The Summer That Melted Everything(22)

Dad tugged on the tail of her hair until she smiled.

“I won’t be gone long.” His long arms wrapping around her was like being somewhere in a wheat field.

“You’ll be gone forever. Once you start talkin’ to your mother, I become a widow.” She broke the embrace and bit her fingernail hard enough to chip the polish. She frowned at this and more as she said to him, “If you must go, then go, but before you do, bring me my canna for the day.”

Breathed envied Mom’s cannas, which were tall, tropical flowers done up in colors with familiar names like red, orange, yellow, peach. Yet they weren’t familiar at all. They were the colors of the other side of a journey to another world.

The job of caring for the cannas was left to me, Dad, and Grand because even though the cannas were just a few feet from the house, Mom never risked the rain. She gardened from the back porch, using us as her hands. We were her reach in the outside world. She told us when the cannas were dry and needed more water. We’d get the hose and give them a drink while she followed through the motions with us, feigning to pull the hose across the yard and then to stand still with her hand up and moving side to side like she was spraying something more than air.

She examined their growth through binoculars, looking out for insects or other damage. I remember the year the leaf rollers came, a great pest that rolls the leaves of the cannas in order to pupate inside them. Mom instructed me from the back porch to cut off the infected leaves. She held a pair of scissors and cut with me. Then she handed me flour to sprinkle on the remaining leaves as prevention, keeping some flour for herself, which she sprinkled all over the back porch.

Every day she asked for a canna. I suppose to feel the petals, the leaves, the roots, allowing her to feel somewhat responsible for them.

“What variety today, my love?” Dad pulled her back to him without much difficulty.

“Oh, I’d say Alaska.” She tilted her face to his and softly wiped the sweat from his cheeks. “Alaska will do for today. Perhaps it’ll cool me down.”

“In that case—” Dad kissed her wet forehead. “—I shall get enough Alaska for all of us.”

The Alaska variety has a yellow middle surrounded by white petals. Pee in Alaskan snow, that’s what I said as I took the flower from Dad.

“Not pee.” Sal frowned at me. “It’s your mother in her yellow dress and she’s twirling in the Alaskan snow. In the white rain.”

“I’m off now. You boys be good.” Dad carried his own flower tucked under his arm as he walked out the door.

Mom watched him go as if he were a feather falling off her wing. “Well”—she turned to us—“what say you boys run down to Juniper’s for me. Get some lentils.”

“You don’t have any, Mom? I thought that was what you were makin’ for dinner?”

“Well, my love—” She licked her palm and tried to lay down my cowlick, the same as hers. “—I can’t make ’em if I don’t have ’em, now, can I?”

“Mom, stop.” I swatted her hand away. “Give me some money so I can go.”

“And may we have enough to buy ice cream?”

“Mr. Elohim flamed all the ice cream yesterday,” I reminded Sal.

“Hmm, I wonder why he did that.” Mom reached into her change purse. “I’ll give ya some extra so you can getcha some chocolate bars.”

“C’mon.” I grabbed Sal’s arm once I had the money. “Maybe Mr. Elohim didn’t burn all of it. Maybe they had some hidden in a back freezer.”

When we came upon the Delmar house, Sal stopped and stared at Dresden, who was once again standing against the oak in her yard, this time with To Kill a Mockingbird. Sal waved and softly called her name. She held the pen in her hand tighter and the book higher, though her freckled forehead and her light eyes peered above the page at him.

“Tell me something about her, Fielding.”

“Her dad split a few years back, so it’s just her and her mom, Alvernine. Alvernine’s one of them fancy-pancy ladies and sexy as hell. She’s consumed by bein’ Miss Perfection. She wouldn’t like you.” I smacked a sweat bee away. “Though, maybe if ya gave her a rose. She started a club on ’em.”

“Is Dresden in the club?”

“Naw. It’s just society ladies, like Alvernine. Why you care so much about this girl anyways?”

“Even a devil’s heart isn’t just for beating.” He gave Dresden one last wave. In response, she hid her face completely behind the book, her frizzy hair sticking out around the cover like red static.

Sal glanced back at her before we left, but his attention was soon placed on the birds flying above.

Papa Juniper’s was on Main Lane, which was a long lane of stores serving as the main route of business in Breathed. Storefronts of wide windows, brick fa?ades, and that summer, flowers and plants wilting in the heat. The soaring elms lining the lane shaped a canopy not unlike a vaulted ceiling, giving rise to the lane’s nickname, the Cathedral. A nickname not just for the ceiling the trees gave the lane but also because the trees were said to be blessed on account of their escape from the Dutch fungus that had obliterated most of the nation’s elms.

In 1984, there were no big-box stores or outside commercial influence. The businesses were Breathed born and bred. Main Lane was a place you could buy books, furniture, music, condoms, a brand-new refrigerator, and finish it all off with a haircut at Chairfool’s barbershop or a meal at Dandelion Dimes, named so by the founder who, in the late 1800s, would accept a yellow dandelion head as payment equivalent to a dime.