The house phone rang in the middle of breakfast Saturday morning. Carolina was eating her cereal while Gabriela helped Daniel pick the best blueberries out of the container. Mami and Papi were deep in conversation with Uncle Porter and Tía Cuca about houses and apartments.
Tía Cuca got up to answer the phone. After a moment, she cupped her hand over the receiver. “Porter, it’s for you.”
“I’ll take it in the other room,” Uncle Porter said, folding his napkin.
Gabriela stretched, then came over and rested her chin on Carolina’s shoulder. “I’m bored,” she said.
“You just woke up.”
“Can you go get your sketchbook and draw me something? I need to be distracted from boredom,” Gabriela said dramatically.
“I thought you were going to the lake.”
“That’s not for three hours,” Gabriela whined.
Daniel scrambled onto the chair next to Carolina. “Yeah!” he piped up. “Draw us something!”
“Okay,” Carolina said, pushing in her chair. “But just so you know, I’m not some kind of artwork vending machine.”
“But you are,” Gabriela insisted.
Carolina grinned and went to grab the sketchbook from her backpack. On her way back to the kitchen table, she faltered. Mami and Papi had joined the kids’ conversation.
“Have you seen Carolina’s drawings?” Gabriela said.
“Of course I have,” Mami replied, in an almost-offended tone. “I used to take Caro to her lessons.”
Carolina hugged the sketchbook tight to her chest, hovering behind Gabriela.
“She’s been making all these drawings about Puerto Rico.” Gabriela grabbed the last blueberry, tossed it in the air, and caught it in her mouth like a jelly bean. She swallowed. “Yeah, there’s a flamboyán tree and a Cucaracha Martina and everything.”
“I didn’t know that,” Mami murmured.
Papi turned to Carolina. “Did you finish the flamboyán? Let’s see it, Caro.”
With one eye still on Mami, Carolina stepped up and laid the sketchbook flat.
Papi pored over the image. “I remember you sitting on that bench,” Papi said. “You’ve really captured it, Carolinita.”
Mami stood behind Papi, examining the drawing over his shoulder. “Señora Rivón would be proud,” she determined. “Maybe you could draw something to send to her.”
“I’d like that,” Carolina said.
Mami rested her cheek on top of Papi’s head.
“She used to sit out there all day, my Carolinita,” Mami went on. “She was always drawing.” Mami reached down and rested a polished finger on the red penned-in blossoms of the flamboyán. “I didn’t know you’d been drawing home.” Mami reached out her free arm, and Carolina took the one-armed hug as Dani climbed onto Papi’s lap. “My Carolinita,” Mami said again.
Uncle Porter came back to the kitchen with his hands in his pockets.
“Well,” he announced. “That was Lance Rogan. Apparently Lydia has decided to delay the sale of the farm.”
Mami’s face clouded with concern. “I’m sorry, Porter, I hope—”
He held up his hands. “I think it’s for the best. She’s still very interested in selling, she just wants to go over the finer points. It turns out she’s had another offer from a young farmer, with some backing from a local conservation group. It might end up being a split sale.” Uncle Porter smiled. “Between us, I’m glad. We all need farmland.”
As Uncle Porter turned toward the living room, Carolina spoke up.
“Uncle Porter, wait,” she said. “Do you know who made the offer? What the farmer’s name was?”
Uncle Porter frowned. “Let me think a minute. Hmmm.”
Carolina crossed her fingers.
“Alice? Alicia? Something like that.”
Carolina thought of flowers in black plastic containers, and of people and places that belonged, the way Jennifer’s elves belonged in the cottage. They clicked.
Across the kitchen table, Gabriela flashed Carolina the tiniest of thumbs-ups.
Mami drove Carolina to register for middle school the following week, and on the way back, she pulled over just past the main intersection in Larksville. She dug her cell phone out of her purse.
“Could you call Jennifer to see if she’ll have you over for a little while?”
Carolina was dumbfounded. “Really?” she finally managed to ask.
Mami held the phone out. “Dani’s at Ben’s house, and Papi and I want to go look at an apartment. It would be a big help.”
“An apartment?”
Mami raised an eyebrow. “Did you want to go see Jennifer?”
Carolina grabbed the phone. “Yes!” she said, punching in the number. “It’s just—”
“I trust you,” Mami said simply.
At Jennifer’s house, Fiona was out and Gavin was busy in his studio, so they raced through the woods, laughing for no reason. They hiked to the place where the trail ended, and stopped there for a long while.
“Should we go look?”
Carolina hesitated. “What if…?”
Jennifer nodded. “We don’t know what will happen. Even if Alicia and Lizbeth get part of the farm, if Mr. Rogan gets this part—”
“He wouldn’t really tear it down?”
“He might.”
The girls ran back down the hill without visiting the cottage, and tumbled into the kitchen. They didn’t talk about it again that day.
Mami and Papi liked the apartment, on the second floor of a house right in the center of Larksville, next to the sturdy brick post office. As soon as Mami and Papi had signed the lease, Mami set about, once again, preparing for a move. She folded all their clothing into perfect squares and borrowed the key from the landlord to scrub the floors herself, even though he swore they had been professionally cleaned.
Mami agreed that Carolina had to return Jennifer’s invitation, so Jennifer came to Tía Cuca and Uncle Porter’s later that week, one day when Gabriela had Alyssa and Jamie there too. Suddenly the house didn’t feel big at all; it burst with people. Jennifer had brought her craft supplies, and she and Carolina spread out on the grass in the yard while Gabriela and her friends lounged on the deck.
As she glued the skirt onto a miniature fairy, Carolina overheard snippets of the older girls’ conversations.
“I’m going to convince my dad,” Alyssa was saying. “We’re going to that concert.”
“But—it’s your dad,” Jamie protested. “He always says—”
“I don’t care.” Alyssa’s voice changed to a loud and conspiratorial whisper. “If Lydia can stand up to him, then so can I.”
Carolina leaned back, letting her body settle into the curve of the tree. She picked out a shining bead for the fairy’s crown, and thought that there was, after all, one thing that was just right about Rogan Realty’s brand-new houses: the distance between this tree and that deck, between those lounge chairs and this glorious pile of pipe cleaners and wool roving and special beads. They were together, and they were each their own.
Their last night at Tía Cuca and Uncle Porter’s, Carolina sat at her desk putting the finishing touches on her first drawing of the bench beneath the flamboyán. It was missing something, so she added another figure, another girl sitting beside her, this one with a long braid. She filled in the bright rubber bands of the girl’s braces with different pens: the rubber bands and the blossoms were the only colors the drawing needed.
“Caro,” Mami said, poking her head in the door, “we have something for you. It just came.”
Papi, Daniel, and Gabriela were close behind, and Daniel dropped a parcel, wrapped unevenly in bright green construction paper, into Caro’s lap.
“I wrapped it,” Daniel said proudly.
“And Gabriela helped us pick it out,” Mami explained. “She said it was something you needed for the school year.”
Carolina eyed the parcel in her lap. “But why am I getting anything? I don’t understand.”
“Mi vida, let’s just say it’s something you’ve been waiting for,” Papi said. “Maybe you’ve even earned it. Lydia and that farmer worked out a deal, did you hear?”
“Really?” Carolina grinned. “That’s—” she faltered. Did Papi know what she and Jennifer had said to Lydia? After all, Lydia was friends with Uncle Porter and Tía Cuca, she might have told them the story, and they would have told Carolina’s parents. Would her parents be mad that she’d gone off into the woods again?
“Aren’t you happy?” Papi asked.
“I think it’s great news.” Carolina looked dubiously at Mami.
Mami didn’t say anything, didn’t offer approval or disapproval, just the slightest shrug. Maybe she was proud of Caro’s meddling, maybe she was furious, but that, Caro decided right then and there, was for Mami and Mami alone to know. She tore the paper off the package with abandon.
“Do you like it?
In Carolina’s lap were three small canvases and a box of new paints. “I love it,” she said.
“Now you can paint some of the things you’ve been sketching,” Mami said. “I would love to see that flamboyán in full color.”
Carolina grinned, and after everyone left the room she sat for a long time, holding each paint bottle up to the light one by one, and arranging and rearranging the colors in their case. They were not little-kid paints but real ones. They smelled of home: of Señora Rivón’s studio, and of Jennifer’s house.
There was a hint of cool weather in the air the day Jennifer and Carolina opened the back door to Jennifer’s house and noticed a single bedraggled ribbon on the ground.
Jennifer stopped on the steps. “What’s that?”
“It’s one of our Hansel and Gretel markers.” Carolina stooped and picked up the wet ribbon. “But what’s it doing here?”
Jennifer clapped her hand over her mouth. “Caro, look!”
Carolina dropped the ribbon and followed Jennifer, who had taken off toward the driveway.
The driveway was piled with things, and Carolina thought at first that the garage had been emptied, but as she drew closer she saw outlines of objects she recognized.
Metal chairs with crawling vines, painted a new and brilliant white.
Yellow curtains cut from sheets, cozy and cheerful.
And a folded note with tidy handwriting:
Thank you for the loan of these chairs and curtains, which did wonders to brighten my home. Like any good neighbor, I thought I should return these items once they were no longer needed. They are yours, and I hope you will keep them a good, long time.
With love,
Silver Meadows Farm
P.S. You will think that I have kept the little elves, but I’m sorry to say that they disappeared into the forest. I trust they will find their paths.
“I guess that means the cottage is really gone,” Carolina said, just as a breeze came and whipped the note out of her fingers. It sailed away, and landed somewhere near the base of Cooke’s Hill, lost among the trees.
Jennifer picked up one of the yellow curtains. “These would look nice in your new room,” she said to Caro, and pressed the curtains into Carolina’s hands.
They never found the little elves from the cottage hearth. Every time Carolina saw a flash of hunter green beneath an acorn cap, she thought that she had found one, but on closer inspection, it was always only a deeply colored leaf, and a well-positioned acorn cap.