Chasing AllieCat (2 page)

One

Cannonballs Fly

May 28

My summer had started with a bang. That was the day I met Allie.

Mom and Dad are divorced, but sort of friends. Dad is an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota. He was spending his sabbatical year in Egypt, doing Nefertiti research. He called mom and told her she should come to Egypt for the summer, that she’d love it.

At first she said, “Absolutely not. Are you crazy? Because that’s what a divorce
means.
”

She didn’t know I was listening to her half of the conversation, and she asked Dad, “Sid, isn’t
she
in Amarna with you?”

“Does Dad have a girlfriend?” I asked Mom later.

“He
did
.”

When he called me the next weekend, I asked him, “Dad, do you have a girlfriend?”

“Not anymore, Sadie,” he said.

“Who was she?” I asked. “How come I never met her?”

“A Ph.D. student. She came with me to do research, but we drove each other nuts. We can’t work together. She went back to Minneapolis.”

“So now you want Mom back?”

“Sadie, don’t get your hopes up. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back together. But your mother and I work well together. And she’d love it here. She’d
thrive.
”

Well, God forbid I should stand in the way of my own mother
thriving.
Talk about a guilt trip if I complained about getting ditched for the summer while my parents were in
Africa
. I did, anyway—complain, that is—but then I thought they might get back together, so I quit whining and packed for the summer at Uncle Scout’s.

Mom had her ticket for Cairo in her bag when we showed up—mom, my eight-year-old brother Timmy, and me, suitcases and my mountain bike loading down her Subaru Forester, which she let me drive for once—for the traditional Memorial Day picnic at Scout and Susan’s house in LeHillier, Minnesota, a township within the city limits of Mankato. And let me tell you, LeHillier is the armpit of America.

Mom’s whole extended family—Scout and Susan and their four kids, Grandma, Mom’s other brother Thomas and his wife Janie and two kids—were all at Scout’s. They were waiting for us so they could start eating.

For dessert, Mom passed around her famous peanut butter pie. “Can’t tell you thanks enough, Scout and Susan, for letting Sadie and Timmy stay here all summer.”

Susan bit her lip and looked at Scout. Uncle Scout bellowed, “Absolutely dee-lighted to have them.” He winked at me.

Susan looked at her lap. Finally she took a bite of pie and looked at me as if she was seeing me for the first time. “Sadie, would you mind babysitting sometimes?”

I looked at Mom. The truth was yes, I would mind. I’d mind a lot. But that would be an anti-mom-
thriving
kind of thing to say. I looked around at Stevie sitting next to Timmy, at Megan, at little Josie in her booster chair, and at Stacie crammed into her highchair, food all over the place. I breathed out. And I said, “I can babysit, but I have to get a job this summer. And I need to ride my bike every day.”

Aunt Janie looked at Aunt Susan and said sideways to me, “You
need
to ride your bike? You may think you
need
a job, but riding your bike isn’t something a person
needs
—”

“I want to start mountain-bike racing this year, so yeah. I
need
to.” I’d been too chicken to race so far. This year, I was determined to do it, and Mom knew it. I looked at her to back me up. I didn’t mind making her feel a little bit guilty about ditching us for the summer.

Mom gave me that
please work with me here
look, and I shot back a look that said I hoped
my
thriving
mattered to her a tiny little bit, too. She played the diplomat. “Seems like you’d have time for all three. And this
is
the perfect location to mountain bike.”

I looked back at Aunt Susan and let out a sigh. On purpose. To be a bit dramatic. It wasn’t my fault we needed a place to stay, after all—it was Mom’s—but I was the one who had to pay. I also knew I could make it worse or I could cooperate, but I didn’t feel much like cooperating. “I can babysit. Some.” I looked down. “I mean, sure. Yes.”

Aunt Janie looked at me and said to Aunt Susan, “And I’m sure both Sadie and Timmy can help you in your big garden, too.”

“Good idea,” Aunt Susan said, giving me the first smile of the day. “You can both help Stevie and Megan and me in the garden.”

I tried not to glare at Aunt Janie.

My little brother Timmy, who couldn’t think of anything more exciting than spending the summer with his cousin Stevie, said, “I can work in the garden!”

And so, my fate was sealed.

LeHillier was going to cut me off from my entire world. I’d just turned sixteen on May 23, so Mom wouldn’t let me get my license until she got back from Egypt and could let me do more practice driving. That’s what she said, but the real reason was so she wouldn’t have to worry about me driving while she was gone. So for starters, my only transportation would be my bike. My best friends in Minnetonka, Erica and Sara, were gone for the summer, too, out of cell phone reach. Erica and her parents were spending the summer in England, and Sara and her oboe were off at Interlochen music camp in Michigan where there were strict rules about cell phones. So Mom had cancelled our cell phone contract for the whole summer. No pleading mattered. Her response was, “You earn enough money to buy your own phone and policy this summer, you go right ahead.”

After pie, I took off on my mountain bike without offering to help with dishes. I rode the bluffs beyond Scout’s place.

Scout’s house sits near the edge of a rocky cliff overlooking the Blue Earth River. The back of his house is connected, by a huge shop and garage and then a passageway, to the back room of Scout’s Last Chance, the bar and grill he owns. The building is as wide as Scout’s backyard, so even though the front of the bar and grill opens onto a parking lot, you can’t even see the parking lot from Scout’s house. The trees come up thick to the sides of the bar and grill, a border around Scout’s yard. The woods stretch out from there, and steep trails slope down to the water.

I swooped down a sand hill and tooled around the jumps and logs by the water. It should have been a stunning spot, with the river and hills and woods and all, but it was a junk pit. Wildflowers bloomed purple, yellow, and white, and the trees were a bright early summer green, but garbage littered the beauty, more colorful than the wildflowers. Not just cans and bottles and candy wrappers. A water heater. Broken chairs. A table with two legs. A shoe. A rope. A ripped sweater. A pile of tires. Beer cans. People must have just driven in, dumped their crap, and taken off. I dodged a water softener beside the trail.

After about an hour, a voice drifted down the hill and I stopped, one foot down, to listen. “Sadie! Sadie!” I turned my bike uphill, toward Uncle Scout’s voice. “Sadie?” I stood on my pedals and cranked up the steep sandy slope.

“Coming!” I yelled.

“Get your wiry butt up here if you want to watch the show!”

“Here she is,” Uncle Thomas bellowed. “Time for the unveiling!”

The whole family—cousins, Grandma, and all—crowded around Uncle Thomas’s trailer, which was hooked behind his pickup. I wheeled over to them.

“What are you boys up to this time?” Grandma asked.

“No worries, Mum.”

Grandma patted her hair waves and crossed her arms.

Uncle Scout set a case of MGD on the pickup tailgate and he and Thomas each cracked a can. Two in the afternoon, and it was their second case of the day. Mom’s brothers are both huge men—they could have auditioned for the part of Hagrid in Harry Potter—and they were a little tipsy.

“I’m sorry,” Aunt Janie said to my mom and to Aunt Susan.

“Sorry?” Aunt Susan said. “What for?”

Aunt Janie tried to smile, but it didn’t work. “It’s something Thomas has always wanted,” she said, “so when I found one on eBay, I got it for him. He’s like a little kid with it.”

The trailer door slid open and Uncle Scout fairly screamed, “Holy shit!”

“Jack Landan Hoelschmeier!” Aunt Susan yelled. “There are eight children present and you
watch
your mouth.”

“He said
holy shit!”
the kids too young to know better (which meant all the kids except me) whispered, giggling.

“And she called him
Jack,”
I said. “Watch out.”

Scout and Thomas came down the ramp, pulling and steadying a full-sized, genuine Civil War cannon.

I don’t know what I was expecting to be in the trailer, but certainly not a real live cannon. Well, not
live,
but real.

“You’re not going to—” Susan started to say.

“What exactly,” Scout said, chucking her on the chin in his most tender teasing manner, “is a cannon for, my dear, if not to
fire
?”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Mom, the liberal of the crowd, looked a little panicky. She hates guns, period. And nobody knows her brothers better than Mom does.

“Settle down, pipsqueak,” Scout said.

She glowered at him and he laughed. Scout is the only one in the world who can get away with calling my mother
pipsqueak.
Not even Thomas, the youngest of the three, would dare.