My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer (6 page)

A seagull soared overhead. I reached for the bread and let the canoe drift. I handed a slice to Eva. We tossed little pieces in, waiting for the birds to come. And slowly they did.

Eva threw one piece close to the canoe, and two males reached it at the same time, squawking.

“What a noisy crowd of birds,” she said.

“I don't like crowds,” I said. My mind flicked to that angry mob outside the library.

“I like dancing in a crowd, but I don't like a crowd of people in the waiting room, all needing attention,” Eva said. She trailed her hand in the water and looked back at me. I purposefully stared into the water. At first I saw the sandy bottom, counting clams out of habit, and then I let my eyes shift until I saw my reflection. My eyes were so serious, and I saw a grown-up woman looking back at me.
Mom is wrong,
I thought defiantly. And then, the black, angry letters of the boycott flyer ruined my glass-lake morning. The hateful words replayed in my head—“
unnatural, queer, wrong
”—louder than the seagulls. I looked at Eva, ripping the bread into small pieces. Her hair was short, the way people expected a lesbian to look.

I threw a piece of bread, hard. It was a good throw—far away from the canoe. Several seagulls dove for it.

“Are you getting along with Tina now?” Eva asked.

I watched the ripples from the canoe roll away. “Yeah.”

“June.”

I looked up. Eva's eyes were serious. “I'm sorry I lost my temper that day at the softball game.”

“That's nothing compared to what's going on now,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “Your mom and I are committed to each other.”

“I'm not talking about the wedding or your fight.” I threw the last chunk of bread in, too big for the birds. Slowly the gulls left, leaving only one swimming nearby, waiting to see if we had anything left to throw.

“Do you mean the sign?”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“Try me.” She leaned closer. The canoe tipped, and I shifted to counteract her move.

“Be careful!”

Eva gripped either side of the boat. “I wish you would talk to me, June, about boats, about your friends.”

I wished she'd turn around again and start paddling. “You don't get it. You don't have kids.”

Eva didn't move. “I'd like . . . Soon you'll be my stepdaughter.”

“Great. Like I'll go around telling everyone I have two moms!” I grabbed the paddle and started for shore.

“June, I love—”

“You know what? You are the whole problem,” I shouted. “Before you moved in, everything was fine. Queers aren't supposed to have kids anyway!”

Eva turned white. “How dare you—how dare you say—”

“That's what everybody says! What am I supposed to think?” I splashed my oar in again and again, breaking the surface with each violent stroke, recklessly spraying water everywhere. First Mom, now Eva. I wanted to get out, to get back to land. And then I knew what to do.

I jumped overboard.

“June!”

“I'm swimming back,” I said. “You'll have to paddle back yourself.” I launched into my strongest freestyle stroke, kicking up a fountain of water.
Who cares if she can't J stroke,
I thought.
I hope it takes her hours.

IT TOOK HER thirty minutes to get back. She didn't say anything to Mom, so I didn't, either. Every now and then I'd catch Eva staring at me hard. I stayed out of the way, not talking to anybody. The problem with not talking, though, is that after a while you get so full of words, they could tumble out at any minute.

As soon as the sun rose the next morning, I whacked on my weather radio until the familiar announcer's voice rumbled: “Cloudy, clearing in the afternoon. South wind, ten to twelve knots. Lake temperature, sixty-eight degrees.”

A good sailing day. I placed the red lens over my flashlight and faced it toward Luke's island. I needed help.

Mom and I had made cookies last night. It had been soothing to beat the batter and fill the cookie sheets. Baking together was her way of making peace, but I still couldn't talk to her. Unspoken worries weighed me down, like too much salt in the dough.

I wanted to tell Luke everything—about my fight with Mom, with Eva, and the library crowd—but I didn't know where to begin. I could at least show him the flyer. The marina could be in a lot of trouble with these posted around. And I had to tell him about Mom refusing to let me enter the pie contest.

It wasn't fair. Secretly, I had found the baked goods competition for children ages eight to twelve in the fair exhibitor handbook that Ms. Flynn had given me. The form was straightforward enough, but right at the top it said
MOTHER'S NAME
,
FATHER'S NAME
and, at the last line,
SIGNATURE REQUIRED
. I needed Luke to help me find a way around that.

“June!” Eva called up the loft stairs. “Luke is here!”

Perfect. Our light system worked. I pulled on my bathing suit and shorts. I tucked the fair form in my back pocket along with the flyer.

“Hey, June.” Luke was in his bathing suit, ready for anything.

I gave him a “please wait” look, hoping he wouldn't ask what the trouble was in front of Eva.

But she didn't look up. She kept reading the newspaper.

“We're going sailing,” I said.

“OK,” she said without a glance.

I hesitated. “Do you think Mom needs help?”

“MJ is fine.”

She probably can handle everything because there's no business,
I thought as I glanced at the cove. One boat was gassing up, and I saw that Mom had put up a sign:
FRESH COOKIES TODAY.
I hoped someone—anyone—would come in.

Luke raced to the dock, and I followed. We quickly raised the mast and put in the rudder. “Where to, Captain?” Luke asked.

“Out,” I said. We navigated through the moorings. Once we got beyond Luke's island, the wind picked up, and we pulled the sail in tight and hung out as far as we could. I let my hand trail in the water as I held on to the main sheet. I felt bad about Eva. I deserved the silent treatment, I guess. Maybe I'd been too hard on Mom, too.

When we reached the middle of the bay, Luke came about and ran before the wind. We were going fast, but the boom was off to the side, and we could sit on either side of the boat.

Luke turned to me. “Well?”

I stalled, checking the telltale on the stay to see if the sail was right. “Mom won't let me enter a pie in the fair,” I said. “And I burned the pies the other night. I forgot to cover the edges.”

“So? Everybody makes mistakes,” Luke said.

“They're afraid of me being in the spotlight—”

“If you win . . . You might not,” he teased.

“I'm a champion pie maker!” I boasted, then paused. “Somebody said gays shouldn't have kids.”

“MJ is your mom!”

Eva isn't,
I thought. But I wasn't ready to talk about that yet. I took the fair form out of my pocket and showed it to him. “It also could be this—”

“What about it?”

“It asks for the father's name,” I said.

“June.” Luke shook the paper with his free hand. “Don't you think I've filled out a form like this? You leave it blank. Not everybody's got a mother and a father.”

My face reddened. I was so absorbed in my own problems, I had forgotten about families like Luke's. But my worries were bubbling over.

“Mom still won't sign it. She's right to be worried.” I unfolded the flyer. “Yesterday at the library I saw Lauren's mother passing these out.”

He took the flyer. The words “Take Back Vermont” and “Boycott Gay Businesses” jumped out in big letters. He whistled. “Wow. That's pretty low.”

“That's why so many sandwiches are left over at the shop.”

“More for us,” he joked, but I didn't laugh. He paused. “We could bike around town and rip down all the flyers.”

“If we could find them all.” I dragged my hand in the water, watching the wake, feeling a lump in my throat. I didn't want to talk about what happened at the library anymore. “Eva wants to marry Mom in a civil ceremony. They asked me to be the flower girl.”

“Cool,” he said, and pretended to fling flowers overboard as he hummed “Here Comes the Bride.”

I splashed him. “Only if I can wear a bathing suit under my dress.”

“Look at it this way—you're getting another parent.” He adjusted the tiller slightly. “My mother just doesn't want to live with us.”

The sail flapped, then filled with wind again. Sometimes when I went over to his house, washed dishes were stacked haphazardly next to a screwdriver. I'd help Luke put things away, because there are always plenty of chores when it's just two. That's the way my life had been, Mom and I making it up as we went along. Who needs more? Especially somebody as opinionated as Eva. But sometimes I caught Mom's warm eyes, taking in the three of us at the table together. Their fight had scared me; it sounded like the kind between Luke's mom and dad before she left.

“She visits me only once a year, you know.” Luke pulled the main sheet in, changing tack. “I can see how she couldn't live with us, on the island without a phone, but I don't see why I couldn't live with her sometimes.”

“Did you ever ask her?” The last time Luke's mom had visited, I had watched her emerge from her car with Quebec license plates in a tailored suit all wrong for getting in a boat to an island.

“She said managing the hotel takes all her time.”

“That stinks.” I folded the papers into small squares and put them back in my pocket.

Luke shrugged and turned the boat abruptly into the wind, letting the sail luff. He took off his shirt. “Man overboard!”

I shed my shorts. “Here I come!”

We splashed at each other but kept an eye on the sail. Luke was careful to push the nose of the boat back into irons, so it didn't take off without us.

“Let's go to Tin Can Island,” I said when we got back on, dripping.

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

In a moment, we were cruising toward the rock outcrop near the mouth of the bay.

“Hey, June,” Luke said as we got close. “Do you see what I see?”

“What?”

“Berries—and they look ripe!”

I guided the boat along the edge of the rock, and Luke jumped off to tie up. I lowered the sail and joined him. The island was covered in goldenrod and harebells, with cypress around its edge. We picked our way around the poison ivy, straight to the berries.

A small patch of black raspberries dangled in the light.

“I can't believe they're ripe,” I said, eating one. It tasted like a piece of sunshine.

“We're lucky the birds haven't eaten them all.” Luke began collecting them in his shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“Picking them for the best pie ever, of course. The one you are going to enter in the fair.”

I cupped a berry in my hand and rolled it back and forth. If I won, people would come back to the shop—never mind who owned it. I could add a few strawberries to sweeten up the black raspberries. What if I used three types of berries? Strawberries from Costas', these raspberries, and blueberries from the cliff-jumping spot. I was already beginning to imagine the flavor, with a little cinnamon, when I remembered the form.

“What about the entry form?” I asked.

“You could sign your mom's name.”

“Luke!” I punched him lightly. “I bet Mrs. Costa doesn't need her parent's signature.”

Luke looked at me. “Do you have to admit your age in the adult category?”

I stared. “You mean just enter that division?”

“Why not?”

It was a perfect idea. “Then I don't have to tell Mom,” I said. “It could just be me, June Farrell, pie maker!”

“As long as you give me credit as your champion berry finder,” he said, passing me his shirt filled with berries.

I placed the berries in the hull and watched Luke untie the boat. I touched my back pocket, feeling the form and flyer. All I needed was a little courage to enter the Champlain Valley Fair pie competition.

AS SOON AS I got home, I packed the black raspberries in our fridge—I didn't want to freeze them, just preserve them so they could last. The fair was only a week away, and I had to be ready.

Mom must have thought I would be hungry. I found a note propped up against the milk:
Come down to the marina right away, love Mom.

Whatever,
I thought. There was no chance to register for the pie competition today anyway—Luke had to help his dad in the studio. As I approached the dock, I was surprised to see more boats than I'd seen in a long time.

The bell sounded as I opened the door, and Mom looked up, grinning.

“I'm glad you're here. It's been the strangest day,” she said. “I have to run up and make another batch of cookies.”

“We've run out?”

“And almost all the sandwiches, too,” she said. “I even had an order from Joe's gallery in Burlington. Someone drove down. Said they'd heard so much about them.”

That was strange. It was the exact opposite of last week, when no one had come. My mind flashed to the boycott flyer, but it didn't make sense. I looked sharply at Mom to see if she suspected anything. Instead, she seemed happier than I'd seen her in a long time. It made me feel better.

“I was going to eat a sandwich but—”

“Don't worry—I'll make you something,” Mom said. “Let's save these last two for customers.”

The door jingled, and Mom scooted out as someone came in. I settled on the stool and pulled a Stillwater Marina cap on my head.

“Can I help you?”

The man smiled. “Just looking.”