Monday morning, seeing Arden felt like running through a sprinkler on a hot day.
Every day of the week except Sunday, the two of us met in the morning to take a shift at the farm stand our families ran together, selling melons and berries and peaches and whatever else was in season to tourists who drove up and down the highway, on their way to places that were more interesting than Maryville. Sometimes people asked if we were sisters or twins, since we both had light skin, brown hair, and brown eyes. Those questions always felt like a little warm light had been turned on inside my heart. Arden may not have been my sister for real, but most of the time, she felt like something just as good.
The farm stand was simple, just a big canvas canopy held up by four metal poles with a cement pad underneath. The Kelly farm had had something or other here for longer than Daddy had been alive, but he and Mr. Ben had made it nicer, pouring the cement when me and Arden were just a few years old. You could still see our chubby little toddler handprints in a corner, where our daddies had pressed our hands into the wet cement and written our names and the date underneath. The farm stand was as much a part of me as the farm itself, or the bay, or the sound of cicadas on a hot summer night.
Business was quiet today, only a few tourists stopping by to fill their trunks. When we didn’t have any customers, Arden and I sat cross-legged on the ground, a bucket of sidewalk chalk between us.
We were probably too old to play with chalk like little kids, but ever since our obsession with Mary Poppins when we were seven, we’d spent every summer trying to draw a mural realistic enough to step into. They didn’t last very long—between the thunderstorms that visited Maryville most summer afternoons so long as we weren’t in a drought, and the wind that blew the chalk dust away, the pictures were usually gone within a day or two. Once, Arden had looked it up on the computer and figured out that real sidewalk artists spray hairspray on top to make the drawings last longer, but we never had. There was only space on the farm stand floor for a couple murals at a time. It was more fun to let them fade and create something brand-new a few days later.
Sometimes we took pictures of our favorites, though. If we asked her to, Miss Amanda would print them off for us, and Arden and I would pick through them and choose the best ones to hang up on the walls of our bedrooms. During the bad time when I was eight, while Mama was getting sicker and sicker, I used to lie on my bed and look at those prints and imagine that if I tried hard enough, I could Mary Poppins my way right into those pictures and disappear into a life made out of color and fun.
Today we were sketching out two halves of a sun: Arden using a chalk the color of Daddy’s wheat when it’s ripe, me with one just the same shade as the summer sky. Where our colors met in the middle, I’d traced a swirling line. Right now I was filling in the shadows on my side of the sun’s face, using navy and gray to make it look like that two-colored sun was ready to send its warmth right off the sidewalk.
“That looks kind of depressing,” Arden said with a corner-of-the-eye glance at me.
“What do you mean?” I asked, sitting back on my heels to look at it. I wasn’t the world’s best artist, but after so many years of practicing, we were both pretty good. And I liked drawing. The two things in the world I was best at were math problems and telling stories, and drawing is a little bit of both. Our yellow-blue sun, even only halfway done, pulled at something deep inside me, like one of the curling rays that wrapped around its center had hooked into me somewhere behind my belly button.
“I don’t know. It’s just kind of sad, isn’t it? Like it’s cheerful over here, and depressed over there.”
“I like it.” What I didn’t know how to say was that I liked it because of that, because of the way the happiness and the sadness swirled together in the middle, two halves of a whole. This week, I couldn’t have drawn with yellow if I’d tried.
I rubbed my thumb against the gray chalk in my hand.
Arden has been my best friend since before I was even born, when my mama was right at the end of her pregnancy and Miss Amanda brought baby Arden over (All wrapped up in some big sheet, like a baby kangaroo, my mama always says) to say hello. They’d moved down from Boston and bought the farm just east of us, wanting to “live closer to the land” and “build a sustainable lifestyle” (says my mama with her fingers scrunched into little quotation marks).
Mama and Daddy were sure they’d wash out and move back north before long. Both Arden’s parents have fancy degrees and had big-city jobs before they moved down south, and Mama and Daddy figured they wouldn’t be cut out for the never-ending hard work and not much money you get out of running a farm. But they stayed, and now none of us can imagine what life would be like without them as neighbors. The Hawthornes sure cause a lot of talking over the fence from everyone in Maryville, even now, but Mr. Ben and Miss Amanda are both so sweet and kind I don’t think you could find a single soul in town who didn’t like them despite it all.
“You okay? How’s Miss Suzanne?” Even in Mama’s good moments, people still asked about her.
“Yeah.” I itched to tell Arden everything, but I was scared, too. Maybe I hadn’t all the way agreed with Daddy about not telling anybody about the watermelon seeds the day before, but I still understood. Sometimes, if I talked too much about Mama and her hard times, that was all people asked about—they’d look at us and see a sad family with big problems. And then they’d worry, and ask me about Mama every time I saw them. And they’d go around treating me and Mama and Daddy and even Mylie like we were made out of glass, ready to shatter any second.
Still, the memory of Saturday night—and of the way Mama had been hearing voices in her head nobody else could hear yesterday—was rising up in me the way a balloon fills with air, making my skin tight and stretched.
A dizzy-looking honeybee bumbled its way past my head, twirling over the produce boxes toward the wildflowers that bloomed tall beside the highway. I thought of the Bee Stories, of the question that had been on the tip of my tongue when I’d seen Miss Tabitha the day before.
“I have to tell you what happened this weekend,” I started, squeezing my chalk so hard the edges of it crumbled in my hand.
“Oh yeah.” Arden giggled. “That reminds me—I was going to tell you something about the weekend, too. But you first,” she added loyally, blending white chalk through one of her streaming yellow sunbeams.
The little bubble of courage inside me popped.
“Never mind. You go ahead.” Even best friends get it wrong sometimes—I couldn’t blame Arden for not being able to read my mind, not being able to sense just how much I needed to talk about what had happened. But that one breath of being brave was over, and all my words were stuck in me just as deeply as they had been since Saturday night. I swallowed hard and went back to drawing.
“So, Mom has been saying that Eli’s room smelled funny for at least a week now,” Arden said. “She’s made him clean it twice but still thought something was strange in there. Eli has promised over and over that there’s nothing in there that shouldn’t be.”
Slowly, listening to Arden tell her story, the strings wound around my heart loosened up a little. If I tried hard enough, I could even forget the image of Mama Saturday night with a watermelon seed above her eye.
Mostly.
“Then last night, Dad went in there to ask Eli something and he heard a noise. Coming from the closet.” Arden’s nose scrunched up in remembered humor. “I was in the kitchen loading the dishwasher and Mom was putting the little girls to bed, and all of a sudden we all heard a shriek from Eli, and Dad shouting, ‘YOU HAVE A FROG LIVING IN YOUR CLOSET?!’”
Arden was all the way laughing now, her swirling yellow sun-half forgotten on the pavement in front of her. “So it turned out that Eli found this tree frog down by Hummingbird Bay last week and decided to keep it. So he put it in a shoe box and he’s been catching crickets and ants to feed it ever since.”
I laughed without even meaning to. Eli was Arden’s ten-year-old brother, and it’d been war between the two of them for just about as long as they’d been alive. The picture of him sneaking bugs into his closet, a little brown frog hiding unhappily in a dark shoe box, was just like him.
“What did your parents do?” I asked.
“Oh, they were furious. Mom gave him a big lecture on respect for life and caring properly for living creatures.”
“Did they make him take it back outside?”
“Nah. Dad dug out an old aquarium and helped Eli build it a habitat. Said as long as the frog is healthy, he can stay. Eli named it Bartholomew.”
I brushed my palms together again and again until they were mostly free of chalk dust. That was the only part of drawing I didn’t like—the way the grit stayed on my skin, hiding deep in the cracks and crevices of my hands, until I washed them good with soap. All the way completed, our yellow-and-blue sun didn’t look sad at all to me anymore. It just looked real. Good and bad. Sad and happy. Worrying and laughing.
Kind of like today.
“What was it you wanted to tell me?” Arden asked.
“Nothing,” I said. And I meant it. Somehow that little bit of laughter and silliness had cleared the air inside of me.
A ladybug flitted down to land on the top of my hand. Ladybugs were always around me and Arden—lucky ladybugs, Mama called them, and laughed that it was a part of the magic Arden and I made together. When Arden and I are together, things all around us know it—when it’s our turn to sell at the stand, the fruit is riper and shinier, the herbs smell sweeter, the cut flower bouquets from our mamas’ gardens hold little warbles of birdsong caught in their petals.
I blew the ladybug gently off.
Arden sat up. There was a big streak of orange chalk across her white cheek. “Do you ever think what would’ve happened if my mom and dad hadn’t decided to move down here?”
I shuddered. “Don’t even say that. It would’ve been awful.” I’ve got other friends at school, when school’s in session, but nobody at all like Arden, who knows me better than I know my own self.
Arden stuck out her hand, all the fingers folded down except for her pinkie. “Best friends forever?”
“Forever,” I agreed, wrapping my pinkie around hers and giving it a firm shake. It was our promise, the one we’d been making for as long as I could remember.
“Wanna get Popsicles when we’re done?”
“Sure. It’s hot enough.” I tossed the chalk I’d been using into the chalk bucket. The thump it made was echoed a minute later by a much louder thump-thump, thump-thump, and a cloud of dust moved down Arden’s driveway with Mr. Ben’s old rusted-out pickup in the middle of it.
“Finally!” Arden said, standing up and stretching. Arden is about my same size, but she can run so fast her feet have trouble staying on the ground, so she looks athletic while I just look soft in some places and bony in others.
Mr. Ben parked beside the pavilion and jumped down from the truck, waving at us. He had a big straw hat on, casting his pale face into shadow. “You girls ready for a break?”
“Yes,” said Arden. “Can we bike to Mr. Anton’s to get some Popsicles or something?”
“That’s fine with me,” said Mr. Ben, checking the record of the couple of transactions we’d made that morning, “but Della will need to ask her parents.”
Arden shaded her eyes and looked off across the highway, toward my place. “Is that your dad over there, Dell?”
Daddy’s truck was rumbling toward us from the direction of my house, kicking up a cloud of dust just like Mr. Ben’s had a moment ago, one more reminder of the drought that wouldn’t let Maryville go.
“Hoped it was your turn over here, Ben,” Daddy said, after he’d parked and jumped out of the truck cab into the shade of the pavilion. “Wanna pick your brain. Something’s turning my watermelon leaves brown and it’s got me worrying.” He sighed. “Just what I need on top of everything else. We’ve been going dawn to dusk every day for the last few weeks trying to get the wheat in.”
“Daddy, can Arden and I bike over to the gas station and get Popsicles?”
“Actually, I need to go gas up,” Daddy said. “You girls go on along and hop in the truck and get the AC cranking, and I’ll be right along.” He tossed his keys over to me, silver in the hot summer sun.
“I’m starting to think making all these changes was a bad idea,” Daddy was saying to Mr. Ben as Arden and I climbed up into Daddy’s truck. “Seems like it’s all turning into a disaster. The Kelly farm has been ours since my great-granddaddy’s time, Ben, and I can’t imagine trying to look my own daddy in the eye if I lost it.”
“Well, anything I can do to help, you just ask,” Mr. Ben said. “Sorry for the stress. Suzanne doing okay?”
Daddy paused with his hand on the driver’s-side door. “Well,” he said, each of his words as carefully picked as the strawberries we sold in the spring, “she’s got her ups and downs, just like always. But we’re doing fine.”