The Forget-Me-Not Summer (18 page)

R
ehearsals began the very next day at Miss Melody's School of Dance. As a
Night Sprites
fan herself, Miss Melody was happy to volunteer her studio. But they had to take the day off a few days later when a heat wave started. It was just too hot to do much of anything. Neither Miss Melody nor Aunt Sunny had air conditioning; hardly anyone in Pruet did. Aunt Sunny's house seemed particularly hot. Even with all the fans in the house whirring like propellers, it seemed impossible to cool down, especially for someone with a wild head of hair like Zinnie's, which she was certain trapped extra heat around her head. It got hot in Los Angeles, but it always cooled down at night. Not here. This was a different kind of heat: thick and sticky, even after the sun had set. Aunt Sunny hadn't even bothered cooking dinner. It was too hot to turn
on the oven, she said, so they ate tuna fish sandwiches and fruit salad. Now Marigold was doing the dishes (it was her turn), and Zinnie, Lily, and Aunt Sunny were finishing up their ice cream.

“Where do you think I can find costumes for my play?” Zinnie asked Aunt Sunny.

“I have lots of stuff up in the attic,” Aunt Sunny said, pointing to the ceiling. “Old clothes, some ancient toys, relics from the past, all kinds of good things.”

“Toys?” Lily asked as she picked up her bowl to lick it.

“Can we go up right now?” Zinnie asked, placing her cold ice cream spoon on her warm forehead.

“It'll be hotter than hades!” Aunt Sunny said.

“We'll only stay ten minutes,” Zinnie said. “I promise. Please? Costumes really help the actors get into character.”

“Ten minutes,” Aunt Sunny said. “I don't want us to get heatstroke.”

Three whole days had passed since Jean's big announcement about Mr. Rathbone, and Zinnie had been thinking about her play pretty much nonstop. She thought about the play when she went to the town beach in the morning and to the library in the afternoon before rehearsal started. And she planned every rehearsal down to the minute. Zinnie had checked out a book about how to put on a play titled
Seven Steps to Putting on a Play
. The librarian had told her the book
was meant for high school kids, but Zinnie assured her that she was an advanced reader and found a quiet table to do her research. Marigold didn't mind hanging out at the library. For one thing, it was one of the only places in town that were air-conditioned. And for another, the girls had finally discovered the nook in the back that had computers with actual, modern, twenty-first-century Wi-Fi.

They both wrote their parents emails full of updates about the play and Lily and her swimming lessons. Marigold had even emailed Jill Dreyfus about Mr. Rathbone, but when she received a quick reply stating that while she loved Marigold's enthusiasm, the casting director for
Night Sprites
was “no longer auditioning young actresses” and to “have fun on vacation” and to “call when you're back in town,” Marigold decided not to be too pushy. She didn't want to mess up her relationship with her new agent. Besides, once Mr. Rathbone saw her onstage in Zinnie's play, he'd find a part for her. She was sure.

While Marigold emailed Pilar, telling her about her sailing adventures and how she was going to perform for Philip Rathbone, Zinnie studied her book. With the play only a week away, she wanted to see the big picture of what was ahead of her, so she decided that for now she would just read the chapter headings. She could check the book out and read the rest of it back at Aunt Sunny's. According to the book, step one
was finding a play. Step two was hiring a director. And step three was securing a date and location for the performance. Zinnie felt a jolt of confidence. She'd already taken care of the three first steps! The fourth step was choosing the actors, and she was almost done with that as well.

Zinnie had cast herself as the narrator. She decided she would be dressed in black and read her lines from a stool off to the side. She had seen a production at the high school done this way and thought it had been very dramatic and effective. And of course Marigold was Forget-Me-Not. Lily played Hope. She had only two lines: “Greetings, fairy,” and “Mama and Papa, you must not build that supermarket or the enchanting flowers shall die!” Zinnie was a little worried about Lily's being able to remember all that, but Aunt Sunny told her that she was just going to have to have faith.

Luckily, Zinnie had convinced Miss Melody's modern dance class to be the chorus of wildflowers, letting them flip coins for who got to be the Ladies' Tresses, Hollyhocks, and Morning Glories and who got to be Goatsbeards. They had only a few lines, which she gave to the two bossiest girls, who were both named Sophie. Zinnie figured that it was important to have the bossy girls in her corner.

The only problem was trying to find someone to play Gus, the dancing chicken, a role Zinnie was convinced was going to be a star maker. Marigold couldn't
do it because (a) she wouldn't be caught dead playing a chicken onstage, let alone a dancing one, and (b) she was onstage at the same time as Gus, so it would be physically impossible. Lily could barely handle one role, let alone two. And none of the dancers would even consider it. Zinnie had asked every single one of them during rehearsals. They thought it was a funny part, but they had no interest in dancing for laughs. They danced only for applause. “If anyone's going to do it,” tall Sophie said, “it's going to be a boy.” Zinnie knew only one boy in Pruet, and that was Peter. She didn't have a good feeling about his saying yes, so she'd sort of put casting Gus on hold while she'd moved on to step five, finding costumes. Step six was rehearsing the play, and step seven was performing it. She couldn't exactly check those off her list in advance.

“Stand clear!” Aunt Sunny said as she climbed up a step stool. Zinnie, Marigold, and Lily stepped back and watched as Aunt Sunny pulled a latch on the ceiling and lowered a set of stairs to the floor below. When Zinnie had begged Aunt Sunny for a trip to the attic just moments before, she hadn't anticipated a secret ceiling staircase.

“It's like something from a book,” Zinnie said as she climbed the stairs to the attic, where the temperature was definitely warmer. She felt her hair expand an extra inch in the attic heat as she wondered what
other clandestine features Aunt Sunny's house might have. Was there a passageway behind a painting? A trapdoor in the kitchen? A tunnel under the vegetable garden?

“Where are the old clothes?” Marigold asked as she stepped into the attic. “Do you have any cool vintage stuff?”

“Are there any bats up there?” Lily asked, before she followed them up.

“No bats. Watch your heads now,” Aunt Sunny said as she pulled a string to turn on a light and the girls filed past her into the small attic room. There were two tiny windows, one at each end, and Aunt Sunny promptly opened them both. The ceilings were so low and slanted that Aunt Sunny and Marigold could stand up straight only if they were in the middle of the room, where the ceiling peaked. Lily quickly spotted an old-fashioned doll with an elaborate dress, a porcelain face, and blond ringlets.

“That was my mother's,” Aunt Sunny said. “You may play with her if you like, but she's very old, so you must be careful.”

“I'll be careful,” Lily said, cradling the doll in her arms. “Her hair is like mine.”

“So it is,” Aunt Sunny said. “Marigold, why don't you start with that wardrobe?”

Marigold opened an old armoire and began to look through it.

“She looks sad,” Lily said, staring at the doll. “I think she misses someone.”

Zinnie thought the doll was more scary than sad with its unsmiling painted-on lips and jowly cheeks, but Lily wasn't frightened. She began crooning one of Berta's Spanish lullabies into her ear.

“Aha,” Aunt Sunny said, lifting an old hatbox off a shelf. “These may come in handy. They're from the days when teachers actually dressed up for work.”

Zinnie opened the box to discover a collection of silk scarves. Immediately she knew they would make perfect costumes for the chorus of wildflowers. The Ladies' Tresses, Hollyhocks, and Morning Glories could wear the pink and purple and red ones, and the Goatsbeards could wear the brown and gray and green ones. She wasn't sure who would wear the mustard-yellow ones, of which Aunt Sunny seemed to have a surprising number.

“Um, this is full of winter clothes,” Marigold said, holding up an old coat.

“Check the drawers,” Aunt Sunny said.

“This doll is really sad,” Lily said.

“I think the singing is helping,” Aunt Sunny said.

Lily began to sing the song their mother sang to them when they couldn't get to sleep. “‘Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home,'” she sang.

“Um, is mustard yellow your favorite color?” Zinnie asked, holding up no fewer than six Dijon-colored scarves.

“Heavens, no, but it was all the rage in the seventies,”
Aunt Sunny said, removing a long blue skirt from a wardrobe and holding it up in front of her. “What about this for Forget-Me-Not? It's simple and plain and certainly blue.”

“No!” Marigold said. “I mean, I think we should go for something more modern.”

“We'd better keep looking,” Zinnie said, not wanting to upset her star. “But Marigold, I warned you it has to be plain. That's what's in character for Forget-Me-Not!”

Marigold started to protest, but the conversation stopped when they heard Lily softly crying.

“Lily, what's wrong?” Zinnie asked, turning around.

“I want to go home,” Lily said. “I miss Mom and Dad! I miss Berta!”

“Oh, Lily,” Aunt Sunny said, closing the chest she had been searching through and rushing over to Lily, “you will see them soon, I promise.”

“It's not the doll who's sad, is it?” Marigold asked.

“It's me, too!” Lily said, clutching the doll. “It's both of us!”

“We'll be home in a just a little more than week,” Zinnie said.

“Is there anything that might make you feel better, dear?” Aunt Sunny asked.

“Maybe some champurrado,” Lily said, wiping away a tear.

“The Mexican hot chocolate,” Zinnie said to Aunt Sunny.

“Isn't it . . . a bit warm for that?” Sunny asked, dabbing her brow with a hankie. “It's eighty-five degrees out. Perhaps ninety up here.”

“It's more of a Christmastime drink,” Marigold said. “Berta made it special for us before we left because she knew we were going away for so long.”

“I could make fresh-squeezed lemonade,” Aunt Sunny offered.

“It's the only thing that might make me feel better,” Lily said, wiping her tears. “The only thing in the world!”

“Then champurrado it is,” Aunt Sunny said.

T
hey brought the doll downstairs so she wouldn't be lonely anymore, opened all the doors and windows, turned the fans up to high, and went to work. Though it took the sisters almost ten minutes on Aunt Sunny's old computer, they found a recipe for champurrado on the internet. Marigold tried to reach Mom and Dad in hopes that they could reassure Lily, but Mom's phone went to voice mail immediately, and the person who answered the emergency landline in Big Sur said that Dad was up in the tree.

“Stir over low heat for twenty minutes,” Aunt Sunny said as she stood in front of the fan, reading the directions aloud. “You'd better pour us some ice water, Zinnia. We're going to have to stay hydrated.”

As Zinnie filled tumblers with ice, Marigold peered over Aunt Sunny's shoulder to read the recipe.

“Uh-oh. Do you have
masa harina
?
Piloncillo
? Or a tablet of Mexican chocolate?” Marigold asked. “Do they even sell that stuff here? I think you can only get it at the Mexican markets.”

“You don't have the right stuff?” Lily asked. Her lower lip was trembling. Marigold regretted opening her mouth, because she could feel her sister approaching the edge of a meltdown. “I wish Berta were here. She always has the ingredients for everything.”

“Now, now. You never know what I have,” Aunt Sunny said, disappearing into the pantry. “A little of this, yes, this will do. . . . We don't have that, but maybe I can use some of this . . . ,” she said to herself. Then Aunt Sunny emerged with her arms full. She set a sack of corn flour, a package of chocolate, a bag of brown sugar, and a few cinnamon sticks on the counter.

“We can do it,” Aunt Sunny said. “But I'm going to need your help, Lily. You're the expert here.” Lily nodded.

First they simmered the milk with the cinnamon, sugar, and chocolate. Lily stood on a stool and stirred the mixture over the stove. Now that she was focused on an activity, her homesickness appeared to be fading. “It's kind of hot in here,” Lily said, as if noticing the heat wave for the first time. Then she stripped down to her undies right there in the kitchen. “Much better.” Zinnie mixed the corn flour with water, then added it to the pot on the stove. Lily kept stirring for
another ten minutes until it was ready.

“Not sweet enough,” Lily declared upon tasting the final product. Aunt Sunny added some maple syrup, which Berta never would have done, and when Lily took another sip, she grinned and declared it
“¡Delicioso!”

For Lily's sake, they each took a mug of the thick, warm champurrado. It smelled good, but it was just about the last thing Marigold wanted to drink on a hot summer night. Even with the fans on and tumblers full of ice water, she could feel beads of sweat on her upper lip.

“Let's go outside,” Zinnie said.

“Great idea,” Sunny said. “Looks like we finally have a breeze.”

They walked barefoot into the pear orchard, and all but Lily abandoned their mugs of champurrado on the little wooden bench by the back door. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, or maybe it only seemed cooler because they were coming from the warm kitchen. But as Marigold's feet sank into the cool grass, the crickets sang a green and summery song, and a gentle breeze lifted her ponytail, the night felt like the perfect temperature.

Aunt Sunny spread a thin cotton blanket on the ground, and they all sat down. Aunt Sunny began to tell them about what exactly caused a heat wave, but Marigold tuned out. She lay on her back and gazed up at the stars. She nearly lost her breath as her eyes
traveled across the sky. She had never seen so many stars in all her life. They were faded and swirled together in some places and were shining bright and solitary in others. A plane pulsed toward the crescent moon. A purple-gray cloud sailed through the scene like a faraway ship. A shooting star dashed across the sky, quick as a blink.

Another breeze swept over her, and Marigold's eyelids grew heavy. Maybe it was all the time she spent in the salt water, or all the exercise she got walking back and forth from town all day, or the way Zinnie made her run around in rehearsals. Or maybe it was something in Aunt Sunny's food. But here in Pruet, Marigold had discovered a new kind of tired. At night her limbs were loose and happy, tingling with a memory of sun. And when her head hit the pillow on her boat bed, sleep became as sweet and irresistible as a bowl of peppermint stick ice cream.

She was drifting off now when Lily shook her back to consciousness. “Wake up, Marigold! Mommy is on the phone. She got our message, and she called us back!” Lily's hot little hands were gripping Marigold's shoulders. But it was too late. Even though Marigold wanted to tell Mom more about her plans and how it finally felt like destiny was on her side, she had already tasted a delicious spoonful of sleep, and all she wanted was another.