Red Kayak: Chapters 12–15

This would have been during the holidays, five months earlier, because I remembered the porch banisters all decorated with pine boughs and an enormous, sweet-smelling bayberry wreath that hung on the front door.

After dessert, after I’d picked up every morsel of that delicious key-lime pie with my fork tines, I said to Ben, “Hey. How about showing me that new hamster you got for Christmas?”

It was surreal, but I’ll tell you, I about died laughing.

I hoped it wasn’t rude the way I dropped my mouth, but I almost didn’t recognize her she looked so bad. Like a bedraggled ghost, you could say.

Even her hair, usually so thick and curly, was pulled back severely, held at the nape of her neck with a cloth scrunchie like a lot of the girls wear at school.

She turned and moved quickly down the stairs. I heard her clogs clomp across the marble foyer, then the front door open and close.

How could Ben stand all that racket? I wondered. As it was, I still had trouble sleeping.

Every other week I mowed the lawn and trimmed, which took all day. Then I mulched the gardens, weeded, planted, and watered everything.

I had to stop for a second, to expound a little, because I knew a lot about butterflies.

Warily, I looked up.

One day, we talked about butterflies again, and I told her about butterfly eyes.
“They can look forward and backward at the same time,” I said. “It’s true because they have hundreds of separate lenses. It’s like looking out from a bowl—a fish-eye, panoramic view of the world.”

Mom winced. “She did?”

Mom’s eyes flitted sideways. She ran a hand back through her hair. “I’m sorry. Of course you wouldn’t know. But those are pretty classic symptoms, you know—morning nausea, fatigue.”

Mom’s eyes flitted sideways. She ran a hand back through her hair. “I’m sorry. Of course you wouldn’t know. But those are pretty classic symptoms, you know—morning nausea, fatigue.”

I even planted some milkweed, violets, and wispy salt grass for the caterpillars—you know, when butterflies are in the larval stage.

When Digger’s grandfather owned the property, J.T., Digger, and I played pirates in that boathouse and used our dinghy for the pirate ship.

“I wondered if you could get things into some kind of order,” Mrs. DiAngelo said. “Pull everything out, sort it. If there’s anything salvageable, put it aside. Make a pile for the dump. Then just rake up around there. It’s such a mess.”

I had to shake my head, remembering how we all brought him food—sandwiches and cookies and stuff, but his sojourn didn’t last much beyond dinnertime.

“Whew!” I needed to plow through the nostalgia and get to work.

Grabbing the rake, I began pulling debris away from the sides of the boathouse.

Instinctively, I looked around to see if someone might be watching me. My heart started pounding.

The smell of something baking, something chocolate, wafted up behind her, and I spied J.T.’s cute little sister Kerry peeking around the corner to see who had come.

“He’s culling, down at the chicken houses,” she said. “Wouldn’t you know it? We had a huge shipment of new chicks yesterday.”

I went back down the steps and walked across their flat dirt yard, past several outbuildings and the huge grain silos, to the first of four long chicken houses.

There were big electric fans droning in the windows to keep the birds cool, but it was just as hot as I remembered.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” I said loudly, so he could hear above the din.

Outside, we walked over to a compost bin, where J.T. dumped the contents of his pillowcase and made a body count, noting the number on a piece of paper.

“Surgery?” His question—and the bluntness of it—threw me.

“I made brownies,” Kate chimed sweetly, trying to entice me to have dinner with them.

Because of the way the light came through the boathouse, he was a silhouette, but I knew the compact, lean body and the way he held his muscular shoulders back.

Digger looked away for a second, and when he looked back at me, his voice had lost its angry timbre.

It was quite a sight because the kayak was longer than the car. Agape, we’d stood on the sidewalk with our sodas while he waved and dashed into the store.

“Come on, what are you afraid of?” Digger had goaded me, shoving the cigarette in my face.

J.T. was coughing, but we’d both stepped away from Digger, who brought the cigarette down quickly and pulled his incriminating hand behind his back.

“Yeah! Murder! They’ll send us all to reform school—J.T., me, and you, too,” he railed, thumping me on the chest with his finger.