The Hidden Summer by Gin Phillips Page A

a good day?” she asks.
    “Pretty good,” I say.
    “It’s not too bad there?”
    “No,” I say. “It’s not bad.”
    “I’m impressed that you haven’t complained once,” she says. “I’d have been a lot grumpier about summer school.”
    This is why it’s worth acting happy about getting my toenails painted. Mom likes me when we’re lying like this, side by side, shiny-skinned. She’s smiling underneath her sweat mustache. I feel my shoulders relax, and I start to enjoy the stretchy feel of the chair underneath me. When she speaks, she turns her head to me without opening her eyes.
    “Sometimes I think we could just pack up the car and leave one day,” she says. “Just leave the furniture behind us, fill up the car with gas, and drive until we hit the ocean. Or the mountains. I could get a job waiting tables—because there’s always a restaurant needing waitresses—and when I wasn’t working, I’d lie on the beach. And I’d have a garden.”
    Have I mentioned that my mom talks about escaping, too? She likes to think about how she could just walk away from her life and start a whole new one. Sometimes those conversations are sad and a little scary—does she really hate her life here so much?—but sometimes they’re sort of fun.
    “We could get a dog,” she says. “You could pick him out.”
    I smile. “A big one or a little one?”
    “Whatever you wanted. As long as he doesn’t dig up my garden.”
    I think about Saban running along the beach, and I think he’d be afraid of the waves. “I think I’ll get an Irish setter,” I say.
    “Good choice,” she says. “I like Irish setters.”
    When we’re lying like this, she thinks we’re the same.
    “You can have space in the garden, too,” she says. “You can grow all the strawberries you want.”
    “I’d like to grow corn,” I say. I have a picture in my mind of a corn maze, which I’ve read about. I’d like to be able to get lost in my rows of corn.
    “Okay,” she says. “You might need to get a job, too, of course, when you’re old enough. You could wait tables and they’d give you great tips because you’re young and pretty.”
    When her eyes are closed, she thinks I’m pretty. I am warm and sleepy and I think how I like the sound of her voice.

CHAPTER 9
    A HANDFUL OF CHALK

    For the next week or so, Lydia and I have a set routine. We drop off any odds and ends at the putt-putt course, and we hang out around Marvin or the rocket ship until about eleven o’clock, when the heat gets so bad we can’t stand it. We check the nests and see if anyone else has hatched. We eat our lunch somewhere shady, then we explore some more. The day we found the blackberry patch, we ate until our fingers were dyed purple. The day we found the two box turtles, we spent an hour trying to make them race. (Turtles are apparently not competitive animals.) Sometimes it’s a slow day and we wind up just playing cards or climbing trees, but, no matter what, in late afternoon we head over to Hole Four to watch the airplanes.
    We’re into our second week of Lodema before we discover the clover field. We’ve just finished checking on the birds, and we decide to walk to the Chevron and treat ourselves to root beer. We usually stay on the cart path when we walk, but this time we veer across one of the long flat stretches of grass. And in the middle of that tall grass, we suddenly step into a huge patch of clover, as solid and dark as a big green swimming pool. Without a word we pull off our sandals and start wading barefoot into the field, the clover so cool and silky under our feet. I watch the clovers peek up between my toes, and I can’t help kneeling down in them and running my fingers over them. I start counting the leaves, hoping, when I hear Lydia yell.
    “I found a four-leaf one!” she exclaims, and I look over and see she’s sitting cross-legged on the ground.
    “Me, too!” I say, because as soon as she says it, I spot one myself.