Fifteenth Summer (24 page)

“Has it been that way for you?” I asked.

“I think so,” Mom said, nodding thoughtfully. “I think I’ve been mourning more than just Granly. I’ve been sewing up these baby clothes, and sometimes I just can’t
believe
you ever wore them. You’re all so grown-up. And Hannah’s leaving—”

Mom’s voice caught, and she shook her head apologetically while I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed.

“I’m not graduating for ages,” I reminded her. “I can’t even drive yet! You’ve got me trapped.”

Mom laughed and squeezed me back.

“You know that’s not what I want,” she said

I nodded. I
did
know. And if it was hard to feel exactly lucky right then, what with my phone still silent in my pocket, I did feel grateful.

“Mom?”

My mom and I turned to see Abbie hesitating at the back door. She was holding a big storage bin—the plastic kind with the locking lid. And she had a funny look on her face.

“I found this in the back of Granly’s closet,” she said as Mom and I stood up and walked over to her. “I thought it was gonna be clothes, but look . . .”

Mom and I peered into the bin. Inside there was a neat stack of cardboard boxes. They were closed loosely, without tape, and on each one Granly had written a name.

Our names.

My mom inhaled sharply, then shook her head.

“She told me about those boxes,” she whispered. “Such a long time ago. I’d forgotten.”

“What are they?” I asked as my mom took the bin from Abbie and carried it to the kitchen table.

“Adam?” my mom called down the hall. “Hannah? Can you come in here?”

Then she turned to me to answer my question.

“These are the things Granly wanted each of us to have after she died,” Mom said bluntly. “During one of our visits here, just before she was taking that trip to Scandinavia, she sat me down and told me where the key to her safe deposit box was and where all her passwords were and things like that. And she told me about this box of things she’d set aside for us. I didn’t pay much attention because she was so young. I told her she’d be around for forever.”

Mom’s voice wobbled but she pressed on.

“When she died,” Mom said, “I did remember about the bank vault and the passwords, but somehow I forgot about this.”

My dad came into the kitchen, with Hannah right behind him.

“What are those?” Hannah asked, peeking into the bin.

My mom pulled out the box with Hannah’s name on it.

“Presents!” Mom said. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was smiling through them.

Granly hadn’t written my name on my box in careful calligraphy or anything precious like that. It was just a quick scrawl with a Sharpie. But it still brought me to tears to see her handwriting.

As each of my family members opened their boxes and silently read the notes Granly had written to them, the whole
kitchen filled with sniffles. Even my dad’s eyes brimmed as he held up a men’s watch with a satiny ivory face and gold Roman numerals.

“It’s Grandpa’s watch,” he said, immediately buckling the worn leather band onto his wrist.

Abbie pulled two framed works of art out of her box. They were two of the red Conté nudes that Granly had loved to collect. Both female figures were in motion—their muscular bodies leaping through the air, their hair flying out behind them.

“I remember these!” Abbie said, wiping at her cheek with the back of her hand. “I always loved them.”

“She gave me Grandpa’s passport holder,” Hannah cried, holding up a brown leather wallet embossed with Grandpa’s name in gold.

Mom was the only one who wasn’t surprised by her gift.

“I always told her I wanted this,” she said, lifting a string of pearls out of her box. The clasp looked like a blossom—a cluster of gold petals. “She used to wear these pearls every Saturday night when she’d go on dates with Grandpa.”

I was the last one to open my box. Inside I found a thin stack of familiar leather-bound notebooks. Granly’s journals. Flipping one open, I saw more of Granly’s handwriting—some of it in ink, some of it in smudgy pencil—pages and pages of it.

Two more of the journals were filled up, but the fourth was blank.

I opened the card that Granly had written to me.

For my Chelsea, who’s a writer (too). Enough with those scraps of paper! With all my love, Granly.

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. I was speechless.

Chelsea, who’s a writer?

Where had Granly gotten that idea? I was a
reader
. And yeah, I wrote stuff down on those scraps of paper. But that didn’t count.

Did it?

Timidly I opened the first of Granly’s notebooks again.

Daddy and Mother want to go to the South Shore for all of June, and I think I’ll just die if I have to go with.

My eyebrows shot upward. That was a pretty good beginning.

And a familiar one.

I couldn’t wait to read more.

F
or the rest of the morning our cottage was very quiet. We all drifted apart, each of us deep in thought, each of us saying our own thank-yous to Granly’s ghost.

But eventually I stopped reading Granly’s journals—which were part diary, part very funny short-story collection. I didn’t want to tear through them. I wanted to make them last.

Besides, I was starving.

When I wandered into the kitchen, I found Abbie peering into the fridge.

“I think I’m officially sick of blueberries,” she said, closing the door with a curled lip.

“Better not be,” I said. “The blueberry festival’s next week, you know.”

“Oh, yeah,” Abbie said. “I almost forgot about that crazy festival.”

“You wouldn’t have if you worked on Main Street,” I said. “Every electrical pole is plastered with flyers. Mel’s got three different kinds of blueberry pie on the menu. And at Dog Ear—”

I’d been about to tell Abbie about the cute blueberry-themed window display Stella had made for the bookshop. But I decided to just let that one go.

“Were you and Josh going to go together,” Abbie asked quietly. “To the festival?”

I shrugged.

“We hadn’t talked about it yet,” I said.

But I was sure we would have gone to the festival together. Ever since the DFJ, Josh and I had just known—without having to say it—that we’d share all the summer’s big events. All its little ones too.

Before I could explain that to Abbie, I heard a knock at the front door. A loud, urgent knock.

“Who is that?” I said in alarm.

Abbie and I jumped up and headed to the door. Nobody ever knocked on Granly’s door. Sparrow Road was too remote for salesmen, and anybody who knew us would have just opened the unlocked door and called, “Anybody home?”

Abbie opened the door a crack and peeked outside. Then she turned toward me, flashed me a huge grin, and opened the door wide.

Standing on the screened porch, looking red-cheeked, breathless, and pretty terrified (but also really, really cute) was Josh.
His bike lay on its side in the drive behind him, its front wheel still spinning. I watched that wheel twirl around and around and wondered if my eyes were doing the exact same thing.

“Chelsea,” Josh huffed, “can I talk to you?”

I couldn’t quite form words, so I just nodded and stepped outside. The moment Abbie closed the door, Josh spoke in a rush.

“I did it,” he announced. He flopped triumphantly onto the smushy couch. I sat—way more tentatively—next to him.

“You did . . . what?”

“I did what you told me to do,” Josh said, breaking into an elated smile. “I talked to my parents. Both of ’em.”

“Well, what did you say?”

“I asked them to step it up at the bookstore,” he said. “Because it was their choice to buy Dog Ear, not mine. That I was doing all this stuff to keep the store afloat for
them
, but that it wasn’t making
me
very happy. In fact, I told them, I’ve given up a lot for Dog Ear. And I was pretty okay with that until . . . well, until I lost you.”

Josh looked so earnest and serious, I
had
to touch him, just to make sure this was really happening. I reached over and rested my fingertips lightly on the back of his hand.

Josh heaved a shuddering sigh and closed his eyes.

“What did they say?” I asked him.

Josh gave a little laugh.

“You were right,” he said, looking at me shyly. “They had no idea. And they were pretty mad at me for keeping it a secret all this time. Then my mom promised to do more practical stuff, though she might need a little training.”

My smile felt tremulous.

“Does this training,” I broached, “have to happen within, say, the next twenty days?”

Josh leaned in, his face so close to mine that it made me feel dizzy in the best way.

“Not a chance,” he breathed.

I closed my eyes and felt his arms wrap around me, so tightly that I gasped. And then he was kissing me. It was the perfect kiss—full of apology and relief and passion.

In an instant I felt like I’d rewound the past two days and landed right back in that moment when my cell phone had rung and I’d just
known
how I felt about Josh. I was feeling it all again.

It turned out I wasn’t the only one.

“Chelsea,” Josh murmured when the kiss finally ended. “Can you forgive me for being an idiot?”

“Well, you were being an honorable idiot,” I whispered with a little laugh.

“Is that a yes?” Josh asked, twining a lock of my hair around his finger.

I grinned and leaned in until my forehead was touching his. I rested my hands on the back of his neck and whispered, “Yes.”

“Good, because you know what?” Josh said.

“What?”

“I’m in love with you, Chelsea. I think I have been since the first time I ever saw you, when you tried to rescue that book from my X-Acto knife.”

Tears sprang to my eyes, but they couldn’t have felt more different from the ones I’d been crying for the past two days.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “That’s when I fell in love with you, too.”

Josh covered my mouth with his. We didn’t say anything else—nothing else needed to be said—for a long, long time.

W
hen you see the boy you love through a crowd, he can look completely familiar and be a complete surprise, all at once.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about Josh’s face. I knew that his left eye got a little more squinty than the right one when he smiled. And that his chin was square, rather than pointed, if you really looked at it. I’d watched the sun turn his hair the color of milky caramel over the course of the summer. It had also gotten long enough to actually look tousled. I knew that the back of Josh’s neck flushed when he got overheated after rowing or, say, rushing over to my house a week earlier to tell me that he loved me.

But when I spotted him in the middle of a throng of people at the Blueberry Dreams Festival, I didn’t recognize him for an instant. Was that him? Was that boy, so tan and tall and
gorgeous
, Josh?
My
Josh?

Suddenly he saw me, and I could swear I saw him blink too—before he smiled an incredulous, giddy smile.

We wove our way through the people crowding the Bluepointe town square. Every adult seemed to be sipping a tall, purple cocktail, and every little kid was sweating inside a puffy blueberry costume. Everybody in between, like me, wore face paint, their cheeks dotted with berries. Or they had on funny blueberry beanies, with tufts of green leaves on the crowns instead of propellers.

Josh and I had just seen each other that morning at the beach, but we hugged as if it had been days.

“You look really pretty,” Josh said, putting a hand on my still-damp-from-the-shower hair.

“So do you,” I said. I laughed before kissing him lightly on the lips. “Should we do a walk around?”

The square was lined with tents in which people were hawking blueberry honey, blueberry syrup, blueberry baked goods, and of course, a whole lot of blueberry art.

We ambled along lazily, our hands clasped, checking out the ceramic blueberry bowls and purple paintings. Only when we got to Chloe and Ken’s tent did we
have
to stop.

They were both sitting in the back of their tent looking miserable. Their space was fronted by two folding tables. One was
full
of ceramic animals, wobbly bowls, and rough-hewn wood sculptures. The other table was almost empty. That’s where Chloe and Ken had set out their blueberries, eggs, and honey. They had all clearly been snapped up by shoppers.

Josh met my eyes. He cringed, feeling Chloe and Ken’s pain.

Then he pulled out his wallet and reached for something in the center of the table.

It was a small chunk of wood that Ken had carved into a little rowboat. It looked craggy and splintery, but it was also the exact same shape as the shabby little boat that Josh and I had floated into Wex Pond.

“Would you take ten dollars for this, Ken?” Josh asked. “It’s really awesome.”

I’ve never seen a man’s face go from dour to lit-up that fast.

“Absolutely,” Ken said, jumping up to take Josh’s money. “Would you like some blueberry jam to go with that? Gratis!”

“Oh, no,” I said. “We’re good, really. We’re
awash
in blueberry jam.”

Ken shrugged and turned to give his wife a happy kiss on the cheek. As Josh and I walked away, he handed the little rowboat to me.

“You could put the kissing chickens in it,” he said, “and put them in the bathtub.”

I laughed.

“It’s the most romantic present I ever got,” I said, kissing
him
on the cheek. “Also the ugliest, but that’s okay!”

“You just don’t appreciate good art,” he said.

“Oh, I think I do,” I said with confidence.

I thought about the poster Josh had shown me the day before, the one he’d finally finished for Allison Katzinger’s book party. It was dreamy and shadowy and layered with one beautiful image after another. It was perfect. And luckily, it wouldn’t be wasted. After Josh’s big talk with his parents, Stella had spent an entire afternoon making calls. She’d managed to round up more than a hundred copies of
Leaves of Trees
for the party.