My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer Read online

I wanted to tell Luke everything—about my fight with Mom, with Eva, and the library crowd—but I didn’t know where to begin. I could at least show him the flyer. The marina could be in a lot of trouble with these posted around. And I had to tell him about Mom refusing to let me enter the pie contest.

  It wasn’t fair. Secretly, I had found the baked goods competition for children ages eight to twelve in the fair exhibitor handbook that Ms. Flynn had given me. The form was straightforward enough, but right at the top it said MOTHER’S NAME, FATHER’S NAME and, at the last line, SIGNATURE REQUIRED. I needed Luke to help me find a way around that.

  “June!” Eva called up the loft stairs. “Luke is here!”

  Perfect. Our light system worked. I pulled on my bathing suit and shorts. I tucked the fair form in my back pocket along with the flyer.

  “Hey, June.” Luke was in his bathing suit, ready for anything.

  I gave him a “please wait” look, hoping he wouldn’t ask what the trouble was in front of Eva.

  But she didn’t look up. She kept reading the newspaper.

  “We’re going sailing,” I said.

  “OK,” she said without a glance.

  I hesitated. “Do you think Mom needs help?”

  “MJ is fine.”

  She probably can handle everything because there’s no business, I thought as I glanced at the cove. One boat was gassing up, and I saw that Mom had put up a sign: FRESH COOKIES TODAY. I hoped someone—anyone—would come in.

  Luke raced to the dock, and I followed. We quickly raised the mast and put in the rudder. “Where to, Captain?” Luke asked.

  “Out,” I said. We navigated through the moorings. Once we got beyond Luke’s island, the wind picked up, and we pulled the sail in tight and hung out as far as we could. I let my hand trail in the water as I held on to the main sheet. I felt bad about Eva. I deserved the silent treatment, I guess. Maybe I’d been too hard on Mom, too.

  When we reached the middle of the bay, Luke came about and ran before the wind. We were going fast, but the boom was off to the side, and we could sit on either side of the boat.

  Luke turned to me. “Well?”

  I stalled, checking the telltale on the stay to see if the sail was right. “Mom won’t let me enter a pie in the fair,” I said. “And I burned the pies the other night. I forgot to cover the edges.”

  “So? Everybody makes mistakes,” Luke said.

  “They’re afraid of me being in the spotlight—”

  “If you win . . . You might not,” he teased.

  “I’m a champion pie maker!” I boasted, then paused. “Somebody said gays shouldn’t have kids.”

  “MJ is your mom!”

  Eva isn’t, I thought. But I wasn’t ready to talk about that yet. I took the fair form out of my pocket and showed it to him. “It also could be this—”

  “What about it?”

  “It asks for the father’s name,” I said.

  “June.” Luke shook the paper with his free hand. “Don’t you think I’ve filled out a form like this? You leave it blank. Not everybody’s got a mother and a father.”

  My face reddened. I was so absorbed in my own problems, I had forgotten about families like Luke’s. But my worries were bubbling over.

  “Mom still won’t sign it. She’s right to be worried.” I unfolded the flyer. “Yesterday at the library I saw Lauren’s mother passing these out.”

  He took the flyer. The words “Take Back Vermont” and “Boycott Gay Businesses” jumped out in big letters. He whistled. “Wow. That’s pretty low.”

  “That’s why so many sandwiches are left over at the shop.”

  “More for us,” he joked, but I didn’t laugh. He paused. “We could bike around town and rip down all the flyers.”

  “If we could find them all.” I dragged my hand in the water, watching the wake, feeling a lump in my throat. I didn’t want to talk about what happened at the library anymore. “Eva wants to marry Mom in a civil ceremony. They asked me to be the flower girl.”

  “Cool,” he said, and pretended to fling flowers overboard as he hummed “Here Comes the Bride.”

  I splashed him. “Only if I can wear a bathing suit under my dress.”

  “Look at it this way—you’re getting another parent.” He adjusted the tiller slightly. “My mother just doesn’t want to live with us.”

  The sail flapped, then filled with wind again. Sometimes when I went over to his house, washed dishes were stacked haphazardly next to a screwdriver. I’d help Luke put things away, because there are always plenty of chores when it’s just two. That’s the way my life had been, Mom and I making it up as we went along. Who needs more? Especially somebody as opinionated as Eva. But sometimes I caught Mom’s warm eyes, taking in the three of us at the table together. Their fight had scared me; it sounded like the kind between Luke’s mom and dad before she left.

  “She visits me only once a year, you know.” Luke pulled the main sheet in, changing tack. “I can see how she couldn’t live with us, on the island without a phone, but I don’t see why I couldn’t live with her sometimes.”

  “Did you ever ask her?” The last time Luke’s mom had visited, I had watched her emerge from her car with Quebec license plates in a tailored suit all wrong for getting in a boat to an island.

  “She said managing the hotel takes all her time.”

  “That stinks.” I folded the papers into small squares and put them back in my pocket.

  Luke shrugged and turned the boat abruptly into the wind, letting the sail luff. He took off his shirt. “Man overboard!”

  I shed my shorts. “Here I come!”

  We splashed at each other but kept an eye on the sail. Luke was careful to push the nose of the boat back into irons, so it didn’t take off without us.

  “Let’s go to Tin Can Island,” I said when we got back on, dripping.

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  In a moment, we were cruising toward the rock outcrop near the mouth of the bay.

  “Hey, June,” Luke said as we got close. “Do you see what I see?”

  “What?”

  “Berries—and they look ripe!”

  I guided the boat along the edge of the rock, and Luke jumped off to tie up. I lowered the sail and joined him. The island was covered in goldenrod and harebells, with cypress around its edge. We picked our way around the poison ivy, straight to the berries.

  A small patch of black raspberries dangled in the light.

  “I can’t believe they’re ripe,” I said, eating one. It tasted like a piece of sunshine.

  “We’re lucky the birds haven’t eaten them all.” Luke began collecting them in his shirt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Picking them for the best pie ever, of course. The one you are going to enter in the fair.”

  I cupped a berry in my hand and rolled it back and forth. If I won, people would come back to the shop—never mind who owned it. I could add a few strawberries to sweeten up the black raspberries. What if I used three types of berries? Strawberries from Costas’, these raspberries, and blueberries from the cliff-jumping spot. I was already beginning to imagine the flavor, with a little cinnamon, when I remembered the form.

  “What about the entry form?” I asked.

  “You could sign your mom’s name.”

  “Luke!” I punched him lightly. “I bet Mrs. Costa doesn’t need her parent’s signature.”

  Luke looked at me. “Do you have to admit your age in the adult category?”

  I stared. “You mean just enter that division?”

  “Why not?”

  It was a perfect idea. “Then I don’t have to tell Mom,” I said. “It could just be me, June Farrell, pie maker!”

  “As long as you give me credit as your champion berry finder,” he said, passing me his shirt filled with berries.

  I placed the berries in the hull and watched Luke untie the boat. I touched my back pocket, feeling the form and flyer. All I needed was a
little courage to enter the Champlain Valley Fair pie competition.

  Chapter Ten

  AS SOON AS I got home, I packed the black raspberries in our fridge—I didn’t want to freeze them, just preserve them so they could last. The fair was only a week away, and I had to be ready.

  Mom must have thought I would be hungry. I found a note propped up against the milk: Come down to the marina right away, love Mom.

  Whatever, I thought. There was no chance to register for the pie competition today anyway—Luke had to help his dad in the studio. As I approached the dock, I was surprised to see more boats than I’d seen in a long time.

  The bell sounded as I opened the door, and Mom looked up, grinning.

  “I’m glad you’re here. It’s been the strangest day,” she said. “I have to run up and make another batch of cookies.”

  “We’ve run out?”

  “And almost all the sandwiches, too,” she said. “I even had an order from Joe’s gallery in Burlington. Someone drove down. Said they’d heard so much about them.”

  That was strange. It was the exact opposite of last week, when no one had come. My mind flashed to the boycott flyer, but it didn’t make sense. I looked sharply at Mom to see if she suspected anything. Instead, she seemed happier than I’d seen her in a long time. It made me feel better.

  “I was going to eat a sandwich but—”

  “Don’t worry—I’ll make you something,” Mom said. “Let’s save these last two for customers.”

  The door jingled, and Mom scooted out as someone came in. I settled on the stool and pulled a Stillwater Marina cap on my head.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man smiled. “Just looking.”

  Unlike our regular customers, he was wearing jeans and a collared shirt. He was dressed for a city job, not as if he’d come in from the water, all windblown or wet. He looked along the shelves at the line and oil, and he picked up a cotter pin, flipping it around, as if he’d never seen one.

  “That’s for a sailboat,” I said. “Do you need one?”

  “No, no.” He shifted his gaze to the food on display. “Do you have any pies?”

  I shook my head, sorry again that I’d ruined the last four. “We’ll have hot cookies in the next half hour.”

  He picked up a ham sandwich instead. “I just wanted to lend my support,” he said.

  He handed me a ten, and I gave him his change. I didn’t say any more, but I had a weird feeling that he had seen the “Boycott Gay Businesses” flyer.

  He left, and several more people came in, buying the last sandwich and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream bars. None of the purchases was large, but everything was adding up. The cash register had more crumpled tens and twenties than I’d seen all summer. Something was going on. I knew I should be glad for Mom’s sake, but it was making me nervous. Just then Mom returned, sliding me a peanut butter and jelly and waving freshly wrapped cookies.

  “Chocolate chip,” she said.

  “Great,” a woman gushed as she approached the counter. She held two postcards in her hand but had been browsing. She snatched up two pairs of cookies. “To share, in the office,” she said.

  Mom rang it up. “Five eighty-nine.”

  “Is that all?” The woman looked around the shop.

  Mom laughed. “It’s not often that I get a customer who wants to spend more.”

  “I want to be supportive, that’s all.” She picked up a Stillwater visor. “How much is this?”

  “That’s fifteen ninety-nine,” I said.

  “I’ll take it.”

  Mom added the item in, her mind quietly working. “What did you mean, ‘supportive’?”

  “I think it’s just terrible what’s going on. I think everybody deserves to be happy, and it doesn’t matter who owns a business.”

  I pulled my cap low down over my eyes. It felt like my tongue was stuck on the roof of my mouth like the peanut butter I’d just eaten. I suddenly hated this cheerful woman. I watched her leave.

  “How unusual,” Mom murmured.

  “Luke and I found some black raspberries.” I needed to change the subject.

  “That will make a nice pie.”

  I nodded. I didn’t mention the fair. I shifted in my stool. It was a good plan to register in the adult division; yet it made me uncomfortable not to tell the truth.

  The door jingled, and we both looked up. A strong woman with deep lines on her face strode in, wearing a jaunty hat over her white curls.

  “Ruth!”

  I was surprised. Ruth played tennis with Eva occasionally, but she was better known as an opinionated letter writer to the local paper and a talker at town meetings. She probably had a position on the civil union law, but I didn’t know it. I jumped off the stool and nervously realigned all the cotter pins in neat rows.

  “MJ! Got any pies? No? What, didn’t expect customers? I wouldn’t think you would take this lying down. You and Eva are fighters, aren’t you?”

  “We’ve had a slow week, but nothing we can’t handle—”

  “Nonsense! Eva did the right thing—strike back! Gather your allies!”

  Mom’s bewildered expression flicked to me.

  I ran up to the counter, placing myself between Mom and Ruth. “Try one of these chocolate chip cookies! They’re fabulous!”

  “Sure, honey. This must be tough on you. But you two have held your own all along. I’m not worried about you. What else should I buy?”

  I grabbed a map of the lake. “Have you got the latest depth chart? You’ll need this if you want to know the ins and outs of every cove.”

  “Sure, and sunscreen, too, for my next fishing venture—”

  Mom clapped her hands on the counter. “Ruth. What are you talking about? June, what is going on?”

  I looked at Ruth and then down at the floor.

  Ruth cocked her hat back. “You haven’t heard? The flyers are showing up all over town.”

  “What flyers?”

  I felt in my back pocket. I was still wearing the same jeans. I pulled out the “Boycott Gay Businesses” flyer, unfolded it slowly and laid it flat on the counter. Ruth was already talking.

  “This kind of thing is outrageous. I’m glad Eva sent out the e-mail, alerting everyone. You’ve got a lot of support, MJ, and there’s no way we’d let one of our Vermonters suffer this kind of injustice. We’re all behind you, MJ, so ring me up.”

  Mom closed her eyes. I came around and gave her a hug. “I didn’t want you to worry. Please don’t be sad.”

  “I’m OK. You don’t need to worry about me.” Her squeeze was quick, her eyes flashing to the flyer.

  Ruth adjusted her hat and pulled out her purse. “So when are you and Eva tying the knot? Don’t forget to invite me!”

  Mom murmured, “August third,” gave Ruth her change, and they said their goodbyes.

  As soon as she was gone, Mom picked up the flyer and turned to me. “How long did you know about this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want you to worry,” I repeated.

  “My June bug.” Mom gave me an exasperated shake. “I’m the one in charge of the worrying!”

  “No worries, right, Mom?” I tried to say it like she did, but it came out squawky like a seagull.

  She tossed her cap on the counter and shook her head angrily. “I thought you were having a little bit of trouble with Tina, but this . . . If people are attacking my family, my business . . .” She seemed to see me again. “Can you handle the cash register? I need to call Eva. I cannot believe she did this without telling me.”

  Mom’s anger didn’t make sense. “But isn’t it good to have all these customers again?”

  “No! Yes, of course!” Mom grabbed her cell phone. “But it’s not exactly lying low, this telling everyone our problems.”

  As I rang up another sale, I had to admit I was impressed with Eva. Telling people to shop at the targeted businesses was a good idea. It was better than Luke’s idea to tear the flyer
s down. Maybe Eva and I could change people’s minds. I would do my part, too.

  I would make a champion pie for the fair.

  Chapter Eleven

  “IT’S HERE!”

  I wiped cinnamon toast crumbs from my mouth. “What?”

  “The fair, silly,” Tina’s voice over the phone filled the kitchen the next morning. “They’re setting up. My dad said he saw the Ferris wheel on the fairgrounds when he drove by this morning. Let’s go!”

  “Now?” I glanced at Eva, but she was absorbed in the newspaper. I hoped it wasn’t too late to register for the pie contest. I’d filled out the adult form last night, by flashlight. Luke was busy with his dad today; it would be nice to go with Tina.

  “You’re the only other kid I know who has entered the fair,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the stoplight in fifteen minutes, OK?”

  We said goodbye, and I clanked my plate in the sink.

  “I’m going biking with Tina,” I said, and waited for Eva to give me the third degree—or at least remind me to put my plate in the dishwasher.

  “I’ll tell MJ.” Her eyes didn’t leave the page with the headline, “Candidate Denounces Civil Union Law.”

  I grabbed my sweater and paused at the door. Maybe it had been a mistake to give Eva the cold shoulder. She was turning out to be pretty good at it, too.

  A “thank you” sat on my tongue, without budging. I was grateful to Eva for bringing customers to the marina, and I almost wanted to tell her my plan to help, too. But how do you talk to someone who won’t look at you?

  ***

  AS I BIKED down the road, I thought about how nice it was to see Mom busy again. I could tell she was still mad at Eva for not discussing it with her first. They had been up late talking. One e-mail wouldn’t change everything, though. It was more important than ever for me to win the pie contest, for Mom and the shop.

  Tina waved to me when I reached our meeting spot. “C’mon, let’s go see what’s set up. I can already smell the cotton candy.”

  Tina’s pink nails gripped her handlebars as she rode high on a hand-me-down boy’s bike. I wouldn’t have minded it, but Tina always worked hard at looking like a girl. I guess it came from having two brothers.