He walked down the few steps to the garden. Miraculously, his cucumbers were still growing in greens of all shades. The peppers too were fleshy and full, and there were little baby peppers growing from new stems on the same plants. He went inside to get his colander, then returned and pulled the greener cucumbers and the redder peppers from their stalks.
And the tomatoes: The vines were crawling up the trellis he’d built. Was it possible the vines had grown almost a foot since the last time he checked? The fruits were orange and yellow and red, plump, their skin shining. They had multiplied, maybe quadrupled in the last week. They had never looked better.
11
“Do we have to go?” the girls asked Fiona as they reluctantly took their dry bathing suits down from the clothesline.
“It’ll be over before you know it,” Fiona said.
That night was a camp-wide, coed boat race, but her girls were too young to care about coed activities, still in the stage where being with one another was much more fun than anything a boy could provide. She didn’t blame them; at nine years old, the Maple boys ignored the Maple girls entirely, unsure of what to do with the girls’ precociousness and femininity, thinking them too smart or too delicate to appreciate a good fart joke.
Down at the lake, teams were already assembling: one boy and one girl on each, each competing against another coed twosome from the same age section. The competitors for the older sections, the Hemlocks and the Evergreens, were already pairing up, groups that had probably been conceived a week earlier, boy-girl pairs based on whoever was “hanging out” this week. She saw Helen and Sarah standing with Mikey and Danny—tall, magnetic Danny appearing to tell some story bombastically while the other three listened, ready to laugh.
Rachel was standing nearby, chatting with one of her fellow Hemlock counselors.
Yonatan was a counselor for the Maple boys, and he beckoned a group of his boys toward her group of girls.
“Hey,” he said, smiling kindly, as his boys shuffled in the sand behind him. “Are your girls on teams yet?”
“No, they aren’t,” she said, raising her eyebrows at the girls, because she knew that she and Yonatan would have to coordinate this, that these kids were not going to take any initiative themselves.
“Billie,” Fiona said to one of the girls standing behind her, “is there a boy you’d like to be teamed up with?”
Billie shrugged.
Yonatan turned around to survey his group. “Avery,” he said to the lanky boy standing off to the side. “Do you want to be on Billie’s team?”
“I think you guys would make a great pair,” Fiona said, which was true: both were quiet, smart kids. Average in terms of athleticism.
“Okay,” Avery said to his feet, and he walked toward Billie but landed a good foot away from her.
Emily and Marley’s arms were linked—the two did everything together—and it took some cajoling just to get them to separate from each other, let alone pair them up with boys. Fiona and Yonatan continued to create teams, conferring with each other on the matchups. It was fun, this part of working with young kids—the absolute authority one had. They finished the teams with few arguments from the kids and sent them off to the boating staff to get their life jackets and their paddles.
Yonatan was still standing next to Fiona after their kids had gone to the dock. He hadn’t saved that dance for her at the dance like he’d promised. He had seemed more into Rachel that night, which was unsurprising, of course. Fiona never asked Rachel if anything had happened between them—better to leave it alone, considering that was also the night Rachel’s father had died. Besides, she didn’t want to know the answer.
“I think we did good,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, looking over at their groups. Some boys and girls whom they had paired up stood next to each other, awkward and silent, while other campers, like Emily and Marley, gravitated toward their same sex again, refusing to acknowledge their partners until the moment they had to get into the boat.
“Give it three years, and we won’t be able to pull them apart,” he said.
“I like this group for that reason,” she said. “Their innocence is so nice. Refreshing, kind of. I can talk about real things with them: their lives at home and their friends and the things they like to do—ride horses or swim or dance or draw. Rachel says her girls only talk about boys.”
He turned to her. “You’re right. It is refreshing.”
Something about the intensity in his stare made her uncomfortable, and she had to look away.
“You’re very insightful, Fiona,” he said.
She didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Are you blushing?” he asked.
She put a hand to her face.
He very gently pulled her hand away from her cheek. “Don’t hide it,” he said. “It’s cute.”
—
“He was flirting with you!” Rachel exclaimed later that night, beer can in hand, in the staff lodge.
“No, he wasn’t,” said Fiona. “He was making fun of me.”
“Jesus, Fiona,” Rachel said. “You wouldn’t know a come-on if it fucked you in the ass.”
Rachel stumbled away to sit on Chad’s lap. According to Rachel, there was still nothing happening between them, despite the fact that they flirted perpetually. Fiona didn’t understand why anyone would be into him; his nose was always sunburned, and he wore the same army-print bucket hat every day.
Fiona slowly followed Rachel to the couch and sat on the other side of Chad. Rachel slumped farther onto Chad, her body limp. Its whole weight rested on him. He traced the fingers of one hand up and down her spine while he took a hit of a joint with the other.
Fiona put her hand out. “May I?” She let the smoke fill her lungs, and that instantly familiar sense of calm came over her.
Rachel nuzzled her nose into Chad’s neck. He passed the joint to her and then whispered something into her ear.
Fiona sat quietly for a few more minutes, uninvolved in their private conversation, until Chad finally passed the joint to her again. After that second hit, she stood.
“Night, Rach,” she said.
Rachel looked up, as if she’d just noticed Fiona was there.
“Where are you going?” Rachel asked.
“Bed,” Fiona said. “Don’t stay out too late.”
“What are you, her mum?” Chad said, but Fiona was just high enough to not retort.
She left the staff lodge and walked up the hill to girls’ camp. It was almost midnight, and there were few lights on now. After so many summers, she could have made it from any one point to another barefoot and blindfolded. She looked up as she walked. She found the Big Dipper, then the Little. The Milky Way. When one looks up at the stars alone on a quiet night, it’s very easy to feel insignificant. She didn’t know any other constellations and made a resolution to study more of them when she could. Then she made a resolution not to forget to do this just because she was high.