Grit Read online

  At once I’m so tired I can barely stand it. I point to the open window. “Rain’s getting in,” and leave her sitting there in the dark.

  THREE

  THE NEXT DAY is Saturday. I come downstairs around six a.m. to the sound of an ax thunking into the stump outside. I fix toast—nothing left but the heels, which Mom and Mags won’t touch; to me, it’s all bread—and look out the window to see Hunt Chapman splitting wood for us.

  I step outside in the big T-shirt I wear to bed and call, “She’s not gonna like that.”

  He stops, lowers the ax, and glances back at me. “Morning.” He stands the log on its end again and splits it in half, then tosses the stove lengths into the pile he’s been working on since probably five a.m. Hunt’s our landlord. He’s also one of Mom’s managers at E. F. Danforth & Son, the blueberry packaging plant in Blue Hill. Hunt’s a tall drink of water, broad-shouldered and not bad-looking for an old guy, if you like the silent type, which I usually don’t.

  “I’ll tell her you’re here.” I find Mom already in the kitchen, knotting her robe around her waist as she peers through the curtains, her hair a little crazy. That robe is the only pretty thing she owns, a threadbare red silk kimono Dad gave her for her birthday a long time ago.

  “What is he doing?” she says under her breath.

  “Keeping us from freezing to death in August.”

  She takes one look at me and gives me a stinging swat on the thigh. “Get upstairs and put on some pants.” I eat my toast instead, following her as far as the doorway. She goes out onto the porch and stands with her arms crossed. “Hunt Chapman, tell me you didn’t buy us firewood.”

  He splits two pieces before he answers her, chewing over his thoughts like Big Chief tobacco. “Apple tree blew down in my north field last night. Wood’s dry enough. Shouldn’t smoke up on you too bad this fall.”

  “Tell me what I owe you.” In the quiet, Mom jerks her chin. “Give me a figure, Hunt.”

  He stops, taking a breath before bringing the ax down and twisting it out of the stump with a one-handed motion. “Just being neighborly.”

  “You live halfway to Brewer.” Hunt seems to have run out of words, and Mom sighs, stepping back. “Let me fix you breakfast, at least. Coffee while you wait?”

  He looks at her for the first time, with a hint of a smile. I think Hunt smiles mostly on the inside; it kind of warms up his features without changing them much. “That’d be fine, Sarah.” Sweat glistens along his hairline, where threads of gray are coming in with the chestnut brown.

  I hear Mags’s heavy footsteps overhead and hustle upstairs to the bathroom to get ready before she can beat me to it. No point in showering before raking, but after I brush my teeth, I look back at the mirror for a second and dab on a little waterproof mascara and some tinted lip gloss. Never know.

  By the time we’re ready to go, Hunt is standing outside with Mom, sipping from one of our heavy white china mugs. Nell comes tearing around the house with our lunch bag banging against her leg, scared she’s late, one hand to the blue bandanna she ties over her hair while she’s raking. She calls to us, “I got meat-loaf sandwiches and Swiss rolls.”

  Mags makes me pay her gas money every week, since I failed my driver’s test four times and Mom says I can’t try again until I get more practice, but Nell’s saving for cosmetology school—pretty funny for a girl who isn’t allowed to wear makeup—so Mags has her fix our lunch for us instead.

  My sister respects saving up for school. She’s been building her college fund since she was twelve. She’s going to UMaine–Orono in the spring, after she earns money for books and stuff this fall. Most of her friends are starting in August or September. She broke up with her boyfriend, Will, back in May, right around their one-year anniversary; she says she wants to be “free” when she goes away. I think she’s nuts. Will was a dork, but he was real sweet. One time he had roses delivered to her in study hall.

  Libby brings up the rear on her morning trek to talk Mom’s ear off, and her eyes narrow behind her glasses at the sight of Hunt. Without even a hello, she says, “She tell you about that light switch in the living room?” I don’t know how he manages to keep his face so still, but he doesn’t even flinch at how god-awful rude she sounds. “Makes a crunching sound like peanut shells when you flip it. Wiring’s gone bad.”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  Libby’s always carping about how our old farmhouse and the trailer are falling apart and how Hunt would rather repair than replace things. But I know for a fact that Hunt gave Mom a break on the rent after Dad died so we could keep living here and not have to move in with Gramma Nan, who lives way the hell up in Aroostook County and keeps pigs. The way I see it, we owe him big. I think Libby’s sour on all men because Nell’s dad took off even though they were engaged and she was seven months along with Nell.

  As we pile into the car, I roll down the window and call, “Bye, Hunt.”

  He flicks us a salute. Little stuff like that is how we know he likes us even though he doesn’t talk much.

  As we pull out, Libby’s on her way inside to help herself to Mom’s coffeepot. I bet she’ll find a way to cadge some of Hunt’s bacon and eggs, too.

  Jesse Bouchard has the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen, and I stare into them as he puts ice cubes in my hand and closes my fingers over them. The shock of cold on my fresh blisters makes me catch my breath, but I don’t look away. He’s got a chipped canine tooth you only notice when he smiles. “There. Bet that feels better.”

  I nod. The ice came from Jesse’s water jug; he fished it out and brought it over to me when he saw me stop raking to blow on my burning palms. “Guess I lost my gloves somewhere,” I say. “Pretty stupid, huh?” I can feel it there, that pull when we lock eyes that makes my stomach twist in the best way. I’ve been crushing on him hard since last harvest, when some part of me woke up and really saw him for the first time.

  “No. But you better borrow a pair or you’ll be a hurting unit tomorrow.” He sits back on his heels and grins. “And how’re you gonna make top harvester with jacked-up hands?”

  I duck my head and laugh. Top harvester always ends up being one of the migrants, usually some Honduran guy in his twenties who travels cross-country, living crop to crop, somebody with endurance and a system to their harvesting. Being a raker isn’t the same as being a harvester; harvester’s a title you’ve got to earn. At the end of each season, the Wardwells pay out seven hundred dollars to whoever brought in the most pounds of berries, giving everybody a good reason to bust their butts. Shea might give everyone a run for their money this year; seems like every time I look up, he’s filled another box.

  Jesse has a dancing light in his eyes—devilish, you could say—and I’m thinking he looks good enough to eat, when a fight breaks out over by the big cluster of boulders. It’s migrants against locals, and surprise, surprise, look who’s in the middle of it: Shea. He’s got a handful of another guy’s shirt, trying to drive him back against the rocks; the guy boxes him twice in the ear, and they fall down together in a tangle.

  “Hey!” Duke McCutcheon, Mr. Wardwell’s strong right hand, is coming, but then Mason wades in, grabbing Shea under the arms and lifting him almost off his feet. Shea’s tall but wiry, lean everywhere Mason’s broad, and you can see it takes everything Shea’s got to twist out of Mason’s hands. The other guys clear out, making themselves scarce as Mr. Wardwell gets there. Migrants can’t afford to get canned. Most of them don’t have any money to speak of except what these berries put in their pocket week to week, and if they lose out on raking, they’ll go hungry until the potato harvest starts up north.

  “What’s going on here?” Mr. Wardwell looks from brown face to white, but nobody’s talking. Mason’s hands go into his pockets. Everybody knows that somebody—Shea—must’ve brought up Rhiannon Foss, last summer, and the rumor that it was a migrant who did it. Not that Shea and Rhiannon were friends. Far as I know, he never had much use for her at all.
/>   “This happens again, you’re both done. Got it?” Mr. Wardwell waits until they nod, then stalks off to his truck. Mrs. Wardwell hollers, “What happened? Bob?” from her roost outside the camper.

  Shea swears, picks up his cap, and smacks it against his thigh before putting it on. He sees Jesse standing with me and stares a long time before turning away, shoulders stiff. Duke says something sharply and cuffs him on the back of the head. Duke is his family, an uncle or a cousin.

  After we’ve all gone back to raking, Mags sighs, her long blond ponytail spilling over her shoulder as she dumps a rakeful into a box. “You sure know how to pick ’em.”

  “I don’t like Shea.”

  “Who would?” She glances at him. “But talking looks-only here . . . he is kind of sexy.”

  “Don’t you mean attractive?” She snorts, and I’m over being annoyed with her for nagging me last night about what happened on the Fourth. Shea’s got eyes the color of sunlight through brown sea glass, and his hair’s maybe three shades darker, a little long on top so that it falls over his brow when he isn’t wearing a hat, which isn’t often. Today he’s wearing a washed-out denim shirt with the sleeves ripped off and a pair of dark Wranglers, and if it weren’t for the fact that I know he’s got a personality to match one of those black pincher bugs that crawl out from under our back steps, I could almost forgive myself for the mistake I made on the Fourth of July.

  Nobody has extra gloves. I suck it up and keep raking, but I’m losing ground to Mags, and that stings worse than the blisters on my palms. My hands will callus and toughen up eventually, but not before quitting time tonight, and that means money slipping through my fingers. Mags fills her fifty-third box and starts on the next. I haven’t filled forty yet.

  Jesse blows out early, getting the okay from Mr. Wardwell with that wicked charm of his. At five o’clock quitting time, we girls are getting ready to leave when who should come barreling up the road in his truck but Jesse. Boy’s got balls coming back here when he’s supposed to be at the doctor’s or wherever. Mrs. Wardwell stares at him like she’d like to drag him around by his ear, but it’s quitting time, so there isn’t much she can do but bark at her husband to start loading up.

  Jesse idles in front of us and rolls down his window. “Here.” He tosses something out the window to me. It’s a pair of yellow work gloves; they’re beat-up and too big, but I grip them to my chest like they were made of spun gold. “Knew I had an extra pair at home somewhere.” He nods at me and drives up to get Shea and Mason before I can thank him.

  None of us speak as we get into Mags’s car, and the silence is heavy. I want to gush about Jesse Bouchard, how everybody has him all wrong, but Nell speaks first. “Those things aren’t even new.”

  “God, Nell.” I jerk around and give her a between-us look that makes her shrink back against the seat. “Don’t be rude.”

  Mags turns right onto 15, heading toward the east side of Sasanoa and home. “Listen to you. ‘Don’t be rude.’ Didn’t know I had the Queen of England riding shotgun.”

  Heat comes into my face. Sometimes Mags is so much like Mom it makes me crazy; they both have a way of cutting through bullshit. A natural-born bullshitter like me doesn’t stand a chance in this family.

  Nell and I sulk as we cruise down Main Street, passing the post office, Gaudreau’s Take-Out, the Irving gas station, the Hannaford supermarket, and a dozen quiet streets where little kids have marked up sidewalks with pastel chalk and dogs snooze in porch shadows. Sasanoa’s sleepy, all right. Sometimes you want to check to make sure it’s still breathing.

  Running parallel to Main Street is the wild and woolly Penobscot River, and the Penobscot Narrows Bridge spanning it. Of the thousand or so construction workers who built that thing, our dad was the only one who died, all because of fifty dollars and a tinsel Christmas star. Hardly a place in town you can’t see the bridge from, sunlight gleaming off the concrete support posts during the day, red safety lights blinking at night.

  Tom Prentiss was a crazy man, though; wasn’t a chance that he wouldn’t take, Mom says. Which, Libby always adds, is why he didn’t live to see forty. If you want to get Mom talking, ask her about Dad. Ask her about midnight rides on his old Indian motorcycle when he was three sheets to the wind, or brawling at the Bay Festival truck pulls, him bleeding at the mouth, spinning one guy around by his shirt collar with another locked under his arm, laughing all the while.

  Mags turns up Second Street. She doesn’t say a word; she doesn’t have to. I start grinning. Nell leans between us, realizes where we’re going, and whoops right in my ear. “Last one in the water buys at Gaudreau’s!” She drags her shirt off over her head, hardly noticing when a guy on a bike sees her and almost takes a spill into a blue hydrangea.

  FOUR

  THE QUARRY ROAD is dirt, winding up through the woods until you reach a cable blocking the way with a sign reading Prvt Prop. Ours is the only car, so we race out into the clearing, stripping off our clothes.

  Mags and Nell stop at their bras and underwear, but I take it all off, ignoring their catcalls as I scramble down the granite ledges to the dark, oily water and cannonball right in. It is cold—kids like to say the Sasanoa Quarry has no bottom—and I keep my eyes squeezed shut until I surface, gasping and pushing my hair back.

  The girls follow me, and for a while all we do is swim and splash and sigh as the sweat and field grit rinses away. It’s like floating in a deep bowl down here, listening to birdcalls echo off the rock walls and shouting, “Hell-o,” just to hear your voice bounce around. Even though the sign says private property, lots of us party here, lighting bonfires and daring each other to jump from the highest ledge.

  Nell climbs out first, wringing her hair and picking her way along the ledges as Mags and I tread water. “Are you going to keep those gloves?” She watches her feet as she walks, arms out for balance. Her underwear is sensible, her bra white cotton with a tiny rosette like you’d see on a little girl’s undershirt. Anybody who was opening the front clasp would have to touch that tight satin swirl, have a second to think about what they were doing, and then keep right on digging. I swallow bitterness and tell myself I won’t think about that. I promised myself I never would.

  “Yeah,” I say. She purses her lips and shakes her head, saying mm-mm-mm. “What’s your problem? Jesse’s never done anything to you.”

  “He’s nasty.”

  “He is not. Name one nasty thing you’ve seen him do.”

  “I don’t mean he picks his nose. He’s not good enough for you.” She keeps her gaze down, like she knows that if she looks at me, she’ll have to remember our secret, and realize that she’s got no place tearing the wings off what I got going with Jesse.

  “Half the girls in school could tell you if he’s a boxers or briefs man,” Mags says.

  I mull it over. “Jockey shorts.”

  “Forget it, Nellie.” Mags climbs out of the water. “She won’t be happy until she’s felt him all over to make sure he isn’t missing any parts, and then she’ll ask us why we didn’t try to talk her out of it.” I’d never say this out loud, but Mags is built like Libby: five foot ten and full-bodied, her breasts and hips straining against her sports bra and boy shorts. I’m smaller and curvy like Mom, but I’m strong.

  Nell walks in a careful line, swinging one arm at her side. She stops, positions herself, and says, “I want to thank you all so much,” in a big, clear voice.

  Mags grins and heads up to the car to grab something for us to dry off with. I swim to the ledge and fold my arms on it, playing my part as I pretend to talk into a microphone. “How does it feel to be up here in front of all these people, Miss Michaud?”

  “Like I’m with my friends. I can’t say how much your votes mean to me. I promise to do all I can to make my town proud.”

  “And how do you plan to use your scholarship money?”

  “It’s my lifelong dream to learn the art of cosmetology at Pauline’s School of Beauty in Bango
r.” Nell pauses. “And if I ever open my own shop, I promise it will be here in Sasanoa.” She bows so deeply her hair brushes granite, and I clap. Breathless, she gives a little skip and drops into a crouch beside me. “So we need to be over at the town hall tomorrow by two o’clock.”

  “What for?”

  “Darcy! Didn’t you call the festival lady back? We have to register for the pageant and get a packet about what we need to do and everything.”

  I didn’t call the festival lady back, and I look to Mags for help. She’s brought a blanket from the backseat, and she gives me a heavy look as she dries off and hands it to me. She’s made up her mind that this is one of those Things We Do for Nell. I groan. “Look, I don’t . . .” My cousin’s eyes are so blue and serious that I can’t finish the sentence. “Okay. Fine. Why not.”

  I wrap the blanket around myself as we climb back up to the grassy clearing. For a second I don’t see my clothes, but then I spot my tank top off to the far left. I’m half-dressed when Nell says, “Somebody moved our stuff.”

  “Huh?”

  “We didn’t leave our clothes back here. Mags and I were over there when we took them off. Now they’re almost in the bushes.”

  I look down at my shorts and underwear and pull them on, fast.

  An engine starts in the trees. Tires crunch over dirt, and we run to the trailhead, only to get there too late. Nothing left but some tire tracks in the mud.

  Gaudreau’s is packed, the line reaching back to the picnic tables on the pavement. It isn’t full dusk yet, but the strings of twinkle lights are on and the fluorescent sign is buzzing. I expect everybody to point and laugh at us, but if the person who got an eyeful up at the quarry is here, they must’ve kept it to themselves so far.

  Mags treats. She and Nell order sundaes, I order a Moxie and fries, and then we scoot off to a picnic table with a red-and-white-checked umbrella to wait for our number to crackle over the loudspeaker. “I don’t get why whoever it was didn’t come down and swim, too,” I say for the second time. “If they’re so scared of some half-naked girls that they have to lay a patch getting out of there, they got issues.”