Three Bird Summer (13 page)

“Are you kidding?” she asked, grinning again.

“It actually looks kind of cool, you know,” I said.

“Try telling that to the flip-flop girls,” she said for the second time that summer. And of course I knew just what she meant.

That night at dinner, my grandmother peered at me with sly interest, the way she had on our first morning at the cabin.

“You sure are spending a lot of time with that Jensen girl, Adam,” she said. “I told you you’d like her.”

Mom glanced at me, seeming both curious and a little concerned. I tried to shrug them off.

“She
is
the only person within two decades of my age around here,” I pointed out.

“She’s also very sweet,” Mom said.

“You never had a boyfriend up here at the lake, did you, Bobbie?” my grandmother asked.

“Just one,” Mom said. “Alex Pinkwaller. His dad owned the soda fountain, remember? I think I only went out with him for the free ice-cream sundaes.”

“Alice isn’t my girlfriend,” I told Grandma.

“She didn’t say she was,” Mom said. “Right, Ma?”

Grandma shrugged. “You can’t fool me.”

It was something she had said a lot over the years, with a smug tone that drove me crazy. “You can’t fool me because I’m older, wiser, and more clever than all the rest of you combined”— that was her basic message.

“Well, what about you, Grandma? How many boyfriends did you have up at the cabin?” I asked her. I said it a little viciously, I’ll admit. But why couldn’t I ask? Why was I so busy protecting her from her own secrets if she was letting me in on them anyway, knowingly or not?

A shadow passed over Grandma’s face.

“Oh, Adam,” Mom said. “There was only your grandfather. You know that. Dottie introduced the two of you when you were, what? Seventeen? He always said it was love at first sight.”

“That’s right,” Grandma said. She sounded genuine enough, but I knew better. Maybe it was love at first sight for my grandfather. But not for Grandma. There was something faraway in her eyes right then; I was sure of it. I wished Alice were at the table with me now to confirm it.

“I miss Dad,” my mom said.

Grandma nodded but didn’t say anything.

It was weird how fast their moods could change. The air felt heavy with memory or sadness, or both. I offered to wash the dishes just to give myself a break from it. But Mom said she was in a cleaning mood, which was like a fish saying it was in a swimming mood. I was happy to oblige, and escaped to the dock.

The light was already getting dim beneath the trees, but out on the lake, it was silvery and sweet. Gentle waves chuffed against the dock, but when a fishing boat crossed nearby, they rose through the wooden slats, splashing the bottom of my sneakers.

Alice appeared on her dock. I waved and thought about shouting a greeting. But with the fishing boat gone, things had settled into a twilight quiet I didn’t want to break with my voice. Alice seemed to understand. She disappeared briefly and returned a moment later with her inflatable boat, which she paddled effortlessly across the water. When she got close, I tied it to a post on our dock and gave her a hand up the ladder.

“Grown-ups doing dishes,” she said quietly. “Excellent time for escape.”

“Here, too,” I said.

We stood beside each other on the edge of the dock, staring out across the lake and not saying a word. It was the best kind of silence.

A pair of loons drifted nearby, and we watched them for a long while without moving. I wondered if I was seeing the same pair every time or whether there were different families coming through. After a while, I spoke to Alice in a whisper. “I always think if I stand here long enough and quietly enough, I’ll get to see them do something really amazing.”

Alice eyed the loons with curiosity. “Like burp?”

I rolled my eyes. “Well,” I said, “sure. Anything could happen. What do we know about loons, really?”

Alice nodded, then turned and took a slow 360-degree view of everything around us. Suddenly she squeezed my shoulder hard and gestured back toward shore. “Look!” she whispered.

I scanned the shoreline in the direction she was pointing. And then I saw them. Threading their way through the shoreline vegetation on the long side of Grandma’s property were two small animals. Their fur was a glossy chocolate brown, and they had long, slender bodies that seemed almost to undulate as they walked. They were mink, I thought. I’d never seen one in the wild before; I hadn’t even known there were any around the lake. Fortunately for us, they were in no particular hurry, but just zigged and zagged along the shore, occasionally darting close to the water, then away. When they reached the dock, they passed easily beneath it, then reappeared, closer to us than ever. We could see their tiny ears and the whiskers on their muzzles. It was tempting to walk back down the dock for an even better view, but I knew that would just startle them away. Eventually they trotted across the wet sand toward the scruffy vegetation in the direction of Alice’s property. We followed them with our eyes as long as we could, frozen in place and hardly daring to breathe. When they disappeared entirely, Alice released her grip on my shoulder.

“Oh, my gosh!” she exclaimed. “Did that just happen?”

I knew what she was feeling. My whole body felt jolted, awake. I couldn’t have even explained why.

“Were they weasels? Otters?” Alice asked.

“I’m pretty sure they were mink,” I told her.

“As in mink coats?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Have you ever seen them before?”

“Only stuffed ones,” I admitted. “At the natural history museum.”

“Wow. Coats. Stuffed. It’s like they’re usually only seen when they’re dead,” Alice said. “Poor mink.”

“Not these ones, though,” I said. “Can you believe it? They live out here with us, and we didn’t even know it.”

“It kind of came true — what you were talking about,” Alice said. “We stayed quiet long enough, and we saw something really, really incredible.”

“Better than a loon burp, that’s for sure.”

Alice smiled, then scanned the length of Grandma’s woods. “I wonder what else we’re missing,” she mused.

“We should go on a wildlife hunt sometime,” I said.

“Definitely,” she agreed.

Alice glanced up at the sky. It was growing dark now, and we both knew she had to go. She climbed down into her boat.

“Good night, Adam,” she said. She paddled a few strokes, then peered into the shoreline trees. “Good night, mink,” she called softly, then paddled away.

I lingered on the dock with the night and the loons and the memories of the mink and Alice, in no hurry to give up any of it and go back inside.

I RETURNED TO THE LAKE
early the next morning, dimly hopeful that the mink would be back. I wandered along the shoreline, retracing their path, and noticed a trail of tiny prints in the wet sand where they had walked. But of course the mink were gone to wherever it was that mink go.

My stomach growled, and I headed back into the cabin to see about breakfast. Inside, Mom was stuffing dish towels into a large cloth bag.

“I’m going to the Laundromat this morning,” she told me. “Do you need anything from town?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe you can give Grandma a hand,” Mom said. “She’s organizing her shelves a little.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Mom frowned, clearly disappointed by my answer, but I ignored her.

After Mom left, I could hear Grandma opening and closing drawers in her room on the other side of the kitchen wall. I sat down to eat cold pancakes and flipped through a two-week-old copy of
Sports Illustrated,
wishing I’d asked Mom to buy me a new one. Still, reading old news was better than the alternative, which was staring at the spice rack. Almost an hour passed before I looked up and saw Grandma wander into the living room. She had a small stack of papers in her clutches.

“It’s like this every year,” she said with a scowl. “The doctors leave the paperwork to the last minute, and we end up being the ones to put it in its place.”

“What doctors, Grandma?” I asked.

“At the hospital. They get all the credit for their medical smarts, but they wouldn’t be anywhere without us nurses picking up all the pieces.”

My stomach twisted. Grandma hadn’t been a nurse since before I was born. “Do you still have paperwork from those old days?” I asked.

She shuffled the papers in her hands, looking perplexed. I came over and peered down at them. What I saw didn’t look like hospital paperwork — just some old letters and bills. My stomach twisted again. She’d never been this confused before.

“Don’t worry about that stuff, Grandma,” I said. “Those are just old papers of yours.”

Grandma frowned and glanced at them again.

“Maybe you’ve done enough cleaning for one day,” I said.

Grandma looked at me quizzically. “I think so,” she said. “I don’t know. Help me put these away, anyway.”

I hesitated. What I really wanted was to slip back outside and pretend this conversation had never happened. But I was used to following her orders, so I reluctantly agreed. As she led me to her room, her shoulders looked narrow, almost fragile, beneath her shirt — like the bones of a small bird.

“That’s where the office folders go,” she said, pointing to a filing cabinet in the corner of the room. She handed me the papers, then sat down on her bed and began fussing with a buttonhole on her shirt.

I pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet.

“You make sure those get where they belong,” she said.

I looked down at the stack of papers. On top was a letter from my mom, written when she was in college. Underneath it was a heating bill, and, beneath that, a bill from a doctor dated 1978. That must have been what had set off her confusion about the old nursing days. The rest just looked like more of the same.

I began to slip the papers into folders, more eager to be done than accurate. “Medical” looked like a good-enough place for the doctor’s bill, and “Utilities” seemed right for the heating bill. I propped open a folder called “Personal” and was about to slide my mom’s letter inside when I saw a large envelope labeled “Map.” Curious, I peered inside and saw a folded piece of yellowing paper.

I glanced at my grandmother. She was dozing off now, her chin resting on her chest. I slipped the paper out and unfolded it. It was a hand-drawn map. Across the top were the words “Viola’s Treasure Map.” I didn’t recognize the handwriting.

My heart took an extra beat. Was this a map from Grandma’s mysterious boyfriend? Could it really have survived all these years? Keeping the map in my hand, I slid the file drawer closed and left the room. It wasn’t until I was outside and down the drive that I let myself take a closer look.

“Viola’s Treasure Map,” I read again. And below that: “with loony love.”

The map was written in black ink in very careful handwriting. About two-thirds of the way down was a neat rectangle with a zigzag line beneath it. At the top was a small target symbol labeled “Secret Treasure!” Connecting these two points were a series of dotted lines labeled with animal street names: Deer Drive, Beaver Boulevard, Raccoon Road, Hare Highway, and more. After each name was a number of steps — for example, “Deer Drive: 200 steps.” At the bottom of the map was a compass — the sort you’d find on any ordinary map.

I had to tell Alice. Biking was slow-going on the long, rutted drive, and I didn’t feel like dragging out the canoe. Instead, I headed straight into the woods. The shrubs grew thick between our cabin and Alice’s house, so I had to wrestle with a bunch of branches and take a lot of detours. But finally I broke out of the trees and found myself standing at the top of Alice’s driveway. I trotted down the length of it and rang the doorbell.

“Adam! What a pleasant surprise!” Mrs. Jensen exclaimed, opening the door. “We were just sitting down to cinnamon rolls. Would you like some?”

Even though I’d already eaten breakfast, I wasn’t about to turn down cinnamon rolls. “Uh, sure,” I said. Then, as if it were an afterthought: “Is Alice home?”

“Of course she is! Come in, come in.”

It was the first time I’d stepped into Alice’s place. It was a small house, with wood paneling on the walls and a soft green carpet on the floor. The kitchen had a homey feel, with lace curtains on the windows, canisters with painted fruit on them, and lots of framed sayings made out of cross-stitch on cloth. I knew what they were because my mother had tried to make her own cross-stitch one summer, to fit in better with the town ladies. Her saying was “Don’t Put Off Till Tomorrow What You Can Do Today,” but she never got further than “Don’t Put Off.”

Alice was sitting beside her father at the kitchen table, chomping on a cinnamon bun.

“Well, look who’s here!” Mr. Jensen bellowed.

“Hi, Mr. Jensen,” I said. “Hi, Alice.”

Alice gave me a slight smile, and for the first time in my life I thought I could actually pick up on a secret signal — the kind girls sent all the time but we boys never understood. It was like she was apologizing for her dad and refusing to greet me enthusiastically in his presence. But I could tell she was happy to see me. I really could.