After Peaches (5 page)
I frowned. That didn't make any sense.“Why would they do that?”
“Because the farmers need people to harvest their flowers and fruit,” said Mamá. “And Mexican workers need money to survive. It's hard to find work in Mexico, and people would rather leave their families behind and put food on the table than let them starve.”
“But lots of Canadians need jobs too,” I said.“Why don't the farmers hire them instead of paying for all those flights?”
“Because most Canadians don't want to work so hard for so little money,” Papá said, pushing back from the table. “Getting up at five and working bent over for twelve hours a day. Most Canadians would demand higher wages if they had to work like that. But that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about why we can't just leave our lives behind and follow the harvests.”
Mamá began clearing the dishes, and she motioned for me to help, as if the conversation was already over. I grabbed the knives and forks from the table and dropped them with a clatter onto the plates. Mamá ran water in the sink, and Papá stayed in his seat because, with two other people moving around in the tiny kitchen, he had no room to get up. He stared at the vinyl tabletop as though it might solve all our problems.
“It's not so easy,” Mamá said as she scrubbed. “First of all, we would need to find a place for all of our things. That costs money. Gas for traveling costs money, and where would we stay while we're on the farms? José and the others always have somewhere to stay because the farms give housing to foreign workers, but we would have to find our own spot. That would take time
and
money, and so we'd still be no better off than we are here.”
“But it doesn't have to be that way,” I said, snatching a frayed pink dishtowel from a hook at the edge of the counter. “Julie's family has a big tent that they haven't used in years. Ms. Norton said that we could borrow it whenever we want to. She said there are campsites all over British Columbia, and some only cost a dollar a night. That's much less than rent. And the other great thing is that Julie has a big basement with plenty of space in it. We don't have much stuff, and I'm sure they'd let us keep it there if we asked.”
I'd written all this stuff in my notebook that day, and I was ready for any excuse my parents could think up. Ricardo would have been proud of me. No matter what, I was going to win this discussion. It was my only shot at a summer with enough Normal Canadian Kid stories for my book. If I wrote about all the places we camped, I wouldn't even have to mention that I worked with my parents during the day.
Our few pieces of furniture and our winter clothes wouldn't take up much space in Julie's basement, and best of all, if our things were at her place, we'd have to come back here to live instead of going somewhere else. I wouldn't have to start all over again at a whole new school that might have even more Robbie Zecs than this one, and I wouldn't have to leave behind my only friend in the whole country.
My parents looked at each other. They weren't disagreeing with me anymore, so I kept talking as fast as I could. “We could travel all the way across, just like you said, Papá. First strawberries and raspberries in the Fraser Valley. Later cherries and peaches on the edge of the desert. We'll meet all sorts of people and see a million places, and I'll help you in the fields every day, and after peaches, we'll be rich! And we can come back here and choose any apartment we want. Maybe even one in the big buildings downtown, with a pool, or a garden on the roof!”
At last they smiled. Mamá even laughed.“I think,” she said, “we'd have to invest in some new furniture if we wanted one of those fancy apartments. They wouldn't want lawn chairs in their kitchens and children sleeping on sofas.”
She was teasing, of courseâand changing the subjectâbut she looked less worried than she had since we got that letter about the rent going up.
“So you'll think about it?” I asked.
Papá sighed. “I don't know,” he said. “A lot depends on the charity of Julie's mother⦔
I bit my tongue and shook out my towel in a noisy
thwap
. I knew they hated accepting charity, but I also knew that they really liked Ms. Norton, and that she'd be more than happy to help.
“We'll think about it,” Papá said finally, and I tossed my towel onto the counter and bounded across the kitchen to hug him.
After that, I spent every spare moment researching farms on the Internet, helping my mother pack or learning to set up the big green tent in Julie's backyard. Ms. Norton not only offered her tent and storage space in her basement, she also e-mailed each farm that we thought of visiting. “To make sure it's okay for you to work, Rosario,” she said. “In Canada, kids have to be twelve years old to work, even with their parents' permission, but hopefully it'll be okay for you to help your parents while
they're
working.”
Thank goodness Ms. Norton knew these things. In our town in Mexico, everyone worked because otherwise families couldn't make enough money to buy food. Canada had more rules than I'd ever imagined. Luckily the farms wrote back to say children were welcome.“As long as parents look after them and they don't eat all the fruit,” Ms. Norton added, giving me a pretend-serious look.
I have no idea why my parents eventually agreed to my wonderful, impossible plan. Maybe they liked the idea of not paying rent for two months, or maybe they were as curious as I was about seeing the rest of the province. I didn't ask questions. I wanted to get on the road before they changed their minds again.
The night before we left, Julie gave me a little white box. “So you don't have any excuses not to write,” she said. When I opened it, I found a battery-operated light to clip onto my notebook when it was dark out.
I threw my arms around her, and suddenly I missed her, even though we hadn't left yet. When I left my friends in Mexico and Guatemala, I knew I might never see them again. I'd never had a chance to say good-bye to my brother. I knew this time everything was supposed to be different. The whole idea was to come back here in September with more money and a whole summer of adventures behind us. If there was one thing I'd learned though, it was that you could never know exactly what was going to happen. So I said good-bye to Julie as though I'd never see her again. She hugged me right back, and Ms. Norton gave us a bag full of chocolate-chip cookies for our trip.
Early the next morning, our car was stuffed with everything we'd need for our summer adventure: a tent, sleeping bags, a cooler, cutlery and all sorts of other things my parents thought might come in handy. Maybe they were making up for how little we took when we left Mexico for Guatemala, and Guatemala for Canada. It was a wonder the old station wagon could move with all the stuff we'd crammed in.
We took the first ferry of the day from Vancouver Island to the rest of Canada. Mamá and Papá and I sat outside on the upper deck, watching the seagulls above the ship and the sunlight sparkling on the water. Later, our car rumbled off the ferry with a long line of other cars, and we drove along big highways with farms or trees on either side. After what seemed like forever, we turned onto a smaller road and finally came to a stop in a gravel parking lot with a floppy-headed scarecrow and a big wooden sign that said
Green's Farmâ
Strawberry Capital of the Fraser Valley
.
“We're here!” I shouted from the backseat.
“
Vamonos!
Let's go!” Mamá smiled at me in the rearview mirror.“We've got berries to pick!”
I was out of the car in an instant. The farm was exactly like the photo I'd seen on the website. In the last month, Julie and I had spent hours at her computer, looking for farms, and later I brought Mamá and Papá to the computers at the library to show them what we'd found. Beyond the edge of the parking lot, little green strawberry plants stretched far into the distance, all the way to the edge of the forest.
Two teenagers stood by stacks of white plastic buckets at the entrance to the field. “We pay thirty-five cents a pound,” said the one with pimples and glasses. “Leave the buckets at the end of the row, and we'll weigh them on your way out. Make sure you get red berries with a bit of the stem on. Not green. Not brown. Red.”
I held my breath and looked at my parents to see if they understood. They didn't know about my decision not to speak English this summer, and they wouldn't understand it if I told them. Sometimes, when they tried their own English with strangers, people talked to them like they were stupid or deaf. When I spoke English though, adults didn't make fun of me the way kids did, so my parents thought my English was perfect. They were so proud to have a daughter who spoke two languages that I never told them the truth.
I was happy my parents didn't have any questions about the strawberries. I nodded to the teenagers and took a few buckets. We headed into the fields, following the dirt road to the far rows. I'd never picked strawberries before, but I loved eating them, and that was why I'd wanted to come to the strawberry farm. I knew we weren't supposed to eat what we picked, but a bite or two wouldn't hurt anyone, I thought.
“On your mark,” said Papá.
“Get set,” added Mamá.
“Go!” I said, and we each jumped into a row and began picking as fast as we could. We weren't getting paid by the hour here. We'd be paid for each pound of berries we picked. If we wanted to make enough money for a good apartment in the fall, we'd have to pick fast.
The strawberries hung heavy and low against big green leaves, and many hid deep inside the plant. Some of the berries were as wide as my little finger was long. Others were still tiny. But every one I tried was sweet. It was going to be a delicious summer.
I glanced up at my parents. They'd been excited about strawberries too, and for weeks we'd been thinking about this first day of picking. I popped another berry in my mouth. Overhead, an eagle soared and landed in one of the trees at the edge of the field. A girl about my age was picking in the next row over, wearing purple shorts, a purple T-shirt and a purple ribbon in her black hair. Her skin was even darker than mine, and I wondered if she was from another country too. The thing about Canada was that lots of people looked like they came from somewhere else, but they were born here and spoke perfect Canadian English.
Farther along the girl's row, an old woman crouched, picking in fast graceful movements as if her hands were dancing. Her white hair was so long and thick that she'd twisted it up in an enormous bun at the back of her head. And most amazing of all, instead of a shirt, she wore a long piece of green fabric wrapped around her, with a stripe of skin showing at her waist. The green was bright, like new grass, against the darker green of the trees.
They were definitely from far away, I decided. And that made me feel better, somehow. We wouldn't speak, but we'd work here together. We'd look out for each other, without wordsâlike Julie and I did, right at the beginning, when I couldn't say much.
“You're new here, aren't you?” The girl's perfect English interrupted my thoughts, and I couldn't help letting out a disappointed sigh as the image of our silent friendship turned to dust.
I wasn't going to talk to her. She seemed friendly enough, but what if she didn't understand me? Julie kept saying my English was almost perfect, but maybe she was just used to the way I talked.
The girl stared at me. By now I'd taken so long to answer her question that I must have seemed really stupid. I focused on my strawberries. She shrugged and turned away.
I should have felt relieved. After all, I'd saved myself from being embarrassed by my mistakes. Instead I felt sad, and I missed Julie more than ever. The summer stretched out ahead of me, long and lonely.
