After Peaches (4 page)

“
Tu amiga?
” José asked when we reached him.

“Yes,” I answered in Spanish. “This is my friend Julie. Remember I told you about her?”

José bowed like Julie was a queen, and he let his grin do the talking for him.

“He doesn't speak much English,” I told Julie.

She frowned. “But hasn't he been here for a long time already?”

“Eight months last year, and three months this year. On the farm, though, he speaks only Spanish with the other workers,” I said. “They all work as many days as they can, so they can take back as much money as possible to their families in Mexico. There's no time to learn English.”

“Oh,” Julie said, pushing her glasses back up her nose. She gave José a shy smile but said nothing, which surprised me. I'd told her a million times that José was one of those grown-ups who think kids have interesting things to say and plenty of good ideas, and Julie always wanted to know more about Mexico.

“You can talk to him, you know,” I said. “I can translate.”

She nodded and her eyebrows pulled together, as though she was trying to think of the perfect question.

“Pick?” José asked, pointing to the rows of tulips beginning at our feet and stretching out to the top of the hillside. Julie grinned, and we both nodded. José bent over and put one hand to his back; then he wiped the back of the other hand across his forehead.“Much work,” he said.

Julie pointed to herself and then made a pillow with her hands and pretended to sleep. She pointed to the ground at the end of one of the tulip rows, and José laughed.

They liked each other. Just as I'd hoped they would.

My parents and Ms. Norton caught up to us. Julie's mother had swapped her white runners for pink rubber boots. I introduced José, who held out his hand, then blushed when he saw it was covered in dirt. He wiped it on his pants, but in the end, the adults only smiled at each other.

I was about to step into one of the rows of flowers when I remembered something. “Hey, José,” I said. “Can I show Julie your picture of Analía? I always tell her Analía's stories, and she wants to know what your daughter looks like.”

Analía was ten years old, just like Julie and me, and she lived in Mexico City with her mother, brothers and sisters. I loved listening to José's stories about her. A few weeks earlier, her detective club had discovered who'd been leaving boxes of fresh
tortillas
at the end of her street, enough for each house in the whole block. (It was a church group from a rich part of the city.) Another time, she and a friend rescued a puppy from a ditch, nursed it back to health and named it Fred because José had told her that
Pedro Picapiedra
is called Fred Flintstone in English.

José handed Julie a picture in a plastic cover. A girl our age with a blue flower in her long black hair smiled up at us. She looked like she'd be as good at telling jokes as her father was.

Above our heads, the adults kept talking.“Have you heard about the barbecue?” José asked Papá.“A bunch of us are organizing one this Sunday to celebrate the warm weather.” He chuckled and shook his head.“Can you believe it? It's finally getting warm enough to pick without a jacket, and it's time for us to leave! Of all the rotten luck.”

I looked up, confused.“Time to leave? But you just got here, didn't you? I thought you were staying until the fall.”

José crouched down so his face was level with mine. “I wish we could,” he said. “Some years, we get to stay in one place for a whole season, or even two. But other times, we have to move around a lot. Pretty soon, we're going to the mainland to a place called Oliver to pick cherries and peaches. We'll really be seeing the province this summer!”

He tried to smile, but his eyes were sad, and when I looked at my parents, they too had fake smiles on their faces. I frowned at all of them. Why was everyone pretending to be happy with this terrible news? If the other Mexican workers left the farm, Mamá and Papá wouldn't have anyone to talk to. They'd come home exhausted and cranky. This summer was looking worse and worse. Too upset to think up anything new to say, I translated for Julie.

She didn't say anything, and I could tell she didn't understand how awful this news was.

All day, I tried not to think about José leaving. I tried to have fun with Julie and to concentrate on slicing the tulips from their bulbs and making perfect bundles. Julie tried hard too. She taught me how to play
veo veo
in English, a game Ricardo used to play with me when I was small. Soon I learned the English words by heart. “I spy with my little eye, someting that is…blue.”

“Some
th
ing,” Julie said gently.“Not some
t
ing.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “Some
th
ing. You guess now!”

We soon passed Ms. Norton, who was picking in the next row, close to Mamá who was trying to explain about staying close to the ground.

“No too much stand,” Mamá said. “Like dees.”

Ms. Norton smiled and shook her head. “I can't believe how fast you pick,” she said, “and how you can hold so many bundles at the same time.” She tried to imitate Mamá—one bundle in her right hand, one under her left arm, and three between the fingers of her left hand—and they all fell to the ground like spilled matches.“I won't even earn enough money for an ice-cream cone, the way I'm going,” Ms. Norton said, but she didn't seem too upset.

“Eees okay,” Mamá said.“You learn.”

By lunchtime, Ms. Norton said she was exhausted and couldn't imagine how anyone could work like this six days a week. She and Julie stayed for the rest of the day and picked 150 bundles. “That'll cover the ice cream,” Ms. Norton joked when she got her cash at the end of the day. “It might even be enough for double scoops.”

We all piled into the car, headed back into town and stopped at a little ice-cream shop by the water, halfway between the Parliament buildings and the blue bridge. I ordered rocky road and mango. Julie had lemon and vanilla. If I didn't think about José and Julie leaving and just how lonely this summer was going to be, I could consider it a good day.

When we got home, Mamá wanted to open the week's mail, which meant I had to pull out the dictionary and help my parents read difficult English sentences, mostly about buying magazines or newspapers, or signing up for credit cards.

One of the letters, though, didn't offer us anything at all.

In fact, it took everything away.

CHAPTER 6
My Wonderful, Impossible Plan

“We must move away!” I told Julie on Monday morning, as soon as she opened her front door. The smile fell from her face, and she stopped pulling on her backpack and stared at me. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. “The owner of the house sent to my parents a letter. He wants us to pay more for rent, I tink—I looked up the biggest words in the dictionary. But we cannot pay more. My parents said now we must find anodder apartment.” My words tumbled out before I could check them for mistakes, and I was too upset to care about anything but where on earth we were going to live.

“Oh,” Julie said, pushing up her glasses, twice. She stood there with one shoe on and the other off, her backpack hanging from one shoulder. “But you won't move very far, right? I mean, you won't move away from Victoria, will you?”

“I don't know,” I said. “My parents want to move closer to the farm, but I don't want to. Now dere is not enough work for José and some of de other Mexicans. So maybe later dere will not be enough work for my parents. I don' want to live far away with no work!” The words flew out of my mouth, mistake after mistake piling up before I could even sort out what I was going to say next.

Julie was ignoring the mistakes. We stood in silence for a few minutes. “If you're near the farm, I could still visit you, right?” she whispered. “I mean it's not the other end of the province or anything.”

She looked as miserable as I felt, but at least one person in Canada cared where we moved. One person in the entire country. When we left Mexico, half the town turned up at our doorstep the night before, with cookies and
tortillas
, pictures of saints, lucky charms, photographs and even a Bible to bring along on our journey. Almost a year later, when we left Guatemala to come to Canada, everyone on our street threw a party for us. Now we had chosen to stay in Canada forever. We had been here for close to a year, and only one person would be sad to see us leave the neighborhood. Sometimes, I thought, no matter how much you want a place to be home, it simply doesn't feel like it.

And that's when I thought of the plan. The wonderful, impossible plan. I wasn't going to say a thing about it yet. Not to Julie anyway. We walked to school, talking about the math test instead, and when we saw the other kids, I went quiet as usual, and she told me about her latest notes for her summer adventures. She didn't sound very excited anymore.

In class, I made a few notes of my own in the notebook Julie had given me, but I wasn't writing about what I'd do this summer. I was writing about how to get my parents to agree to my wonderful, impossible plan. With Julie
and
José leaving, I had nothing to lose. Anywhere would be better than here for the summer.

As soon as Papá and Mamá got home that afternoon, I asked them what they thought.

“It's too risky,” Papá said. “Too much to plan in too little time. Too many things could go wrong.” He was sitting at the kitchen table with his arms crossed. Mamá was leaning back in her chair, looking exhausted. The empty supper plates sat waiting to be washed.

I took a deep breath and was about to try again when Mamá said, “I agree with your father. We can't just travel across the province right now, following the harvests like the other Mexicans. They
have
to do it because they signed a contract, and that's why they're here in Canada, but it's different for us. Our home is here. We can't just pack it all away and leave it behind.”

“But why not?” I asked. Would Ricardo have backed me up if he were still alive? He used to do that sometimes, sticking up for me when he knew I wanted something really badly. Even though we didn't always get along—he was so much older than me and we didn't have much in common—I missed him now. “It would only be for a couple of months,” I said, “and it's perfect timing. I won't be in school in the summer, so I can help in the fields, like I do on Saturdays. And Papá's been talking about exploring the province ever since we got here. And we have a car, and you two are really good at harvesting, and José said that farmers are desperate for help. Besides, imagine how much money José must be making if he can afford to fly back and forth to Mexico every summer!”

For some reason, they smiled at that, but they still didn't look convinced. “José doesn't pay for those flights, Rosario,” Papá said.“The farmers do.”