Lucy lay in bed, one arm thrown across her eyes to block the sun. The shovelling—it was back. She got up and checked out her window. Yup, there he is.
He looked up and waved, that same giant sweep of a wave. Maybe he hadn’t been sending a message that he’d changed his mind after all. He could have just been sick or something.
She supposed it wouldn’t kill her to go talk to him for a few minutes. She could take pity on him, do him a huge favour. He had mentioned how bored he was. And he’d sure appreciated the drink. It’s not like she had anything better to do, which was quickly becoming the theme of her summer.
Josie was sitting on the sewing machine stool, winding thread onto a bobbin. Lucy stomped her foot and waited for Josie to look up. “Do you have any more Kool-Aid?” She held an imaginary glass to her mouth and tilted her head back.
“There should be some packets on the freezer door.”
“Thanks.” Lucy wasn’t surprised. Josie froze everything. In the kitchen, she swung open the freezer door. The first thing she saw was two jars of Miracle Whip. The mixture had separated, white on the bottom, yellowy oil on the top. Lucy shuddered and moved a package of Kraft cheese singles to get to the Kool-Aid packets underneath.
After she’d finished her breakfast, Lucy mixed some cherry Kool-Aid. It took a lot of stirring because the powder had turned a bit chunky from being frozen, but it tasted fine.
“Did you ask him what he was doing out there?” Josie asked, coming into the kitchen.
Lucy shrugged. “It’s like a protest or something.”
Josie pulled a cigarette from behind her ear, stuck it in her mouth.
“He’s trying to make a point,” Lucy added, pouring a glass of Kool-Aid.
Josie frowned. “Say it again.”
Lucy looked up. “A protest.” She shook her fists in the air. “He’s trying to make a point.”
Smoke filled the air. Josie still looked confused.
“Something to do with having to move here. He didn’t want to,” Lucy explained. “But his mom didn’t care. The hole is supposed to represent his”—she began running on the spot—“escape.”
Josie raised her eyebrows. “Escape from what?”
“I dunno.” Lucy shrugged again. “His parents’ control? I’m not sure. I only talked to him for like, five minutes.”
“That’s the trouble with you kids today,” Josie said, taking a drag off her cigarette. “You think the whole world revolves around you. What you really need is a good kick in the arse.”
Lucy rolled her eyes and picked up the glass. Josie thought everyone needed a good kick in the arse.
“Tell Colin to let his mom know we’ll bring over a basket of homemade goodies once she’s had a bit of time to settle in.”
Don’t you mean warn him? Josie had made cookies the other day. When Lucy took a bite, her tooth had hit something—she still didn’t know what—and she had had to take an aspirin for the pain, as well as a Tums for her upset stomach.
“Um, yeah, okay.”
At least she would get the introduction to Esther she wanted.
Hopefully no one would break a tooth or be struck down with food poisoning as a result.
Lucy kept her eyes on the rim of the glass, trying to keep the juice from sloshing as she walked down the lane. She couldn’t believe she was actually doing this. And all on her own. Guess boredom can make you desperate.
Colin looked up when he saw her. “Hey.” He jammed his shovel into a mound of dirt.
“Hey.” She passed him the Kool-Aid and crawled up to sit on a flat rock. He still had on the same grody T-shirt and shorts. Guess the moving truck hasn’t shown up yet.
The girls in the Harlequins got all swoony whenever they saw a sweaty guy.
Lucy sat perfectly still for a second, checking to see if she felt any different. Nope. Must only work in romance novels.
“Did Josie make you come?”
“No. Didn’t have anything better to do.”
“Gee, thanks,” he said, then he downed his drink all at once, just like before, and passed it back to her. “But I hear ya.”
Lucy set the glass down on the grass and tried to think of something to say. “You weren’t here yesterday.”
“No. Thursday’s Mom’s grocery day. I had to babysit my brother and sister.”
“Oh, you have a brother and sister?”
“Yup. They’re five. Twins.”
Colin had to be about…fifteen or sixteen? Lucy did some mental math. That’s a big age difference.
“Yeah, we’re almost eleven years apart,” he said as if reading her mind. “I keep telling them they were an accident.”
“No.” Lucy looked horrified. “You do not tell them that.”
“I do when they tick me off. It’s okay. They don’t even know what it means.” He smiled mischievously. “But they keep going to Mom and asking, so….”
Lucy laughed out loud.
He picked up his shovel. “I’m going to start over there and see how long it takes me to make it back over to the big hole.”
“Okay.” Lucy frowned. “Want me to time you or something?”
His eyes lit up. “Yeah! Time me.”
Holding up a finger, she looked at her watch. “And…go!”
As she watched him dig, she couldn’t help thinking he reminded her of someone. Who? She thought for moment while she kept track of the time. Jean Pierre! From clarinet class. Jean Pierre, who she wanted to punch on a regular basis. They were both tall and thin, with the same stringy hair. Please don’t let Colin have the same personality.
He was almost to the hole’s edge when she remembered Josie’s message. “I’m supposed to tell you to tell your mom that we’re bringing over some homemade treats later, after you guys are settled, I guess.”
Colin immediately stopped and straightened. “Really?”
So much for the timing. “Yeah.”
“Should I be scared?”
Lucy was about to ask why when it dawned on her. “Oh. You’re aware of Josie’s—”
“Cooking skills? Yeah. Mom’s got loads of stories.”
Lucy nodded. “She’s legendary.”
“How are you even surviving, anyway?”
“It’s not so bad. She doesn’t make me eat anything I don’t want or can’t recognize. And thankfully—I’m not saying she’s lazy or anything—but she doesn’t cook that much. I don’t think she likes it. So…I eat a lot of frozen waffles. And bread. She makes amazing bread.” Lucy paused and scratched her forehead. “You’d think if you could master bread, you could master other things. But nope.”
“Keep crackers and a jar of peanut butter under your bed, that’s what I do. And cereal’s a good backup too.”
“Your mom can’t cook either?”
“No, she can. I’m just always hungry.” He started digging again. “It’s all the fresh air and exercise I’m getting.”
Lucy smiled. “Actually, I already thought of cereal. But it’s the milk. Josie has powdered milk. I can’t even explain how gross it looks. The lumps.” She cringed. “I can’t bring myself to even try it.”
“Man. I’m sorry,” Colin said, flinging a load of dirt to his side.
“I’ll be okay. I forgot to say she loves bananas, so they’re always around. And marshmallows. She always has marshmallows.”
Colin drove his shovel under a big rock and tried to pry it up. “Well, when it comes to our welcome basket, maybe you could get her to stick to bread. Like, tell her it’s our favourite thing.”
“Yeah. I’ll see what I can do.”
That night Lucy’s dad called, and she was surprised how good it felt to hear his voice. He talked about the Bennets next door having their sprinkler on all day even though they were supposed to be conserving water because there’d been no rain. He told her he’d run into Sadie and her mom at the IGA and they said to say hi and that they missed her. It made Lucy sad to think of her dad going to the grocery store by himself, then going home and cooking his dinner alone. She had planned on giving him the silent treatment for the first half of the conversation and then causing a stink over how Josie was still making her do stuff she didn’t want to do, but the moment passed. It just didn’t seem that important anymore.
It was official. Lucy was actually getting sick of waffles. She’d be willing to trade almost anything for a bowl of Rice Krispies with real milk. She hung on the freezer door and scanned the contents. Sighing, she pushed aside a giant bone wrapped in plastic wrap—Please don’t be human—then pulled out a new box of waffles and tossed two in the toaster.
With zero enthusiasm, she plunked herself down at the table and carefully filled the waffle holes with syrup. Some habits were hard to break.
“The tide’s finally starting to switch around,” Josie announced, sitting down across from her. “Should have enough water for a swim today.”
For almost a week the tide had been low during the daytime. Lucy had tried to go for a swim a couple times but she would wade straight out for what seemed like a mile and the water never got past her knees.
Josie leaned back in her chair. “What do you got going on today, missy?”
Lucy shrugged and poked at her waffles. She didn’t feel much like eating them.
“You’ve got a pout on about something,” Josie said, snapping back the lid on her lighter.
Here it was, her moment. Say something. “Your milk. It’s not like my milk at home.”
Josie looked confused.
“Milk,” Lucy repeated, doing her holding-a-glass-and-drinking move. “Yours is different. I like store milk. In a carton. And I have money,” she added quickly, rubbing her fingers together. “I’ll pay, next time at the grocery store.”
“You’re off your rocker,” Josie said.
She got up, took the jug from the fridge, shook it, poured a glass, and set it in front of Lucy. “Drink that and tell me it’s not the best milk you’ve ever tasted.”
Lucy rolled her lips inward over her teeth and shook her head.
Josie sighed loudly. “Just try it.”
Lucy stared at the glass. Okay, she could do this. If she drank it and still didn’t like it, what could Josie say? At least she could say she tried, right? She lowered her head, eye level with the glass. It was so…beige. And there they were. Tiny, chunky, yellow floaties. Like boogers. Even if she did manage to swallow a mouthful, there’s no way it would stay down. She shook her head again and, using one finger, she pushed the glass back across the table, away from her, as if it was an unexploded grenade.
There was complete silence as their eyes locked.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Josie said. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. You want fancy store milk? I’ll get you fancy store milk. Muriel will take me this week.”
“Thank you,” Lucy said, blowing out a sigh of relief.
“You done with that?” Josie pointed her cigarette at the waffles.
“Yup.” Lucy slid the plate over and watched Josie drown the waffles in more syrup till every hole overflowed.
Colin was so busy digging, he didn’t notice Lucy until she was standing right beside him.
“Hey,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Good timing. I need a break.”
The hole was so deep now that Lucy could sit and dangle her feet over the edge with still a few inches to spare. She pulled a handful of suckers from her back pocket and held them up.
Colin dropped his shovel and sat down next to her. “Sweet. Thanks.”
“I found a whole drawer of them in the kitchen.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. She’s not what you’d call a health nut.”
“Lucky for us.”
“They were probably giving them out free somewhere, and she kept going back until her purse was full.”
Colin laughed and crunched on his sucker. She threw him another one. They sat quietly for a few minutes enjoying the breeze coming up over the bank from the water.
“So what’s it like?” he asked. “Living with her. Her being deaf and all that.”
Lucy moved her sucker to one side and jammed it into her cheek. “Not that different, actually. Like sometimes she talks loud, I guess. But she’s really good at lip-reading, so as long as you don’t mumble and you look right at her, it’s fine. And I act things out a lot too, without even realizing it.” She shrugged. “But yeah, other than that, it’s pretty normal.”
They went back to enjoying the breeze. She felt him looking at her.
“I saw you before, you know,” he said. “Before you came to the hole.”
“Yeah. The window. I know. Thanks for pointing it out, though.”
“No. I mean like a long time ago.”
She moved her sucker to the other cheek. “What?”
“The funeral. I was at your mom’s funeral.”
Some of the lemon goo went down the wrong way and she coughed. “What? How come you never said?”
“I dunno. I just didn’t.”
“You were there?” She said it slowly, like she was trying to understand the words as she spoke them.
He nodded. “It was really weird. Just Mom and me. We came all that way and then when we got there, it was like she didn’t want to see anybody, like she didn’t want anyone to know we’d come.”
“What do you mean?” Lucy watched him bend his sucker stick in half, back and forth till it broke.
“Well. We came. We went to the funeral. She talked to your dad. Then we left. I pretended not to notice, you know, how quick it all was, how weird she was acting. But like I said. It was weird.”
Lucy thought for a minute. “Did you ask her about it?”
“No. She was so upset. I sort of didn’t want to bring it up.”
“Why would she even take you?”
“Dad had to stay home and look after the twins. Maybe she didn’t want to go alone.”
“Yeah. I guess that makes sense.”
Colin jumped off the edge into the hole and picked up his shovel. “Could just be she was so upset that she got weird.”
Lucy slid her butt back and leaned against a tree. She needed some time to let Colin’s words sink in. She let her mind drift back to that day of the funeral, something she almost never did. Most of it was a blur. What she did remember about that day was the fear of not being able to make it through. She knew she couldn’t let herself fall apart; she was the only thing holding her dad together. The memory made her nose sting and her eyes get watery.
The church had been completely full, standing-room only. Lucy had stared straight ahead at the altar, focusing on anything except what was actually happening around her. She had counted. Counted the members in the choir, the candles, the chain links in the chandelier. Whenever she’d felt like crying, she looked up and counted the ceiling tiles. That way, the tears collected in her eyes and didn’t spill out. The worst had been when she felt her dad shaking beside her, sobbing. She had wanted to reach out, comfort him, touch his hand, but she couldn’t. So she had stood there, still as a statue, and had kept counting the ceiling tiles until it was over.
Those were the moments that were crystal clear. She had no memory of things like what the minister had said, who had been there, or who she’d talked to. Colin could have easily been there and she didn’t remember. She just may not have seen him. There had been so many people….
“Damnit!” Colin swore loudly and snapped her back.
“What’s wrong?”
“Rock. Ginormous!” he said in disgust, pointing to the floor of the hole.
She got up, peeked over, and tried to look sympathetic. “Oh yeah, I see.”
He let his shovel drop. “Got any suckers left?”
“Yeah, just a sec.” She weeded through the debris of empty wrappers in her pocket. “Should be one—wait. Do you hear that?”
They both tilted their heads, straining their ears. There was something—a sound—off in the distance.
“What is that?” Lucy asked.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was…the theme from Star Wars?” Colin scrunched up his eyebrows and looked around.
Lucy listened. He was right. Someone was whistling, loudly. And it was definitely the theme from Star Wars. She squinted off into the distance. It was a girl. And she was walking across the field towards them.
“Do you see what I see?” he said.
Lucy nodded, and kept nodding as the girl got closer. The girl had her hair done up in two buns, one over each ear, and she had what looked to be a white sheet draped around her, toga style. It was tied at her waist with a pink skipping rope.
“Who is that?” Lucy whispered.
“Isn’t it obvious? It’s Princess Leia.”