Summer of the Gypsy Moths (14 page)

“
W
e eat relish,” Angel said from her perch on the counter Monday morning. “Relish and Froot Loops dust. It's crazy that we're so happy to be here.”

It wasn't crazy, though. Now we belonged here, because George was counting on us, because he needed us. And maybe we were happy because somehow Angel and I had become friends.

“Do you ever wonder what it would be like if Louise hadn't died?” I asked. “I mean, I wish she were still alive, of course. But if she hadn't died, do you think you and I would still be…oil and water?”

“Maybe,” Angel said. “It's too hard to think about, because everything is different now.”

I agreed. Everything was different now, and the difference was that it all felt right.

Except that we were starving.

In the afternoon, I tried the pizza trick again.

This time, Mama herself answered. I gave her the order, read her the card number, then told her our address.

“Pickup only. Delivery kid quit. Teenagers…hey, how old are you anyway?”

I hung up. When I told Angel what had happened, she leaped up as though it was exactly the news she'd been waiting for. She grabbed Louise's car keys from the hook and jangled them in front of me. “Let's go get that pizza.”

“Are you crazy?” I cried. “We'd be arrested in a minute.”

“No,” Angel insisted. “I've been practicing in the driveway. I'm really good now.”

“Even if you could drive, somebody would see a kid driving and call the police.”

Angel smiled. “Wait here.”

I had to laugh: Angel came back wearing one of Louise's flowery blouses, and she had painted big red
lips on. I stopped laughing when she tucked her hair up under Louise's straw gardening hat. It could work.

“Well, you really can drive?” I said. “Show me.”

We got into the car and buckled up. Angel clicked the key into the ignition and the engine started smoothly, which I thought was a good sign. She looked over her shoulder before she backed up, which I thought was another good sign. She winked at me and stepped on the gas.

The car leaped. Forward into the privet hedge. We bucked to a stop.

“Cancel that idea,” I said. I went inside and sat at the kitchen table to think. Angel came in and hung up the key without a word. She pulled up a chair beside me.

“We can't get to a store and we can't order pizza and it's five more days until changeover,” I said.

“Why isn't there a restaurant around here? Why do we have to live in the middle of nowhere?”

“Well, actually, there is,” I said. “It's on a side street near the beach.” I'd noticed the sign walking home one day and checked it out, hoping they'd have a Dumpster outside—restaurants threw out a lot of perfectly good food. The restaurant was in an old captain's house. It had a widow's walk and a wide porch and a whale weather-vane, but no Dumpster. “But it's fancy.”

“We'll change our clothes,” Angel said. She looked down at Louise's blouse. “Or I can keep it on….”

I shook my head. “The menu was in a glass case outside. The cheapest thing is sixteen dollars.”

“Let's go,” Angel said. “I'd pay sixteen dollars for a meal today.”

“It was a salad, Angel. Probably three bites of something you wouldn't eat. Besides, a place like that isn't going to let two kids come in without asking questions.”

And then I had an idea. “Do you know how to fish?”

I watched Angel's face carefully, but she seemed all right with the word. “No,” she admitted. “But…how about clams? We could dig clams.”

We grabbed a wire basket from the shed, and twenty minutes later, Angel and I were out on the flats at the end of Mill River Beach with the regular clammers. Including the boy.

“Now what?” Angel asked.

“We do what they're doing, I guess.” I got to my knees and started scooping sand with my hands, making a pile beside me, just like I'd seen the clammers do so many times. I dug and dug, but I never ran into a clam.

“You're scaring them,” Angel said. “You should sneak up on them.”

I looked around. Nobody seemed to be sneaking up
on anything. Clammer boy was sitting back on his heels, watching us. “We're clamming,” I called over to him, my idiot mouth taking over. “We're going to make chowder. For our family.”

Angel elbowed me to shut up, but it was no use—my blabber instinct had kicked in full power. “They're waiting for us at home. Our family. Waiting for the clams. To make the chowder.”

Clammer boy got up and rinsed his hands in the water, then walked over to us. “These are the wrong clams.” He looked more closely at the heaps of sand around me. “Well, if you'd found any, they'd be the wrong clams.”

“What are you talking about, the wrong clams?” Angel asked, her hands on her hips, as if he'd insulted her.

“These are soft-shelled. Steamers. You want quahogs.” He waved at the inlet. “Over there.”

“Under the
water
?” Angel asked.

He nodded. “You need a rake.”

“No, we don't,” Angel snapped. “Our family likes a special kind of chowder. Made with
these
clams. Can you just show us how to catch them?”

Clammer boy looked like he was about to set Angel straight about soft-shelled clams, but one look at her face convinced him that would be a bad idea. He dropped to
his knees and forked his fingers into the wet sand. “Go in slow, so you don't cut yourself on anything, then scoop out fast. There are plenty of holes here, which means plenty of clams. You just didn't go deep enough.” He dug a hole the size of a basketball. “Now feel around for a smooth tip…. There's one!” He tunneled his fingers in deeper and tugged out a gray-and-white oval clam. “Anything under two inches, put it back.”

“Great, got it!” said Angel. “We can do it now, thanks!”

He left, and I felt sad for a moment. Which was ridiculous. Then Angel and I got to work. It felt good to kneel in the wet, gritty sand and pull out clams. The sun was warm on my back through my shirt, and the sounds of gulls and waves wove themselves into a kind of song. I noticed Angel never looked up to gaze at the water the way I did, but on the other hand, she didn't seem all that eager to leave. After maybe forty-five minutes, our basket was full of clams, and Angel and I were full of new hope.

“There was some cream left in Plover,” I said, walking back down the beach. “And onions in the garden. I really could make chowder.”

“Or fried clams,” Angel said, dreamily. “I love those.
Jesus querido,
we are saved!”

Halfway back, we came upon a flock of gulls sitting on a narrow bar of sand. “Angel,” I said, pointing. “That thing you did, where you lifted your arms…”

Angel nodded. “And they flew. My father taught me.”

“How do you do it?”

Angel shrugged. “I get as close as they'll let me, then I pretend I'm one of them. And I think, ‘Let's fly,' and I raise my wings.” She dropped her head. “Never mind—that sounds stupid. Just sneak up on them, then raise your arms.”

“Show me,” I asked.

Angel shook her head and took the basket of clams from me. “You.”

So very slowly, step by step, I walked through the shallows to the sandbar. One step up onto the bar, though, and the birds shifted. I stopped. The birds resettled. And then I spread my arms high, as if my hands suddenly needed to burst into flight. I thought to those birds,
Let's fly!

And they did! Just like when Angel had done it, all the gulls rose at once, their wings taking flight with my arms. I turned to grin at Angel.

She gave me a smile back, but it was half sad. “Every time I do it,” she said, “I'm always sort of disappointed I don't fly up with them. That they leave me and I'm
always stuck here on the ground.”

She laughed then, and we each took a side of the bucket's handle and lifted our heavy dinner. We walked the rest of the way down the beach, talking about nothing much. It felt so good, I even made a joke about it. “Have you noticed we're
talking
, Angel?” I said. “I saw something like this on an episode of
Friends
once.” And Angel even laughed at that, after she fake-punched my arm.

When we got to the stretch of sand next to the parking lot, we were still talking. Neither of us paid much attention to the man in the tan uniform who emerged from a van and walked toward us.

“Evening, girls.” He tapped a badge on his shirt pocket. “Shellfish warden. Looks like you've got yourself a nice mess of clams. Could I see your license?”

“License?” Angel and I asked together.

He nodded. “You need a shellfish license to take clams. Guess you're not from around here, are you?”

“We live in Spring Valley,” Angel said. “Both of us. It's in…New Jersey.”

“Well, tell your parents that here on Cape Cod you need a permit before you can go clamming.”

“Okay, we will. Thanks, officer.” Angel turned for the road.

“Not so fast,” the warden called. “I'm afraid I'll
have to take those.”

Angel hesitated. She looked at the road, and I could see her weighing the odds of making a run for it. I admit that the hungry part of me wanted her to try. But then she tipped the clams out on the wet sand at her feet.

“Say,” she said. “Since we're tourists and all, could you tell me what that island is over there?” She pointed out to sea.

The warden turned and shaded his eyes from the lowering sun. “That'd be Monomoy Island. Too hazy today, but if it were clear, you could see Nantucket a little to the west, right about where that trawler is…. You see it?”

But Angel had already set out for the parking lot, swinging our empty basket. I trudged after her, thinking the whole way home about my empty stomach.

When we got there, I collapsed onto the back steps. “I'm too weak to go inside.”

Angel stood in front of me, patting her hips with a funny look. She lifted the hem of her tee and drew something out of her shorts pocket.

A clam. And then another. And another.

One by one, she pulled eleven clams out and laid them beside me on the step. She spread her hands in mock shock. “Go figure. They must have jumped in while Officer Friendly was showing me Nantucket.”

We boiled those eleven clams. They tasted like salty rubber bands coated in sand. Delicious.

Afterward, Angel went out to toss the shells into the driveway. When she walked back in the door, I really looked at her. Her nails were ragged and blackened. Her hair looked like it hadn't been brushed in a week. Worst of all, her shorts were hanging off her hipbones.

Angel and I were three weeks starving and dirty. And no one had noticed. Wasn't someone supposed to notice?

T
hursday morning, I woke up stuck to the sheets in sweat. It must have been over ninety, and the sun was just up. The renters had only a few quick questions about where the water was coldest, and everybody was gone by ten.

“I saw an air conditioner in Louise's closet,” Angel remembered. “Under her four hundred shoes.” She went up to check and came back down again in a few minutes. “It weighs a thousand pounds—I think we're just going to have to boil today. But I found this.” She held out a brown grocery bag. “It has your name on it.”

Angel left to stand in a cold shower. I opened the bag.

A package with a UPS label. Whatever was inside bumped in the box like a solid thing with corners. A book. I opened it, and my heart caught: a brand-new copy of
Heloise from A to Z
. This was the actual dictionary of household hints. I opened the cover, and the spine cracked, it was so full of new promise. And inside, handwritten, were these words:

 

For Stella.

Happy birthday and happy hinting.

Heloise.

 

I stared at that page for a long, long time.

Then I picked up the chair Angel used to give her soap opera report and went out to the garden. I settled the chair in a patch of shade beside Louise.

“Hey, Louise,” I said. “Did you ever notice how I used to do that? Say ‘hey' in front of your name—‘Hey, Louise'—and I'd slide the words together to make it sound like Heloise? I want you to know it was a compliment. I really like Heloise. And I think you were like her. Thank you so much—that book is the best present.”

It was sweltering out there, but I didn't want to go in. I leaned over and plucked out a few weeds. “Hey, Louise,”
I said again. “I'm sorry about what I thought—that you were taking care of us just for the money. I should have known better. I mean, you're a gardener. Nobody pays you to take care of these plants. You probably figured Angel and I got planted with you, and you were going to take care of us, and make sure we had everything we needed. You were probably looking forward to seeing what we sprouted into.

“Are you okay out here? I really hope we did the right thing—I thought it would be your favorite place, next to your blueberry bushes. I wish you could see them. They're doing really well now, finally, but I've had to work so hard. George helped—he was the one who told me about the gypsy moths. He really did love your pies, you know. For a while, Angel thought he was in love with you.”

I fanned myself for a minute, thinking about how nice it would have been if George and Louise
had
been boyfriend and girlfriend, keeping each other company. “Well,” I said finally, “thank you again for the present. You couldn't have picked anything better, and I really appreciate how you thought ahead and got it signed.”

As I got up, I heard a window creak open above me. Angel craned her head out. “You can just leave the chair out there, you know,” she said.

I went inside and stacked the dishes in the dishwasher and wiped down the counters, moving in slow motion because of the heat. Then I decided it was my birthday, and I should quit working early.

I brought my new book up to my room to place it next to my Hints file, to read when I got home from the beach. But it was missing. My folder of Hints from Heloise, the only thing I had from my grandmother, was missing.

I felt a panic rise in me so powerful, it was hard to take a breath. I flew around the house, looking everywhere. The kitchen, the living room, the den, even the bathrooms.

Finally I banged open Angel's door. She sat in the mess of her bed, pulling her earphones out. “What?”

“My hints!” I cried. I heard the quaver in my voice, but I didn't care. “They're gone. You have to help me find them. Someone must have—”

I stopped short.

There was my Hints folder, on top of Angel's bureau. I ran over and grabbed it and clutched it to my chest. Then I turned to face her. “You took it? Why?”

Angel stared at me. She pressed her lips closed, and then she put her earphones back in and closed her eyes.

I stormed out. Back in my own room, I went through
my hints. They were all there, and all still in order. I read over some of them and my breathing slowed. Still.

How stupid I'd been to think maybe we were becoming friends! Six more weeks until Labor Day. Wherever that girl was, I wasn't. Back to where we started.

I went to my bed with my new dictionary of hints, pulled a sheet over me even though it was about a hundred degrees, and started with
A
.