Quite an Undertaking - Devon's Story (12 page)

That was kind of cool. Our little river was famous. I decided to put my reporter hat on. Maybe I’d propose an article for the Gazette about Mme Depardieu’s annual mecca to the land of Jacques Cartier. I raised my hand high in the air and hoped I didn’t sound like a jerk asking my simple question.

“Yes?” John pointed at me. “In the back?”

“Do you know when the lock was built?” I knew we were at the power dam and not at the lock, but John seemed interested, so what could it hurt to ask?

“Good question. I’ll detour to that topic for a second, but then I must get us back to the power dam stuff, or they won’t let me have popcorn.”

A couple of girls in the front giggled.

“Well,” he continued, “the lock officially opened in 1959. You all remember 1959, don’t you?” The girls in the front giggled again when he looked at them. “No? Okay, well President Dwight Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth were both on the first ceremonial ship through the lock, but it was New York Governor Roosevelt—Franklin Delano Roosevelt that is— that was the first one to push for the lock.”

I knew that Roosevelt had been the governor of New York State, but I had no idea that FDR, as my Grandma called him, had cared about the North Country.

John continued, “Roosevelt wanted the locks to protect our military ships in the Seaway in the event of war. The cost was enormous, and most people didn’t see the need for a seaway from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. Roosevelt persevered, though, even from the White House. He died in 1945, but President Eisenhower gave the lock project in Massena the final push, and it was finished in 1959. That’s why the lock is named for him.”

I felt bad for President Roosevelt. Okay, the whole St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project was named after him, but maybe the lock should have been named for him, too or at least hyphenated to the Roosevelt-Eisenhower lock. I laughed to myself. No, that would have been too much.

John smiled at me. “Okay, the history part is finished, and now your tour turns into science.”

He asked us to stay on one side of the exhibit hall and briefly explained some of the hands on demonstrations we’d see along the way. He encouraged us to read the signs and try everything out.

“Try to understand the underlying physics behind each exhibit,” he told us just before he set us free. “Fourth graders turn the knobs and press the buttons without understanding. This is your chance to get it this time. You have about twenty minutes on this side and then once Lynn’s group is out of the way, we’ll continue up the other side.”

Rebecca and I turned toward the exhibits.

“I wish we could have gone to the lock today, too,” I said. “It’s kind of cool.”

“Yeah, it is,” Rebecca agreed and smiled at me in a way that made my knees wobble. “Hey, maybe we can go there next summer. We can watch some ships go through. Jessie hates stuff like that.”

Another point for me. Take that Jessie. Of course, I didn’t say it out loud. I just smiled and said, “That’d be fun, and then we’ll go fishing, right?”

“Absolutely.” She nudged me lightly with her elbow again. “Hey, are you coming to my dance concert?”

“Of course. Three weeks from Friday.” I knew the date of her dance concert by heart.

“Right before Christmas. Ooh, Devon, I’m sorry.”

I had no idea what she was sorry about. We were looking at an exhibit about transformers, but I couldn’t see why transformers would make her apologize. “Sorry about what?”

“I brought up Christmas.”

“Oh.” A quick wave of sadness overtook me, but I fought hard to let it go. “That’s okay.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Tomorrow, it’ll be one month.”

“Already?”

“Yeah, and on Christmas day it’ll be exactly two months.”

“Oh, that sucks.” She put a hand on the sleeve of my jean jacket in sympathy. “That’s going to be a hard day for you.”

I saw my opening and silently thanked Missy for the idea. “Yeah, and I haven’t been back to visit her yet.” I looked down, but watched her out of the corner of my eye.

“Oh, you haven’t?”

I almost got lost in her soft sympathetic brown eyes, but I gathered up my courage and threw out the bait. “No, I only have my permit, and I don’t have a car, so...” I held my breath and hoped she would go for it.

“Oh, Devon. You should have asked me. I can drive you. I got my license in September, and if the cemetery’s locked, I can get the key.”

“You can?” I remembered to breathe again and wished I could hug her.

“Of course I can. This Thanksgiving week is a little busy, though. My Aunt Lucinda, my mom’s sister, is coming up from Norwich and spending the whole four-day weekend with us. I’ll be lucky if I can sneak away for the basketball game on Friday.”

“I hope you can,” I said way too quickly.

“I think so. My mom knows that Jessie’s my best friend.”

Best friend. Is that all, Rebecca, or is it more than that?

“Hey,” she continued, “maybe we can go visit your Grandma next week after school sometime. Okay?”

“Okay. That’d be awesome.” I looked away, afraid my expression would betray how I really felt about her. She had to know that I liked her. How could she not? How could anybody who saw the way I looked at her not know I was falling in love with her? Well, maybe it wasn’t love because I didn’t really know what love was yet, but it was definitely stronger than anything I felt for Marcy Berger in eighth grade and all those other crushes I’d had along the way.

We walked on silently, and I pretended to be fascinated by the old photographs of the dams on the St. Lawrence River. I let Rebecca lead the way through the exhibit hall, and remembered that on the night Jessie stranded me at Bruster, I decided that I would follow Rebecca wherever she led, and here I was following her around on our field trip. I couldn’t help the smile creeping up my face.

She stopped in front of a photograph of President Nixon and Queen Elizabeth. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.” I looked down at my feet.

“No, c’mon. I saw you smile.”

What was I supposed to say, that I wanted to follow her everywhere? I made up something quick. “I was thinking how Mme Depardieu drags us out here in November because she loves Jacques Cartier, and he had nothing to do with the Seaway. I mean, not really.”

“She’s funny about things like that, isn’t she?” She flashed me a mischievous smile, and the mirth in her eyes made me smile even bigger. “The French III classes used to go all the way to Québec, you know.”

“Oh, yeah?” Oh, what a conversationalist I was. My brain was mush. Couldn’t I think of anything more clever to say than Oh, yeah?

“Yeah, but I guess budget cuts forced us here.” She gestured to the exhibits. “Hey, Devon?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you sure you’re okay hanging out with me today?”

I couldn’t believe she was asking me that question. “Yeah, why?”

“Oh, well. I just…you know.” She pulled up her sleeve again and showed me her forearm.

Of course it didn’t matter to me that her skin color was darker than mine. “Rebecca, how can you ask me a question like that?”

“Well, I don’t want you getting grief from—” She waved her hand toward the other students in the exhibit hall.

“Them? Pfft. Don’t worry about them. Who cares what they think?”

“Well, it’s kind of hard being different.”

Was she trying to feel me out on the race issue? I wasn’t sure, but I tried to make her feel better by saying, “Well, I kind of know what it’s like to be different.” Not that anybody knew I was different since I wasn’t out of the closet yet, but still.

“No, I don’t think you do, Devon.”

“Yeah, actually, I do. Your difference is just a little more, uh, obvious.”

She was about to say something, but then a bunch of our classmates came by, and we couldn’t talk anymore. Even though I had just kind of come out to her, we managed to walk on for a while in what I would call a comfortable silence.

John directed our group up the other side of the exhibits and then to the movie in the big theater after that. I could hardly concentrate on the movie with Rebecca sitting so close to me in the semi-darkness. Once the movie finished, I finally got to have popcorn while watching the video in the lobby. I couldn’t believe it when Monsieur LaFrett, one of the other French teachers, announced that we had to get back on the buses to return to school. It felt like we had just gotten there.

Rebecca and I walked side by side to the bus, but I stepped aside to let her get on first. She seemed surprised by my chivalry, and I couldn’t help thinking that Jessie would have bounded on the bus leaving Rebecca trailing behind. I heard the scoreboard tick over again. Another point for me.

Rebecca headed toward the same seat we had shared earlier and slid all the way to the window. I sat next to her, but sitting this close made my palms sweat and my stomach flip. I tried to act normal, but that was nearly impossible. I felt better once the bus started moving back toward the tunnel to Massena.

Rebecca turned to me. “Did you bring lunch?”

I smiled at her, kept eye contact, and reached down for my backpack. I unzipped the front pouch and pulled out my banana. I held it up, brown spots and all, for her to see.

“That’s it? A banana?” She looked at me incredulously.

“Faulty alarm clock, remember?”

“Oh, you didn’t have time.” Her eyes were an odd mixture of sympathy and laughter.

“Pretty much. I’m lucky I’ve got this baby.” I wiggled the banana and then zipped it back into my backpack.

“I’ll share if you want. I’ve got plenty. My mom made my lunch, and she packed me a huge turkey sandwich on seven grain bread with…” She opened her lunch bag and rooted around. “Oh, a granola bar and some cucumber slices. I could split everything with you, if you want.”

“You would?”

She nodded.

“Thanks.” I got all jiggly inside thinking that Rebecca wanted to share her lunch with me. I had planned to snag half of Gail’s sandwich, but maybe Rebecca wanted me to eat lunch with her at the same table and everything. “Looks like your mom knew I’d be in a pickle today.”

Rebecca made a show of looking in her lunch bag again. “Nope. No pickles, just cucumbers.” She chuckled at her joke, and I laughed with her. It felt amazing.

“Well, that’s okay. I’m not a pickle fan anyway.”

“Me neither. I’ll take the original cucumber instead.”

“Oh, I know. Me, too.” We settled into a conversation about the foods we liked, and it turned out that we both liked to eat healthy, but she admitted a weakness for hot fudge brownie sundaes. For me it was black raspberry ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. We decided that we would pig out at Scoopalicious once they reopened in the spring.

We were almost through the tunnel when the bus swerved wildly knocking me into Rebecca. We both put a hand down on the seat to brace ourselves, and our hands touched. Rebecca started to pull hers away, but before I knew what I was doing, I reached over and linked my pinky with hers.

THANKSGIVING WITHOUT GRANDMA sucked. Uncle Joe sat in Grandma’s usual spot next to Dad, and I couldn’t help thinking that Uncle Joe had just moved up in the family pecking order. Families changed, I realized. Families shifted. Grandmas died. I squeezed my eyes shut at the dinner table, so I wouldn’t cry in front of everybody. I made myself think about Rebecca and holding her pinky on the bus. That helped me keep it together a little.

Jarrod, my cousin, pretty much ignored everybody, and after dinner he sat in the living room with his headphones blasting some kind of heavy metal music. He was in tenth grade at Grasse River, but even though he and I were related, I never hung out with him. Everybody was always amazed when they found out we were cousins. Mom used to make me hang out with him during holidays, but since he was so anti-social, she gave me permission to retreat to my room after I helped clear the table.

I went up to my room and tried not to notice Grandma’s open bedroom door. When I got to my own room, I left the lights off and flung myself on the bed. I hugged Seymour as hard as I could and cried as I remembered Dad’s grace before the meal. He’d started by saying, “Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks, and I would like to thank the Lord for the wonderful life He gave my mother—” He glanced at Uncle Joe and modified his toast. “—our mother. She lived a good life, and we were lucky to be able to call her Mom or Grandma.” When he said “Grandma” that’s when I started crying for real. I think Missy did, too because she wiped at her eyes a couple times. I bowed my head even more and hoped I wouldn’t embarrass myself by having to leave the table or something. I saw my mom rest her hand on Dad’s wrist while he spoke. I thought that was sweet and was glad that we had such a boring normal family that could comfort each other, but I was also incredibly glad when we finally got to say, “Amen.”

We tried to make Thanksgiving seem like every other Thanksgiving, but I for one had a hard time pulling it off. I kept thinking little things about Grandma like how she hated green bean casserole. She always said the mushroom soup ruined perfectly good green beans. Would my mom or dad ever have to live with me or Missy when they got older, like Grandma had to live with us? Would I say grace someday and thank the Lord for the life of my mom or my dad?

I lay on my bed in the dark and tried to convince myself that Grandma was the reason I wanted to go to the cemetery with Rebecca next week. I knew otherwise because having Rebecca to myself was the major reason. Maybe we could hold pinky fingers again, or, hey, maybe we could even go all the way and hold hands. I laughed, but stopped because I needed to make visiting Grandma my priority. I was kind of scared going to the cemetery because I wasn’t sure how emotional I would get. I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of Rebecca again.

On the bus, I had taken advantage of a good thing thanks to my grandfather-look-alike bus driver swerving to avoid what we found out later was a workman changing light bulbs in the tunnel. Grabbing her pinky was my way of giving her a sign. She was either thinking, “Finally!” or she was thinking “Gross!” I still didn’t know which because Rebecca hadn’t called or texted me since the trip. I could have texted her, but I was scared to death. When we got off the school bus after the field trip, she handed me half her lunch without saying much and then hurried into the school building leaving me behind. By the time I got to the cafeteria, she was already sitting with Jessie and her regular group of friends. I tried hard not to be disappointed as I made my way toward Gail and Travis.