wait as I
stepped through the doorway, and I paused, the smile that had come onto
my face when I learned my mother was on the phone slowly fading
away.  Arvil had sunk down onto the three steps dividing his
kitchen from his living room, and his head bowed down over the receiver.

 

    "When?" he asked, and then after a pause. 
"Another heart attack?"  My own heart sped up, suddenly sure Arvil
and my mother were discussing my bio-dad.

 

    I'd actually been thinking of Glen all day, until Kat
pushed him to the back of my mind.  Despite his absence from the
Greensun meeting, I'd just about built up my courage enough to go see
Glen this week, but I hadn't quite gotten around to it.  Then this
morning, I'd found a note tucked away in
Small is Beautiful
,
quoting Guillaume Apollinaire in my father's handwriting.  "Now
and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be
happy," my father and Apollinaire admonished.  So I'd taken their advice and walked
with Lucy to my favorite cleared spot on the hill above the house,
eating my breakfast in the wild and catching sight of a saffron-colored
warbler in the process.  Glen had felt so present, I could almost
have reached out and touched him.

 

    But now I never would touch my biological
father.  Mom broke the news to me when Arvil handed off the phone,
but I'd already guessed.  Glen was dead.

 

 

 

    "Honey, I'm so sorry it had to end this way," Mom
said, the sound of her voice immediately opening the floodgate of my
tears.  "Dad's on the computer now getting you a ticket home and
Arvil said he can drive you to the airport."

 

    Mom's words were enough to pull me out of my mindless
misery and make me take a mental step back.  Kat's theft and
Glen's more-permanent absence from my life had torn me apart, but this
wasn't the
way I wanted my Greensun adventure to end.  It took a concerted
effort, but I turned off my personal waterfall in time to interrupt Mom
before she could go any further.  "I'm not coming home like that!" I
said.

 

    There was a pause on the other end of the line, then
Mom changed gears.  "Okay, that makes sense.  You want to go
to Glen's funeral."  There was another short hiatus, then she continued, "Dad says I can get on the red-eye and be there
tomorrow morning.  How does that sound?"

 

    This second suggestion sounded perfect, like a cup of
chamomile tea doctored up with a spoonful of honey.  I reluctantly
let Mom go so she could pack and get ready for her flight, but I
rejected Arvil's kind offer that I stay over in his guest room.  I
needed to be alone to digest this news, and I could tell my neighbor was
also torn up about the death of his oldest friend.

 

    The great thing about a walking commute is that it's
not terribly dangerous to get from point A to point B, even if your eyes
keep tearing up and your vision is hazy.  Lucy steered me in the
right direction when I seemed about to branch off on a deer trail into
the woods, and we reached the Greensun farmhouse without any undue
trauma, except for the emotional kind.

 

    And then I cried until I couldn't cry any more. 
And, being the type A person I am, I decided that the only solution to
the way I was feeling was to find every note Glen had written me and
compile them into a simulacrum of his life to replace the physical body that was now absent.

 

    My search turned up dozens of missives that had
heretofore gone unnoticed.  My bio-dad had apparently hoped I was
as fond of the classics as he and my mother were, so the most in-depth
letters had previously escaped my more scientific eye. 
Catcher in the Rye
yielded a brief recap of Glen's own boyhood,
Catch-22
included a handwritten piece about Glen's take on the evils of war, and, slipped between the slender covers of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
,
my father included the tale of my birth.  "I caught you as you
slid out into the world," Glen recalled in this final note.  "Even
though I've never met you as an adult, you are the child I've always felt closest to
in my heart."

 

    And I cried again, but this time the tears were
cathartic.  Before long, I was able to fall asleep on the couch,
Lucy's head beneath my hand.

 

 

 

    I woke to Mom's worried face peering into mine.  "Forsythia?" she said quietly.  "Are you okay?"

 

    When I first arrived at Greensun, I used to try to
picture Mom in various locations.  She'd told me stories about the
root cellar, but I hadn't been able to imagine my put-together mother
inside that dank structure, the dirty water pouring out along the floor
during a heavy rain.  And how could Mom have canned those fabled
quarts of tomatoes and apples in the rough Greensun kitchen when her own
counters were now spotless and modern?

 

    But when I opened my eyes to see Mom in Greensun's
doorway, the stories and truth slid together, and I understood exactly
how my mother had fit into Greensun.  She'd thought the farm was an
adventure, just like I had this summer, and her intrepid spirit would
have made it easy to dive right into primitive conditions with
enthusiasm.  Sure, Mom's sheltered upbringing—like my own—would
have made her afraid of some of Greensun's rougher edges, but
bravery is really about overcoming your fears, not about being
fearless in the first place.  It occurred to me that my mother was
probably just as
stout as Kat, maybe more so.

 

    All those thoughts ran through my head in the space
of time it took to say: "I'm so glad you came."  And even though
I had thought I'd dissolve into a puddle of tears when Mom finally showed
up, I instead realized I was eager to see how much of the Greensun world
we shared.

 

    "It's wonderful to be here," Mom agreed, hugging me
tight then letting me loose.  "So, are you going to give me the
grand tour?"

 

    "Maybe you should give
me
the grand tour instead," I countered, and one dimple popped up on Mom's ever-so-slightly lop-sided face, just like on mine.

 

 

 

    That morning, I learned that Mom had planted the pine
grove I was camping in and that my favorite cleared spot had been her
favorite location as well.  Our experiences had differences, though. 
Mom told me about her first winter at Greensun, when the snow had made
roads impassable and she felt so isolated and alone at Greensun, despite
(or perhaps because of) sharing the house with three other
adults.  In contrast, I liked the quiet at Greensun, although I had
to admit I'd never seen it when the sun was so low in the sky you'd
only be out of the shade for a few hours a day.

 

    I ended up telling Mom the whole sordid tale of Kat's
treachery, and rather than using the admission as an excuse to make me
promise I'd go home, my mother reciprocated with a description of how
Glen's goats had escaped, bred, and gone a long way toward defoliating
all two-hundred acres of Greensun.  "Glen finally let a neighbor
come in and hunt them down," Mom confided, a twinkle in her eye, "But we
didn't eat the meat.  We were all vegetarians then."  It was
the goat episode that had prompted Mom to plant my pine grove.

 

    Our story swap seemed to mark a loosening of Mom's
resolve to keep her reminiscences sugar-coated.  And as the day
progressed, I began to realize how much Mom had edited her stories in
the past so they wouldn't color my own impressions when I finally met
Glen.  Now that the possibility of first-hand experience was gone,
Mom was willing to tell me more about my biological father.

 

    "But if you really want to know what life was like
back then, we'll have to find the time capsule," Mom told me at last. 
We walked up the holler past the pine grove, taking a right when the
creek forked, and ending up at a cement box.  Looking back the way we'd
come, I noticed a plastic pipe running toward the farmhouse and realized
the box enclosed the spring, which in turn provided all of the farm's drinking water.

 

    The spring itself wasn't the purpose of our journey,
though.  Mom drew my attention to a pile of rocks behind the
spring box, then began carefully lifting each mossy stone and setting it
aside. "It might be gone," she warned, but the area looked like it
hadn't been touched for as long as I'd been alive.  And, sure
enough, after a couple of false starts, Mom plucked out a plastic yogurt
container, brittle with age, but still doing its job of protecting the
ziplock bag inside.  Within these two layers of protection were a
black-and-white photo of my parents in their youth, a carved wooden
pendant, and a farewell letter from my mother to the farm.

 

 

 

    I won't quote Mom's full letter here, although I read it three times
and took it away with me when we left.  Mom had addressed the letter to
"my dearest Greensun," and she cringed as we read the words together.  "I
was so melodramatic!" Mom laughed at her younger self, but I was glad to
realize that my mother had felt the same magnetic attraction of this tract
of land.