Three Bird Summer Read online

  I stared across the water at the loons and pretended not to notice the kids. Loons were more interesting anyway. Their heads were glossy and black, with a band of vertical black-and-white stripes around their necks that looked like something they’d stolen from a zebra. Their eyes were red. Across their backs, dozens of small white squares aligned in near-perfect rows.

  The two loons drifted closer to me, then abruptly dove underwater. A moment later, I heard the sound of oars clunking against the oarlocks of a boat and looked up to see the two kids rowing into talking range.

  “Hey,” said the girl. Her long hair was pulled back in a smooth ponytail, and she wore a faded T-shirt from someplace called Camp Watson. “Are you Mrs. Stegner’s grandson?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The boy was looking at me coolly. I turned my attention to my foot and started picking idly at my big toenail. There were certain boys at my school who turned into total jerks whenever girls were around, and I sensed he was one of them.

  “What’s the matter? Too much toe jam?” the boy asked.

  I pulled my hand away and shrugged. “It’s nothing,” I mumbled.

  “We’re going fishing,” the girl said. “Want to come?”

  The boy’s eyes traveled over the inside of the boat, which was already stuffed full with tackle boxes, cushions, and a white plastic pail. “Where’s he going to sit — your lap?”

  “Very funny, Tyler. There’s plenty of room if you slide those worms under your butt,” she told him.

  Tyler made a face at her.

  “That’s OK,” I said quickly. “I promised my grandmother I’d help her out with some things around the cabin.”

  “No problem,” the girl said. “I’m Alice, by the way. And this is my cousin Tyler.”

  I nodded. Cousin. So much for my defense against Grandma’s teasing.

  “You got a name?” Tyler asked when I didn’t say anything.

  “Uh, yeah. Adam,” I said.

  He smirked. “Nice.”

  “See you around!” Alice said, giving Tyler a look.

  “Later, Uh-Yeah Adam,” said Tyler, whipping his blond hair out of his eyes. He picked up the oars and gave them a strong pull.

  I watched them row across the water. A girl on the lake was bad. A girl with an obnoxious cousin was even worse. I couldn’t help feeling like my favorite place on earth had just been invaded by enemy forces.

  LATE IN THE MORNING, I found Mom in the kitchen, her nose buried in the refrigerator. She had been cleaning. The house smelled like Murphy Oil Soap, and the surfaces had an unnaturally shiny glow.

  “We need to go to town for food,” Mom said, closing the refrigerator door with a hard shove. “There’s nothing in here but eggs and a very old ham. I’m not even sure she’s gone shopping since Uncle Martin brought her up last month.” Uncle Martin was Mom’s brother. He lived in the Twin Cities and came up to the cabin for occasional weekend visits.

  I glanced out the window at Grandma’s station wagon, covered with pine needles. It didn’t look like it had been moved in a long time.

  “Maybe she doesn’t feel like driving anymore,” I said.

  “Maybe she shouldn’t be driving anyway,” Mom said quietly, more irritated than concerned. “Come on, let’s go to the store so we have something for lunch.”

  I made a face. “I’d rather stay here.”

  “I need you to come,” my mom said. “I can’t keep track of what you like and don’t like these days.”

  “Where’s Grandma?” I asked.

  “Someplace nearby listening to us, I’m sure,” Mom said under her breath. She washed her hands at the sink and dried them on a tattered dish towel.

  “Ma?” she called. “Adam and I are going into town for some provisions. Would you like to come?”

  We heard a thump from around the corner. Grandma emerged with a dust rag in one hand and a sponge in the other. “Apparently your mother thought this place wasn’t spick-and-span enough,” she told me with a scowl.

  “Mom’s a neat freak,” I said.

  “You’ve always kept this place neat, Ma,” my mom said. “I’m just maintaining tradition.”

  “The tradition was that there were men around here to do the heavy lifting,” Grandma said. “Then we ladies had time for cooking and cleaning.”

  Mom grimaced, but I couldn’t tell if my grandmother was referring to my dad’s absence this summer or to the old days, when my grandfather was still alive. From what everyone said, he was a total freak of nature — a big lumberjack of a guy who could chop down a tree, build a shed, fix a leaky pipe, haul out the dock, swim across the lake, and still be back on the deck in time for five o’ clock martinis.

  “Anyway, we’ll stock up on the basics,” Mom said, ignoring Grandma’s remark. “Are you staying home, then?”

  Grandma nodded. We all knew she hated leaving the property. It wasn’t so much about driving the Taurus as about seeing herself as a kind of pioneer woman who could exist without modern conveniences. Never mind that she loved an Oreo or two before bedtime.

  “Can we get you anything when we’re there?” Mom asked.

  “You know what I like,” Grandma said.

  “All right, then,” Mom said. She picked up her purse. “We’ll be back in time for lunch.”

  My mom looked strained as she drove out to the main road.

  “I knew it,” she said. “Something’s not right.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Grandma’s different. She’s . . . I don’t know. I think she’s slipping.”

  I wasn’t sure what my mom was talking about. Grandma seemed her usual tough self to me. So what if she forgot what time we were supposed to arrive and hadn’t bothered to go grocery shopping? That was just Grandma being stubborn, wasn’t it?

  “Well, we can help out now,” I said.

  “Temporarily,” Mom said. “And not when she’s back in her house in St. Paul.”

  “Uncle Martin can take care of her there,” I pointed out.

  “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Martin with a pet fish,” Mom said.

  I gave up. Mom was in one of her arguing moods. I knew she’d just pick apart anything I said.

  “And I’m supposed to go to Madison in two weeks for a conference,” she went on.

  “So go,” I said.

  “And leave you here?” she asked.

  A skinny tree branch whipped in through my open window, and I jerked my head to avoid it. The drive was a challenge under any circumstances, and Mom wasn’t driving her best.

  “Mom, we’ll be totally fine,” I said. “Why are you so worked up?”

  Just then a deer burst through the trees. Mom braked hard as it bounded across the road. I could see the muscles ripple under its brown hide as it leaped past us and disappeared into the roadside shrubs.

  “This place gets wilder and wilder as the rest of the lake gets more and more tame,” Mom said.

  “Yeah. So?” I asked. I had a strong desire to bolt from the car and run through the bushes like the deer.

  “Maybe you could come with me to Madison,” she continued as she started driving again.

  “Mom, that’s stupid,” I said. “You just said you don’t trust Grandma by herself.”

  “That doesn’t mean I want you looking after her.” She shook her head. “You don’t see the things I do, Adam.”

  I was glad for that. More and more, it felt like my mom was one big worry machine. “Well, I still think we can survive a few days,” I said finally.

  She pursed her lips and drove the rest of the way without saying a word. I stared out the window, relieved to have some silence.

  The town of Hubbard Falls looked the same as always. The main street was like something from an old-fashioned movie set, with a dime store, a movie theater, a candy shop, a soda fountain, and an antique store filled with old snowshoes, painted duck decoys, and a real Indian birch-bark canoe. But that part of town lasted only a few blocks before it intersected
a long stretch of fast-food restaurants and the kinds of chain stores you could find anywhere in America.

  Once we were at the grocery store, Mom shopped with attitude. She piled the cart high with milk, cheese, and fresh produce, and stuffed the bottom with a ton of nonperishables.

  “You expecting a snowstorm?” I asked her at one point.

  “Ha-ha.”

  But it wasn’t really a joke. She was like a grocery shopper with road rage, overfilling the cart in what I guessed was some kind of statement to Grandma. “This is food,” she seemed to be saying with every box of cereal. “This is how you stock a kitchen,” said the oatmeal, the sugar, the jam. I finally drifted away to flip through baseball magazines. The Cubs were having a rough season, but I still followed their every game. I didn’t rejoin Mom until she was at the register.

  As expected, Grandma looked grim when we brought all the bags into the cabin.

  “I’m not sure where we’re going to put all this,” Grandma said as Mom started pulling out bags of rice and pasta, cans of soup and tuna.

  “I’ll take care of it, Ma,” my mom said.

  Grandma started to empty a bag, then gave a small shrug and returned to the living room, where she had been dusting the mantel.

  “All these little nooks and crannies,” she complained, poking her dust rag along its edge.

  The mantel had an intricate wooden rail around it carved with cutouts of animals. There was a loon, a bear, a beaver, a fish, a squirrel, a wolf, and a deer. As a kid, I’d climb on the brick foundation that wrapped around the fireplace and stretch up to the mantel, running my fingers along the inside of the animal shapes, like tracing stencils in the air.

  “I thought you liked that mantel, Grandma,” I said now.

  “Oh, sure I do,” she said. “It’s just a pisser to keep the dust out.”

  She slid the rag into the narrow opening of the loon’s beak.

  “You can make that my job, if you want,” I said.

  “You just enjoy the lake,” she said. “That’s the job for grandsons.”

  I smiled. Grandma was OK. I was looking forward to when Mom left for her conference. I pictured Grandma making me pancakes for supper and going to bed so early that I could stay up till midnight without her noticing.

  Grandma stopped dusting and furrowed her brow. “Now, what do we have to feed you? Not much, I’m afraid. Do you like ham and biscuits?”

  I hesitated, confused. “Grandma, Mom and I just went shopping, remember?” I said. Was it possible she’d forgotten? “We have all sorts of food.”

  She looked at me for an extra moment and then nodded. “I didn’t know you bought lunch food.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was covering for her mistake or if she really meant it.

  “Let’s go eat,” I said quickly, and headed into the kitchen.

  FOR A FEW DAYS, Alice and her relatives were a constant, unwelcome presence on the lake, whether or not they were actually in sight. Tyler wasn’t the only other kid. There were a couple of boys almost as loud as my cousins, and one little girl who liked to float in a giant inner tube tethered to their dock. I never sat on our own dock when I knew they were outside, choosing instead the hammock under the trees that separated our two properties. I swam only a few times, always listening for the sound of Tyler’s mocking voice across the water. I worried, too, that they might discover my grandmother’s morning routine — swimming at sunrise before the rest of us were up, with her bathing cap on and her bathing suit off. It seemed normal enough to us after all these years, but that didn’t mean she should have spectators. Then one day, the activity around their dock came to an abrupt stop. We learned later that most of the family had gone on a camping trip. Our lake was restored.

  For a week, we did all the things we’d always done at the cabin. We took the canoe across the lake and up the Potato River, passing blue herons standing watchful among the reeds and painted turtles basking in the summer sun. Another time we paddled all the way to Hubbard Falls, pulling our canoe ashore at the town park and walking over to the ice-cream parlor. Grandma dug around in the bottom of her purse and came up with enough coins to buy us each an ice-cream cone. Mom didn’t mention that she had sixty dollars in her wallet.

  On rainy days, we hunkered down in the cabin. Mom had work to do — she was editing manuscripts for a medical journal in Chicago — but Grandma and I stayed busy with cribbage and gin rummy. Other kids would have probably hated being in a cabin without anything but a radio and a telephone to connect them to the outside world. But I liked it. It made me feel farther away from school — like we were trekkers at a remote base camp or polar explorers at a primitive field station.

  Grandma spaced out a few times about little things, like whether she’d made her tea yet and which game we’d decided to play. But it all seemed like pretty minor stuff. Not so different from my mom forgetting my favorite kinds of cookies and breakfast cereal. In a way, it made me feel useful. Like for once I had a job that I could do better than Grandma. I could be Memory Guy.

  I spent a whole afternoon lounging on the hammock thinking about what Memory Guy would be like as a superhero. I sketched him with a red cape emblazoned with the letter M. I had him tracking down lost sunglasses and car keys and reminding people about their dental appointments. I imagined a major crisis in which vinegar zombies try to take over Earth until Memory Guy remembers the formula for baking soda and neutralizes them in a fury of sticky bubbles.

  It occurred to me that Memory Guy could even be the hero of my family. He could help my parents remember the reasons they used to like each other. He could remind them of the promises they’d made to stay together till the bitter end. I tried turning my ideas into a real comic strip, thinking I could mail it to my dad and it would make him chuckle. “Here’s one thing you can forget,” Memory Guy said in one panel. “Those divorce papers!” But something made me stop — maybe it was my pathetic drawing skills, or maybe it was realizing that it probably wouldn’t make my dad chuckle at all.

  I spent a lot of time down on the dock, of course — sitting, swimming, watching the boats, thinking. There were times I missed the company of my cousins, even if I didn’t miss having them boss me around. They had always invented hilarious games on the water — like turning inner tubes into floating basketball hoops or creating a water golf course out of floating life jackets. One time they even set up a bowling alley down the length of the dock; gutter balls became splash balls, and strikes required diving under the water for ten sunken pins. Grandma told my mom that she thought the boys should have been invited to the cabin this year as always, even if my dad wasn’t coming. But Mom said it would be too awkward for everyone, especially for her and Uncle John and Aunt Jean. “A lot of things are going to be different from now on, Ma,” she’d added. She said it quietly, but of course I heard.

  Left on my own so much of the time, I began to think that maybe this was the year to start canoeing by myself. I liked imagining the moment when I came up from the dock telling Grandma I’d completed my first circumnavigation. I’d be just like Christopher Columbus standing before the Queen of Spain, minus the long robes and funny tights. But what about all the hard work that came before that? What would it really feel like, I wondered, to be alone on the far end of the lake? Would I be able to control the boat? Would I be strong enough to get it home? What if I tipped over? I eyed Grandma’s canoe, a bulky red Old Town sitting overturned on some logs near the shore. It weighed a ton. I wasn’t even sure I could get it into the water by myself. So much for Christopher Columbus; in the end, it was easiest just to wait for my mom and grandma to be ready for their next paddle.

  At the end of the week, Mom started fretting again about her conference. I could tell she still wasn’t comfortable leaving Grandma and me alone. The day before she left, she filled the house with more groceries and kept giving me suggestions for meals I could prepare if Grandma wasn’t up to cooking.

  Late in the afternoon, I wandered back to
my room to get my swim trunks, planning to squeeze in a quick dip before dinner. Standing in front of the dresser, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror — something that never thrilled me. I lifted up my arm and made a fist. It was totally humiliating: my bicep looked like a small potato. Some guys at school were so ripped, their muscles looked like boulders — boulders that could easily crush a little potato into mush. Maybe I’d start lifting logs this summer and see if it would help me bulk up.

  “Do you have enough clean clothes to wear till I’m back?” Mom asked from the other room.

  I ignored her.

  “Adam?” she called.

  I gave up and wandered in. “I’m fine,” I said. “I could wear the same shorts and shirt all summer, and it wouldn’t matter.”

  “You’d smell,” she said.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. “Anyway, I have a bunch of shirts, and you’ll only be gone for four days.”

  She folded her clothes carefully and placed them in her suitcase. “Do you have something to read?”

  “There are lots of books here,” I said.

  “And you’ve probably read most of them three times already.”

  “I haven’t read Remembrance of Things Past. I haven’t read One Hundred Famous Minnesotans,” I said. After all these years, I had managed to memorize most of the titles on Grandma’s shelves.

  “Yeah, good luck with those,” she said. “I’ll bring you back something from Madison.”

  “Cool.”

  I sat down on the bed, leaned back, and began picking up Mom’s little balls of rolled-up socks and tossing them into her open dresser drawer across the room. It was definitely a three-point shot.

  “Name two things you liked best about Grandma when you were a kid,” I said as I tossed.