All-Season Edie (17 page)

“No, it's okay,” Robert says. “It was that stupid Weight Watchers my mom made me go to. I guess it worked.”

“Is your mom here too?”

Robert nods. “Just the two of us this year.” I see he's happy about that. “Want to go fishing?”

Dexter pokes me in the arm.

“This is my sister, Dexter,” I say, and Robert says hi and Dexter says hi in the soft shy voice she uses for boys she likes the look of. She's gone a little pink in her cheeks also. I look at Robert and roll my eyes, and he crosses his eyes at me, and I know he'll be my friend for one more summer at least.

“Let's go fishing,” he says again. “The rowboat will fit all three of us.”

“I don't know how to fish,” Dexter says in that same bashful, appealing voice and blinks a few times for good measure. I've seen it all before.

“Well,” Robert says slowly. “There's a lot to learn. But we could use a second mate.”

He holds his hand out for Dexter to take and pulls her out of the boat. Maybe I made a mistake a moment before, and my summer is going to be rather lonely after all. I scramble out on my own.

“The first thing you have to do is go back up to the office and ask for some bait,” he says, and when he turns back to help tie the pedal boat up again, he gives me an enormous, unmistakable wink.

That night, our parents go to bed early, leaving us flopped out in the cedar chairs on the front deck with a big bowl of popcorn and instructions to keep it down. I flip through Dexter's teen magazines while she reads one of my mystery stories. Lights from the other cabins wink through the trees, and after a while I pull my beach towel from where it was drying on the railing and drape it over my knees against the mild summer-night cool. Dexter does the same. Dexter's towel has a Hawaiian pattern on it, big bloomy flowers, blue on blue, and mine is green on green. These are new, a surprise gift from Mom when we came up from the lake this afternoon, panting and laughing and dripping and swatting at each other, Dexter saying, “I can't believe you guys did that to me!” and me saying, “I can't believe you fell for it!”

I immediately wrapped my towel around myself like a cape, but Dexter showed me how to knot it at my hip over my bathing suit, like a sarong, and we sashayed around the cabin that way for the rest of the afternoon.

“That boy has made you girls giddy,” Dad said. He had spent the afternoon in a deck chair on the carpet of fragrant pine needles a little way from the cabin, turning the pages of his newspaper and humming tunelessly, like a motor.

“Daddy!” we both shrieked and collapsed laughing on the sofa, though we couldn't have said exactly why.

“When you see Robert tomorrow, invite him and his mom for dessert,” Mom said. “I'll make a pumpkin pie.”

“In the summer?” I said wonderingly, even though pumpkin pie is our family's favorite.

“Sure,” Mom said. “We'll celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” Dexter said.

Mom and I looked at each other, and I thought,
I know what
, though I wouldn't have wanted to say it aloud. It was that we still had the whole summer ahead of us, and our whole family was happy at the same time, and that was rare enough these days to be cause for a celebration.

“Go to bed, Edie,” Dexter says now, and I realize my eyes have closed and I've been drifting. “I'm coming in a minute.”

Don't tell me what to do, I think. But because the night is so peaceful, the lake quietly lapping and the night bird calling every few minutes, and because we've spent such an unexpectedly pleasant day, and because I really do want to go to bed, I content myself with dropping my new towel on my sister's head as I pass by on my way back into the cabin. Smiling at Dex's thrashing limbs and muffled threats, I look forward to my sister's fierce, sweet, inevitable revenge. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but soon, I know. Soon.

Annabel Lyon
is the author of two books of adult fiction,
Oxygen
and
The Best Thing for You
.
All-Season Edie
is her first work for children. She lives in New Westminster, British Columbia, with her husband and two children.