Umbrella Summer (11 page)

Dad dropped me off at the Bowling Barn
Friday evening, and I was ten minutes late, but Tommy and his parents hadn't started bowling yet. Mrs. L. was picking out a bowling ball and Tommy was typing on the computer that kept track of the scores.

“Hey, Annie,” he said when he saw me coming. He typed out some letters on the keyboard. “You ride your bike here?”

“What?” I said, because I thought that was a weird thing to ask. But then I remembered I was still wearing my bike helmet from the car, and I took it off quick and
plopped it on one of the red plastic seats. “This is for you,” I told him. I held out his present, which was the chocolate chip cookies I'd baked at Mrs. Finch's house stuffed into a Christmas tree tin I'd found in the hall closet. That was Rebecca's idea. She'd come over to my house that afternoon with a bag of gummy bears, and we'd spent almost the whole day playing gummy rummy.

Tommy opened the tin and took a bite of one of the cookies. “Thanks,” he said. And then he went back to typing.

After that Mr. L. took me to get bowling shoes. I was size five, but even the size sevens weren't big enough to fit around my feet with my ankle bandages on.

“Can't you take those off?” the shoe guy asked me. His name tag said
CHARLES
.

“But they're for ankle sprains,” I told him. “What if I twist wrong while I'm bowling and I have to go to the hospital and they end up amputating my foot off?”

He looked at Mr. L., who shrugged.

“I really don't think that's ever happened before,”
Charles said after a second.

I thought about it. “Can't I just wear my regular shoes?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Bowling Barn rules.”

“You don't have to play, Annie,” Mr. L. said. “You can just watch, if that's what you want.”

I sat there for a minute, with my regular shoe in my left hand and the bowling one in my right hand. From behind me I could hear bowling balls shuttling down the lanes and pins knocking over
crash!
Oldies music my parents liked was blaring out of the speakers, and people were laughing and talking, and lights were flashing green to red to blue.

I could call my dad, I figured, and have him pick me up and go home and not have any amputations to worry about ever.

Or I could bowl.

“Annie?” Mr. L. said again.

“I'll wear the shoes,” I said, bending over to unwrap my ankle bandages.

By the fifth frame I was in second place to Tommy,
but I was pretty sure Tommy's parents were losing on purpose.

“You're up, Batgirl!” Mr. L. called when it was my turn to go. Tommy had given us all weird names on the screen, which he said were out of comic books. I didn't mind mine too much. At least I wasn't Major Disaster. That was Tommy's mom.

I picked up the neon pink bowling ball that Mrs. L. had helped me pick out. It was the lightest one they had—so even if I dropped it on my foot, it probably wouldn't bruise me too bad. It also had extra-big finger holes, so I wouldn't get pinched.

“Come on, Batgirl!” Mrs. L. hollered as I stepped up to the line.

“It's going to be a strike,” Mr. L. told me. “I can feel it.”

I pulled back the ball with my right hand, aimed just the way Mr. L. had showed me, and swung, making extra careful sure not to let it go too soon and accidentally whack someone. It thundered down the lane.

Strike!

Tommy's parents stood up and cheered, and the screen hanging from the ceiling flashed BATGIRL! BATGIRL! BATGIRL! Tommy gave me a thumbs-up.

“Hey, pretty good,” he said when I sat down.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Oh, by the way. I was supposed to give you this.” He picked up a piece of paper from under the pile of sweaters on the seat next to him and handed it to me. The paper was bright yellow and folded in half, and scotch-taped at the edges like it was a top-secret document.

“What is it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I dunno. Doug handed it to me at the store today and told me to give it to you.”

“Doug Zimmerman?” I peeled off the tape with my fingernail and opened it.

It was a yellow flyer that used to say “Cheap Art Lessons with Louise!” but Doug had crossed out most of the words and written in new ones. Now it read “Free Obstacle Course Lessons with Doug!” And there was a picture on it that I think was supposed to be a
person limboing under a pool noodle, but Doug definitely needed to take Louise's art lessons, because it looked more like a German shepherd getting hit over the head with a giant pencil.

“That's weird,” Tommy said, reading over my shoulder.

“Yeah,” I said. I put the flyer back underneath the pile of sweaters.

“Wolverine!” Mr. L. called, pointing to Tommy. “It's your turn.”

Tommy won that game with ninety-six points, and I came in second with seventy-two. For the second game, Tommy named us all after pirates. I said no thank you to the hot dog Mr. L. offered me, but I did eat half the nachos, because those didn't have meat in them so I figured I probably wouldn't get food poisoning.

While we were waiting for Charles to unstick Mrs. L.'s ball from behind the pins, I shifted in my hard red chair to look at Tommy. I couldn't stop thinking about how today was his twelfth birthday. And how even though Jared's twelfth birthday was coming up in just
two days, Jared would never be twelve.

I guess Tommy saw me staring at the side of his face, because he scrunched up his eyebrows and looked at me funny. “What?” he said.

I ran a finger along the seam of my shorts, just studying the stitches for a while. “I'm sorry you have to have your birthday with me,” I said finally. “Instead of Jared. I know it's not as good.”

Tommy let out a puff of air. Then he told me, “I've been thinking about what you said, you know.”

“Huh?”

“What you were asking about before. About wills. What I'd give to people and all that?”

I clacked the heels of my bowling shoes on the floor and noticed a pencil rolling around by my left foot. “Oh, yeah,” I said. I waited for Tommy to keep talking, but he didn't. “So?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding slow. “I was just thinking that I don't think I'd have one.”

Down at the very end of the lane, I could see Charles's head bobbing behind the pins, still trying to
get Mrs. L.'s ball. “How come?” I asked.

“Well, I guess if I had a million dollars or something I would.” He picked up the cookie tin from the seat between us and took out another cookie. “But I just have stuff. And I think people don't need my stuff to remember me.” He took a bite and held out the tin to me so I could take a cookie too. “I guess I think people will just remember me 'cause of things I did.”

For someone who didn't talk much, Tommy sure had lots to say. I ate the rest of my cookie thoughtful slow. And then, after the last swallow, I bent down to snatch the pencil off the floor, and I pulled the yellow flyer out from the sweaters.

“What are you doing?” Tommy asked me.

“Writing down the things I remember about Jared,” I said. I wrote “burrito game,” on the back of the flyer, on the blank side.

Tommy nodded and pulled one leg underneath him. “Put down ‘tackle baseball,'” he said.

“Ooh,” I said, scribbling fast. “That's a good one.”

Tommy and I thought up lots of things to remember
about Jared, dozens and dozens, and I wrote them all down.

“You know,” I said, halfway through writing “Cheerio-eating contest,” “I think Doug stole this off the bulletin board in front of your store.” There was a pinhole at the top, right in the center.

Tommy just shrugged. “That one's been up forever. I bet the whole town's seen it fifty times already.”

“Yeah,” I said, and I went back to writing.

But that got me to thinking, with an itch in my brain that I just knew was the start of a good idea. The more things Tommy and I thought up to write down, the itchier my brain got, full of thoughts about Lippy's, and the posters Mrs. Finch had told me about in Italy, and what Tommy had said about remembering. And by the time we'd finished our second game of bowling, me and Tommy had come up with the perfect way to celebrate Jared's birthday.

About ten o'clock Saturday morning I strapped
on all my gear and walked down to Lippy's. While Mr. L. was stocking the warmer full of chicken wings, Tommy and I worked on our plan for Jared's birthday the next day.

“So you'll type it up on your computer?” I asked him, smoothing out the piece of scratch paper we'd been writing our rough draft on.

“Yep,” Tommy said. “I'll make it look real professional, I promise.”

“Good.”

After I huffed my way back up Maple Hill, I figured I'd spend the rest of the day playing gummy rummy at Rebecca's. But when I got to her house, her mom said she wasn't there.

“Really?” I asked, yanking on my helmet strap. It was awfully sweaty under the chin. “But I thought she'd be back from ballet by now.”

“She went over to Doug's house,” her mom said. “About twenty minutes ago.”

“She did?” That was weird. Now that Rebecca was friends with me again, what did she need to hang out with stupid Doug Zimmerman for?

“Apparently they're working on a
top secret project
.” Rebecca's mom laughed. “But I'm sure they wouldn't mind if you went over too.”

“Oh,” I said. I tugged at my helmet strap again. “Yeah. Well, maybe.”

I decided not to go to Doug's. I didn't know why Rebecca was there, but if I went over, Doug would probably try to give me obstacle course lessons, whatever those were. And I definitely did not want to do
any obstacle courses.

Instead I figured maybe I'd do some reading. But since I didn't have my big green book anymore, it had to be
Charlotte's Web
. I dug it out from the pillows on top of my bed, where I'd stuffed it after the fireworks. Six of the pages were bent halfway over, and page fifty-eight was ripped in the middle. I was hoping Mrs. Finch wouldn't be too mad about that. Dr. Young always said that books were for reading, and if people wanted to keep them pristine and beautiful, they would've put them in museums instead of libraries. Personally I thought that was a pretty good way to think about things, but I put a piece of Scotch tape over the rip just in case Mrs. Finch didn't agree. Then I plopped down on my bed to read the chapter called “Uncle.”

It wasn't a bad book, really, if you liked books about pigs. Anyway, the part about the fair was interesting. Fern rode on the Ferris wheel with a boy, and Wilbur was hoping to win a big prize, and Templeton the rat went off to stuff himself full of carnival food.

But when Charlotte the spider said she was
“languishing,” I closed the book with a snap. That word had been up on Dr. Young's word wall once, and I knew for a fact it wasn't a good one.

I was out my front door and halfway across the street before I realized I'd forgotten to put on my bike helmet. But I looked both ways and didn't see any cars coming, so I kept going, the book tucked close to my chest.

“Hello, Annie Z.,” Mrs. Finch greeted me after I rang her doorbell six times all in a row. Then she got a good look at me and frowned. “Is everything okay? You look upset.”

I held out the book to her. “Charlotte's sick,” I said. “You didn't tell me that was going to happen.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Mrs. Finch said, her voice thick as cream. She took the book and then grabbed hold of my hand too. “Come on inside. I'll put the tea on.”

Fifteen minutes later we were sitting on the back deck, on Mrs. Finch's brand-new wooden porch swing with the dark blue flowery cushions. Mrs. Finch rocked softly with her feet, tipping the swing back and forth,
back and forth. I kicked off my sneakers and socks and tucked my legs up to my chest, and took a small sip of my heartache tea, fresh from the teapot. Mrs. Finch opened up the book where I'd told her.

I closed my eyes while she read, her words coming out like rainwater. Mrs. Finch was a good reader. When she got to the chapter called “Last Day,” I took another deep swallow of tea, and I concentrated hard on the words Charlotte was telling Wilbur, about how one day, after the winter, everything would be nice and warm and sunny again.

“‘The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again….'”

But Mrs. Finch stopped reading after that, and I opened my eyes to find out why. She was gazing out at her backyard, still rocking the swing slowly back and forth. I could tell just by the look on her face, the look that wasn't-quite-happy-wasn't-quite-sad, that she was thinking all the same thoughts I'd been thinking about Jared. Only hers were about her husband.

I set my teacup down careful on the deck, and then
I leaned over in the swing and scooped the book out of Mrs. Finch's lap. She looked up at me, surprised, and I started to read, right where she'd left off.

“‘All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur—this lovely world, these precious days.'”

By the time we got to the last word on the last page, our cups of tea were empty and I had a lump in my throat that ached when I swallowed. But I was pretty sure it wasn't tonsillitis.

“That was a good book,” I told Mrs. Finch.

“I'm glad you liked it, Annie Z.,” she said.

“You know,” I told her, rocking the swing slowly with my feet, “I think maybe my umbrella really is closing a little bit, like you said.”

“Really?” Mrs. Finch asked.

“Yeah. Maybe just a smidgen.”

That night I woke up all of a sudden, and I
could tell from the mud-darkness outside that it was later than I'd ever been up before. At first I couldn't figure out what had woken me up like that, and I worried for a second that I might have a sleeping disorder. But then I heard a noise coming from outside my bedroom, which was sort of like the sound Mr. Normore's wiener dog made when he was sniffing out something tasty, and I figured that must've been what woke me up. So I stuffed my feet into my alligator slippers and went to investigate.

The sniffling was coming from Dad's office, where the door was partway open. I was a little bit afraid, but I peeked my head in anyway, just to get a look.

Mom was in there, wearing her bathrobe she always wore at bedtime, the fuzzy peach one with the satin trim. Just like normal. But what wasn't normal at all was that she was sitting down at my dad's desk, holding his wall calendar, and she was crying.

Then, while I watched from the doorway, she ripped the calendar right in half and threw the two pieces on the floor. Even from where I was standing, I could see the big red circle on the calendar around July 9, and the words
Jared's B-day!!!
in giant letters.

I put my hands in the pockets of my pajama pants. “You can't rip up all the calendars in the world, you know,” I told her.

Mom looked up then. “Oh, Annie,” she said. And she opened up her arms the way she used to when I was tiny and I'd crawl into her lap so she could read to me. And even though I was way too big to sit in her lap anymore, I did it anyway. She pulled me close and
then she put her hand on my arm-scrape Band-Aid, patting it smooth a few times, like she was trying to make it all better with just her fingers. “I keep telling you you're fine, don't I?” she said, and she blinked out some more tears. “But the truth is none of us are. How could we be?”

I thought about that. Then I reached up to smudge away a tear that was tracing its way down her cheek. “We just need to close our umbrellas,” I told her.

Mom blinked a couple times. “Umbrellas?”

And so I explained about closing up the imaginary umbrellas, and how for Mrs. Finch that meant putting up fish pictures, and for me it meant reading books about pigs instead of books about diseases.

“So what do you think my umbrella is?” Mom asked when I was done with the explaining. I was still sitting in her lap, and she was rocking me soft. She had a few sniffles left in her, but she was mostly done crying.

I didn't answer right away. Instead I stood up and grabbed Mom's arm and made her walk with me into the hallway.

She stopped cold when we got to Jared's door. “Oh, Annie,” she said, and she shook her head. “I don't know….”

But I was the one who knew all about umbrellas, and I wasn't going to let Mom get out of it. “We'll do it together,” I told her. So Mom went to get the key, and when she came back, we reached out, our two hands together, and we turned it in the lock.

As soon as we opened the door, it was like Jared was standing there with us, because it smelled exactly like him—dirt on his sneakers and Tootsie Rolls and orange-scented hand soap from Tommy's house. I didn't even know Jared had a smell until right that very second.

“Come on,” I whispered to Mom, and we inched inside.

Parts of the room looked exactly like before Jared died, with his baseball posters on the wall and his robot collection on the shelf and his Einstein mug on his dresser filled up with quarters. But other parts weren't Jared-like at all. The bed was made up nice,
corners tucked in and everything, and his clothes were hung up neatly or folded away in his drawers, instead of spewing out all everywhere the way they usually were. And the floor was vacuumed, row after row of ruler-straight vacuum lines, not a speck in sight.

Mom took a deep breath and then walked across the room, her feet leaving Mom-sized footprints on the perfect floor. She sat down gentle on the bed and looked around her. She wasn't crying anymore.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

I crossed the room and sat down next to her.

“I dunno,” I said with a shrug. “Just sit, I guess.”

I never thought that'd be how I'd spend the night before my brother's twelfth birthday—up past midnight sitting in his room with my mom in her peach bathrobe. But actually, it was sort of okay. After a while Mom stood up and tugged open the middle drawer of Jared's dresser. Then she pulled out a blue-and-green striped T-shirt and held it close to her face.

She looked over at me. “We should take his things to the thrift store,” she said. “His clothes at least.”

“Yeah?” I said.

She nodded. “People could use them, I think.” She buried her nose in Jared's shirt again.

“I think that's a real good idea, Mom.”

“You do?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Mom looked around the room for a minute. “Why don't we organize tomorrow?” she said. “We'll pack up his clothes, and you can help me go through his toys and things, and let me know which ones you might like, or if there's anything we should give to Tommy, or one of his friends at school…”

I stood up then, and I hugged her. Right around the middle.

She laughed. “What was that for?”

“Nothing,” I said.

She hugged me back. “I love you, too, Annie,” she said.

So far the umbrella-down project had been working pretty well, it seemed like. But there was still one person I needed to work on.

“Mom?” I said. “Would you do me a favor?”

“Anything in the world.”

I pulled out of her arms and looked her square in the face. “I need you to teach me to make coffee,” I told her.