Where the Watermelons Grow: Chapters 18–27

They’d been drying sheds, made to hang all those bunches of tobacco leaves from the rafters.

She was still watching me with that expectant eyebrows-up, give-me-your-answer-young-lady sort of face; I wondered if her forehead was hurting yet.

“She’s gotten worse so fast, and I tried everything I could think of to fix her, but none of it worked,” I said finally, my voice hardly making it past my throat and leaving my words mangled and soft.

A hot gust of wind wrapped itself around me, pelting my legs and arms with little grains of sand and dust, a hundred little fires on my skin.

I thought of the noise and bustle at Arden’s house—the little girls screaming and chasing each other, Eli and Arden fighting, the baby crying.

“See?” Daddy said, his face as pale as the downy white heron that lurked in the shadow of a tree by the water’s edge.

“See?” Daddy said, his face as pale as the downy white heron that lurked in the shadow of a tree by the water’s edge.

I’d known Arden my whole entire life, and never once had any words come between us that felt as hard and hurtful as the few we’d just exchanged. Lying there on that mattress, I felt the fear of it creeping over me like the kudzu that twined over the trees beside the highway.

It had only been fifteen days since that night I’d come in to find Mama in the kitchen cutting out watermelon seeds like her salvation depended on it.

The heat was already rising up, radiating from the asphalt down over me, until I found myself wondering how on earth I still had water left to sweat out.

The heat was already rising up, radiating from the asphalt down over me, until I found myself wondering how on earth I still had water left to sweat out.

There were other things on the shelves, too—fancy-shaped yellow bricks of beeswax, little displays of stacked-up lip balm containers, those plastic straws filled with honey that Grandma and Grandpa Kelly were always convinced counted as a real treat.

Miss Tabitha pulled a chair out from the table and waved at me to sit down, then scurried around the kitchen, pouring me a glass of lemonade and spreading butter and honey over a thick slice of bread.

“My daddy had to stop by the church,” I lied. “He, uh...wanted to get some notes from yesterday’s sermon. To share with Mama. I just walked on over from there.”

I looked down, tracing a finger along the whorls of the wooden kitchen table. “I told you I had something that could heal you, if you wanted it.”

The water sluiced down from the sky like God was pouring it from giant-size buckets, filling the ditch beside me so fast the water was higher every time I blinked.

Somehow, here in Miss Lorena’s car with the rain pattering down on the roof above me, the honey in my little jar seemed much less magical than it had when I’d been sitting in the Bee Lady’s kitchen.

I’d eaten a lot more of the honey by the time Miss Lorena came back, spooning it into my mouth with my finger and not even bothering to savor it anymore.

“She was just fine until I came along. The schizophrenia didn’t come on until I was born. Dr. DuBose says it was triggered by the hormones and the stress. And—” I took a deep, shaky breath.

Deep inside my heart, deeper even than the fear that Mama would never get better and that it was my fault she was sick in the first place, another fear was nestled, hard and sharp and thick.

No, I thought, remembering how much Daddy hated it when I called Mama crazy, remembering how Mama had winced once when she’d heard a man at church refer to people like her that way.

I hugged Mama, trying not to feel how trembly and frail she seemed, about to float away on the breeze any minute.

“Sweetheart, your mama and I love you so much—that’s exactly why we wanted Mylie. We just couldn’t abide the thought of going all through life without another little girl or boy to love, too. And we knew what we were doing, I promise. Dr. DuBose worked with us every step of your mama’s pregnancy—you know that. We knew it might be tough, but we also knew it would be worth it.”

“Next time, fill us in before Suzie ends up in the hospital,” Grandpa said gruffly.

It rained all that week and into the beginning of the next one, rain that sighed and cried until all the grass in Maryville started to turn green again, and on Sunday the preacher got up at the pulpit and gave thanks in a voice that trembled and dipped like the rain itself.