Ivy Takes Care (2 page)

“I know you are already fabulous pals!” Annie’s mother chirped. Did she know the chance of them all being pals was as likely as a snowball surviving on a griddle? Ivy wondered.

The tent mate nattered on about last summer’s scandal. An Allegro tennis counselor had been caught in the woods with a canoe instructor from the boys’ camp across the lake. What the two might have been doing among the New Hampshire pines had been on everyone’s lips.

“The two of them were probably just holding hands and singing songs in the woods!” said Annie’s mother, amused. But her smile said she knew better and that only got the tent mate started up again about how the boy counselor had been fired and the girl counselor shamed to tears by the Allegro camp director.

Ivy listened impatiently. She couldn’t wait to tell them about the rattlesnake that had wound itself around the axle of her dad’s pickup truck the night before. That was much more exciting than last year’s camp gossip.

The tent mate brought out a bottle of nail polish. There was no room edgewise for Ivy to say a word. She couldn’t talk around or over this Allegro girl, with her bright hair and camp talk. Annie seemed already transported to New Hampshire. The tent mate kicked off her shoes.

“They don’t let you do your nails at Camp Allegro,” she explained in Ivy’s direction. “Allegro was founded by missionaries, and missionaries don’t believe in nail polish.”

Ivy curled her hands so that the tent mate would not see the rough condition of her fingernails, but the tent mate wasn’t the least bit interested in Ivy’s fingernails. Annie spread both hands on the flagstone floor, and the tent mate coated each nail with glowing polish. “You can’t have nail polish or radios or movie magazines or hair curlers at camp,” said Annie for Ivy’s benefit. “Even if your mom sends candy bars, you are honor bound to turn ’em in.”

“But guess what!” confided the tent mate. “They can’t take the polish off your nails if you put it on before you get there!”

“Remember the night last year,” said Annie, “when we sneaked into Tent Seven and painted Frances McCall’s toenails blue while she was asleep, and she didn’t even wake up?”

Ivy sipped her lemonade and watched the nail polish appear on Annie’s fingertips in two lovingly applied coats.

Annie turned to Ivy and finally asked, “So, Ivy, besides injured turtles, what are you up to?”

Ivy took a deep breath. Her turn. The tent mate concentrated on the nail polish, fanning Annie’s fingertips dry. “Dad ran over a rattlesnake with his pickup!” she said. “A ten footer! It got coiled around his front axle. He had to get out and shoot its head off with a twenty-two!

“He drove home, and guess what Billy Joe Butterworth did! He crawled under Dad’s truck, uncoiled the headless rattlesnake, skinned it, and set the skin to dry up on the barn roof. But by morning vultures took away what was left of the snake. Billy Joe just stood outside staring up there at the empty barn roof and saying words he was not allowed to say. Only thing the vultures left was the rattle. Billy said he could sell it.”

The tent mate turned white as a dinner plate. “Rattlesnakes!” she said. “We don’t have those in San Francisco!”

“Lucky my dad saw it,” said Ivy. “It could have come off the axle and bit his leg. Dad would have been dead in thirty minutes. He was an hour up Mule Canyon, pickin’ up a dead buck for the mountain patrol. Nobody around.”

The tent mate was horrified. “I don’t want to hear any more about rattlesnakes or guns or dead bucks!” she said. “Now I’m going to have nightmares about poisonous snakes getting into my bed!”

“There’s no rattlers up here near the house,” said Annie. “We’re too high. Above the snake line. It’s kind of like the tree line.”

“There’s no such thing as a snake line,” Ivy said. “There’s rattlers and sidewinders, even scorpions, all over the —” Annie shot Ivy a dark, warning look that span
Stop now!
She tried to steer the subject back to a bus trip up Mount Washington and how many choruses of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” had been sung on the bus.

But it was too late. The tent mate’s hands shot up to her face. “Scorpions are poisonous!” she gasped. “They crawl out of the shower drains and bite you before you even know they’re there! You can die!”

“The Nevada ones aren’t so bad,” said Ivy. She looked at Annie’s face. That remark had not redeemed her for the rattler story. She decided not to tell the tent mate that Billy Joe Butterworth liked to capture scorpions and make them fight in mason jars while he watched. Annie knew about Billy Joe’s scorpion matches, of course. But Annie didn’t want any more snake or scorpion talk. That was clear from her expression.

Ivy picked up the three lemonade glasses and carried them down the hall and into the kitchen. Annie’s mother was carefully arranging fruit in a silver bowl. In went a pear, and then the pear was removed in favor of a peach. She looked up and saw Ivy’s face.

“Honey,” she said, “I’ll miss seeing you around here this summer. You, too, I’ll bet.”

Ivy tried and failed to smile sunnily at Annie’s mom. “I’ll miss you a whole lot, too,” she said. It was about all she could say. This kitchen was as much home to her as her own. Annie’s mother as much mother to her as her own mom. It had been that way as long as she could remember.

“How’s your mom?” asked Annie’s mother, as she always did.

“Workin’ hard,” said Ivy.

“And your dad?”

“Him, too. Lots of guests coming this summer.”

“How’s that Butterworth boy? Making trouble?”

No answer from Ivy. She washed out the glasses vigorously at the kitchen sink and stood them on the drain board.

Annie’s mother put down a nectarine and settled a hand on Ivy’s shoulder. “Summer camp friends are like summer breezes,” she whispered. “Come the end of August, Annie will say good-bye to all her camp friends and settle back into her regular life. Now, Ivy, you’ll stay and have supper, won’t you? We have lamb chops! Your favorite.”

Ivy shook her head. “We’ve got three guests at the ranch this week,” she answered. “Gotta help out. But thank you all the same.”

Ivy strolled back down the hall with a plate of cookies. Annie’s mother had covered the flagstones on the porch floor with a scarlet-and-brown rug. Two more of these rugs hung in frames on the wall. They were museum pieces, according to Annie’s mother, two hundred years old and too delicate to be walked on. In the corner Annie and the tent mate had settled into a game of Old Maid, pairing up farmers and milkmaids. Somewhere in the deck was that fatal mateless card, the old lady with the crazy hair, forever alone in the world.

The tent mate’s shoes still lay where they had been kicked, near the radiator. The deeply shined uppers were hand-stitched to the welt, the leather glove soft. Ivy could see inside the words
Ferragamo — Italy
in gold script. They were tempting as chocolates. Without thinking, Ivy slipped off her sneakers and put the soft brown shoes on. They fit her as if they had been made for her. She marveled at their comfort. How much would it take to buy shoes of this kind? Probably a whole month of her dad’s pay.

Annie’s voice came a little sharply. “Ivy! What are you doing in those shoes?”

“Oh, sorry,” said Ivy. She blushed horribly. “They were so beautiful. I only . . .”

Annie glared.
Please don’t embarrass me even more after that half-dead turtle and rattlesnake business,
was what her eyes said.

The tent mate shrugged and went back to sorting her cards. “You want ’em? You can have ’em. They’re my sister’s, anyway.”

Ivy so wanted the Italian shoes. She wanted to keep them on her feet forever. She wanted to hear the musical squeak of the heels. She wanted to own something that was not scrimped for, dollar by dollar, and bought at the end-of-season sale in the Sears Roebuck catalog. She kicked the shoes off quickly, as if they burned, gathered up her sneakers, and ran out of the room without saying good-bye. She dashed out to her bicycle, which was leaning against the house.

“Good-bye!” hung in the porch air for a moment. It was the tent mate’s voice. Then Annie came out.

“Ivy, I’m sorry,” Annie said. “But, jeez Louise, you make us look like hicks out here with your rattlesnakes and scorpions. Emily Hopkins is from San Francisco. Her family owns the Mark Hopkins Hotel. Of course she has Italian shoes! Do you have to act like you’ve never laid eyes on anything but Keds before? Do you have to mention all that snake stuff? Emily Hopkins is going to think we live in Outer Mongolia, and she’s going to tell everybody at Camp Allegro that we’re a bunch of hillbillies!”

Small tears pricked the corners of Ivy’s eyes. “Have a good summer,” she murmured before her voice failed her altogether.

Annie sighed. Her arms were folded. “Just in front of Emily, could you please not . . . ?” she began, but Ivy turned her bike so that Annie would not see her eyes and pedaled down the driveway. As she made the last turn, she remembered the turtle and pedaled quietly back. She heard two voices from the porch lifted in one of the Camp Allegro anthems, “Ever by Allegro’s Shore.”

Ivy knew all the words. Annie and she would sing them each summer when Annie came back from camp. In return, Annie always wanted to know everything she’d missed in town during her summer away. Would that comfortable trade ever happen again?

Ivy wandered back to the lawn and found the turtle much as she had left him, but with his feet and head now out. Again she placed him in her bicycle basket as gently as she could, then coasted downhill, letting the pedals spin on the way down. Tears blurred everything.
Why did I have to bring that up about the rattler?
Why did I even touch those shoes? That stupid girl’s going to think I’m worse than a dumb boy! Why, why, why didn’t I keep my mouth shut about the rattlesnake and Billy Joe? Why did I let this stupid turtle wreck my shirt today?

Ivy didn’t care if Emily Tent Mate did find a rattler in her bed. She rather hoped she would find at least a garter snake. It was her best friend she cared about. She had disappointed Annie. Ivy had said and done three embarrassing things that could not be undone or unsaid. She and Annie had never had a fight before. Annie would fly away in the morning. It was too late to put things back together.

“Honey, what in heaven’s name is that?” asked her mother when Ivy brought the turtle into the kitchen.

“I can fix him, Mom,” said Ivy. She turned on the water in the kitchen sink and let it run into the bloody wound on the turtle’s side, washing off the rest of the road grit. She placed him on the table under the brightest light. Then she took glue and pieced the hanging carapace sections together, covering them with duct tape.

Ivy carried the turtle to a shaded grass pen behind the barn, once home to a litter of farm pups. She filled a dish with water and broke an egg, leaving the yolk in half a shell not far from the water. The tortoise would either be dead or dig himself out by morning. Ivy knew that.

As she checked the patched-up shell one more time, a head with a shock of uncombed red hair appeared from around the barn. It was Billy Joe Butterworth.

“We gotta serve dinner,” he said. “Your mom said to come get you.”

“It’s you that wants me, Billy Joe,” said Ivy, “ ’cause you’re too lazy to do any chores alone. I know you. I’m taking care of this turtle, so go on and peel carrots and shell peas. ’S good for you.”

“Well, you better come soon,” he said. “There’s more than one person’s share of kitchen prep to do. And there’s blood all over your shirt.”

Ivy knew that Billy Joe would deliberately leave all the onions for her to weep over.

When Billy Joe left, Ivy grabbed a plain T-shirt from the clothesline. In the barn she ripped her worn-out Sears Roebuck blouse with the turtle blood into angry shreds and hid the pieces in an old feed sack where her mother would never find them. She cried there, in the darkness of the barn. Angry loud sobs. Through the cobwebbed window she saw the turtle extend its legs, then its head, and move to the dish of water, where it drank deeply. Ivy dried her red and smarting eyes on her sleeve and headed for the kitchen. She’d start right away on the onions, and no one would ask her what the matter was.

While Ivy chopped Vidalias into fryable chunks, she skimmed yesterday’s
Carson City Star,
which was folded under the onions to catch the juice. The paper ran a story about the rodeo, coming soon to town. Billy Joe would want to go to that. Billy Joe wanted to be a rodeo rider when he grew up, even though his mama would allow no such thing in the world. The newspaper ran the usual graduation speeches, reported from Carson City High. There had been a robbery at a pawn shop at the edge of town. She flipped through the sports and the obits pages. There was a full-page advertisement for a sale on birthstone friendship rings at Steinway’s department store.

Ivy read the ad with interest.

Just three days before, on the final day of school, Mary Louise Merriweather had jounced into the fifth-grade classroom sporting one of those friendship rings with a honey-colored topaz in the setting. Blond and bouncy Mary Louise was the head of the popular girls. Ivy figured she’d been born to that destiny.