Sun & Spoon (5 page)

Joanie sniffed her notebook, then rubbed her nose against it.

“What are you doing?” Spoon asked.

“I'm seeing what color my notebook would like me to use,” she answered.

Crayons, markers, and pens were scattered between them. Joanie selected different colors of each and held them up, one by one, to her notebook. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes to slits as she decided. “I think purple is best,” she finally announced.

Spoon had already chosen a black felt-tip marker and had begun to draw on the front of his notebook. He was drawing a sun. He would have liked to have copied one of the suns from the backs of Gram's cards, but taking them out of his pocket to study with Joanie around would have been risky. She would have asked questions; she would have wanted the cards. Or worse, she would have told their mother or Pa about them.

Shielding his drawing from Joanie's view with his left arm, Spoon pulled away from his sun and looked at it critically. It's okay, he thought. Capturing on paper what he saw in his mind's eye was never easy. His rendering was as close to the sun on Gram's cards as he could get.

By darkening a line here, adding a line there, Spoon completed the drawing. He decided against writing a title on the cover. Satisfied, he opened the notebook. On the first page, using a ballpoint pen, he printed
THE SUN.
On the next page he started a column of numbers, skipping two lines between each one. He numbered from one to fifty-two. Fifty-two—the number of cards in a deck. It took him five pages.

The notebook would be his place to record his memories of Gram, his place to list observations or descriptions or details about her. He wondered if he could think of fifty-two things.

Starting was easy. He wrote:

Spoon tried but failed to recall his two new dreams of Gram clearly enough to be able to include them. His thoughts drifted to Gram's funeral and to the cemetery. It was scary how, in May, Spoon had seen Gram one day, and then the next day she was dead. Just like that. And he would never see her again. He saw the casket, which was closed. He saw the hole in the ground at the cemetery. But he would never see Gram again. Quickly he tried to push those thoughts aside. He didn't want to put things like that in his notebook.

Out of the corner of his eye, Spoon could see Joanie coloring like mad. The pages in her notebook turned like wings flapping.

Spoon tapped out a rhythm with his pen on his notebook while he struggled for something else to write. Something that would be exactly right.

Finally he added to the list:

“Whatcha writing?” Joanie whispered, leaning forward, her eyes shiny.

“If I told you, it wouldn't be a secret notebook,” Spoon said, backing away a little, protecting his notebook.

“I'll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours,” Joanie offered.

“Nope.”

“I'll tell you about mine anyway,” Joanie said. She sat up and scooted over to Spoon.

Suddenly the soft density of the morning seemed oppressive. The quality of light on the porch and the subtle shift of the shadows told him he'd been doing this long enough for now.

Spoon snapped his notebook shut and rose from the floor. “Maybe later,” he said sharply. But before he walked away, he smiled at her to make up for the tone of his voice.

“Y
OU
'
VE
BEEN AN
exceptionally fine big brother lately,” Scott said to Spoon.

“I guess,” Spoon mumbled, scrunching up his shoulders.

“And you've never liked to be complimented,” Kay said, smiling. She broke open an orange and passed it around.

Spoon and his parents sat on a rumpled blanket, finishing a late lunch. Joanie had been invited to go out for lunch and to a movie by one of the neighbor families. Because Joanie had something special to do, Scott thought it would be nice for the three of them to have a picnic in the yard, in the shade of the Douglas fir. The tree towered above them, on the fence line, casting a shadow the size of a small pond.

Spoon liked being alone with his parents—a situation that didn't occur very often since Joanie was nearly always present, as constant and common as a doorknob.

The orange tasted so good, Spoon breathed, “Mmm.” Then with a certain urgency he said, “We should have asked Pa to come over. We could have told him we were having a picnic.”

“I don't think he would have joined us,” said Kay. She raked her damp bangs to one side. “When I called him this morning, he sounded down. He said he was busy and wanted to be alone today.”

“He'll come for brunch tomorrow, though, right?” Spoon said.

“I think so,” Kay replied.

“I'm sure he will,” said Scott. “I'll call him later.” He glanced at his watch and then at his work gloves, and Spoon knew that lunch was over. Scott wanted to be back in the garden.

There was something Spoon needed to ask his parents. Asking would help him with his notebook. He spit an orange seed onto the grass, swallowed, and spoke. “Will you tell me something about Gram? About Gram and me?”

“What kind of something?” Kay asked.

“Something nice or funny that maybe I don't know or can't remember.”

With barely a moment's pause, Scott said, “The Sistine Chapel.”

Kay laughed lightly. “Yes,” she agreed.

“Huh?” said Spoon.

Scott slapped his thigh with his gloves. “I don't remember how old you were. Little, though.”

“Before Joanie,” Kay added.

“Gram was watching you at their house,” said Scott. “And while we were gone, she taught you about the Sistine Chapel.”

Spoon knew about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling because of his parents' many art books.

“Gram and Pa had just returned from a trip to Italy,” Scott said, gathering the remnants of lunch. “First she showed you photographs of the chapel. And then, to let you see what it might be like to make art on a ceiling, she taped paper to the underside of the dining-room table and let you draw with crayons.”

“When we picked you up,” Kay said, “both you and Gram were crammed beneath the table. Gram was all hunched up so she would fit. But you fit fine. Your neck was bent way back and you were drawing excitedly. It looked so funny. We had no idea what you were doing until Gram explained.”

Spoon decided he had a vague memory of this. “I think I drew dogs,” he said nodding. “Flying in the sky. Through a storm.”

“That I don't recall,” said Scott, scratching his chin. “But I think you referred to it as the
Sixteen
Chapel.”

A hairy bumblebee lumbered by like a tiny weighed-down, overworked airplane. It captured their attention. They turned their heads to follow the path of its flight. Slowly, comically, the bee moved up up down, left left right, then quickly shot straight to the garden. And that's where they all ended up.

At first, all Spoon could think about was the Sistine Chapel. He wished that he could replay that day in his mind, the way he could replay a video on the VCR. But soon his fingers were busy in the soil, his knees darkened by it; and his mind strayed to other things.

Before Joanie arrived home, Spoon weeded three long rows. Mostly he was lost in daydreams, but from time to time he caught snatches of his parents' conversations—often just a phrase or a word: “I miss Charlie,” “could call your dad,” “Evie,” “know what the bones are about,” “daisies,” “Martha,” “imagine painting the sky.”

As they were washing up to go in, Spoon asked his father how to spell Sistine.

In the late afternoon, Spoon and Joanie worked on their notebooks. Spoon wrote three new entries:

Spoon played a hand of solitaire with Gram's cards in bed just prior to falling asleep. And if he dreamed that night, he had forgotten completely by morning.

P
A
WAS LATE
for brunch. Even so, when he simultaneously rapped on the front door and threw it open, Spoon was startled. “I'm running behind, and I'm a bit out of sorts,” said Pa. Then he took a deep breath, blew it out, smiled at all of them, and said, “There. Much better. I'm glad I'm here, and I'm starving.”

Whenever Pa came for a meal, he sat at the head of the table, in Scott's spot, and everyone shifted over. And Pa served the food. That morning they had pumpkin waffles, sausage, maple syrup, blueberry muffins, yogurt, strawberries, grapes, and orange juice. The adults had coffee.

Spoon watched Pa load the plates and pass them. Pa's hands were veiny and spotted and slightly shaky. His face had settled, had relaxed since his arrival. People said that Charlie, Joanie, and Spoon looked alike—coarse sandy hair, blue eyes, round faces. And people said that the three of them looked like Scott, who, in turn, looked like Pa. Spoon didn't see the resemblance at all. It was too difficult for him to see similarities of that kind between himself and someone forty years old (his father) or seventy-three years old (his grandfather), and usually difficult, in a very different way, to admit that he and his siblings were anything alike.

Halfway through brunch, the telephone rang. It was Charlie calling from Oregon. They took turns talking to him, using the phone in the kitchen. Spoon was last. He was excited to hear his brother.

“Hi,” Spoon said, almost shyly. “Hi, Charlie.”

“Hey, Loony Spoon,” Charlie replied. “You really blew it. This is the best vacation I've ever had.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It's been more fun this time than any of the other times we've all been out here before. By a long shot.”

“Oh,” was all Spoon could think of to say.

“Well, I'd better go. I'm kind of talked out. See ya.” Then
click.
That was it.

Spoon hung up the phone and rejoined everyone at the table. He ate quickly, finishing first. And then he wandered outside—kicking at the fallen brown needles as he circled the Douglas fir, and lolling around the garden. He checked the rows he had weeded the previous day. Either he had done a mediocre job, or new weeds had sprouted overnight. He decided the latter was the case and was amazed at how rapidly the tiny new shoots had pushed upward into the light.

He sensed a shift in the weather. A mild breeze had whipped up, and it was growing stronger, stirring the leaves on the trees and causing the sunflower plants at the far edge of the garden to wag gently. It was still hot, but the sky was clouding over, drawing near, like a ceiling closing in.

The telephone call from Charlie was bothering him. Spoon wondered if Charlie was really having so much fun, or if he had just said that to make Spoon feel bad. He didn't exactly feel bad, but moody, changeable like the weather. Without any idea of what to do next, he proceeded toward the house.

Back inside, Spoon could hear voices rise and fall just out of reach. He checked the living room, the den. Everyone was on the front porch.

Good, Spoon thought. He wanted to try something. He crawled beneath the dining-room table and sat. He looked upward at the underside of the tabletop, trying to remember what the real Sistine Chapel ceiling looked like. He remembered pictures in art books of the creation of man—God's arm extended, his finger nearly joined with Adam's. Had God and Adam already touched, or were they about to? Spoon reached up with his finger and drew in the air. Nothing grand. Just squiggles.

Suddenly the room darkened. Spoon slid out and ran to the porch.

“There you are,” said his mother.

“Hi, bud,” said his father.

“Just watching the weather,” said Pa. “I heard on the radio a storm is coming.”

“We're going to have a storm!” said Joanie. “There'll be lots of bones after the storm. Broken ones. I'll fix them.”

“Doctor Joanie, tree surgeon,” said Spoon.

His parents and Pa were sitting in the old creaky wicker chairs, and Joanie was scampering up and down the length of the railing, walking her fingers along it as if her hand were a quick little animal with five legs.

At the railing, Spoon kept watch for changes in the sky. He stepped aside each time Joanie approached him, letting her pass. The voices of his parents and Pa were background noise to the mounting wind.