How Tía Lola Saved the Summer (12 page)

Essie also meets the Prouty twins, who have
horses
, and they invite Essie to come over whenever she wants to ride them. There’s a boy, Milton, from Juanita’s class, who asks Essie a lot of questions about the city, but then when Essie finds out he lives on a farm, she fires back a bunch of her own, and between answering and asking, they can’t stop talking to each other.

A quiet girl listens in like their audience. Her name is Hannah, which is kind of funny that she should have the same name as Hannah Montana, a movie star, when she’s so shy. But then, parents have to name their kids before they have any idea what that little baby will be like. Look at her with a name like Esperanza, which even in English, Hope, is a name for a goody-goody-two-shoes. That’s not Essie at all! If her mother and father had known what she was going to be like, they would probably have named her Contrary. That’s what Papa is always accusing her of being, contrary, as in not always the easiest person to get along with.

After swimming, the camp group heads over to the café.
Rudy hasn’t left yet for practice, so he has lunch right along with them. Without Victoria around, Essie is free to ask as many baseball questions as she can think of without being reminded that she needs to give Rudy a break so he can eat his lunch. Cari and Juanita are more than glad to have Essie talk while they eat up all the French fries. “Hey! No fair!” she says, slapping their hands away playfully. When Essie is a millionaire, she’s going to hire a chef who specializes in French fries, pizza, macaroni and cheese, and desserts with chocolate. She’ll kiss the food pyramid goodbye forever.

They stroll through town after lunch. “Good for the digestion,” Tía Lola claims. Even better for the digestion is stopping at Stargazer’s store! They can touch anything in the shop, turn it on, play with it. Stargazer doesn’t seem to mind. She’s too busy talking to Tía Lola about their auras, whole body-size halos that Stargazer can read. Essie wonders if Stargazer might look at her and see money in her future.

As they walk over to Colonel Charlebois’ house, Essie’s head is spinning. She’ll have to pay close attention to the rooms so she can start planning how she is going to redecorate them once she moves up to Vermont to be a millionaire. Wait a minute! Did she just actually wish to
stay
in Vermont? Is this the same girl who a week ago was sure it was a death sentence to visit, much less stay in, Vermont? Sometimes Essie has to agree with what she knows is the general opinion in her family: it’s not always easy being with Essie. But if they think that’s hard, they should try
being
Essie and having to be with herself all the time!

Colonel Charlebois is expecting them. He has a tea tray all laid out in a room he calls the parlor.

“Sit down and make yourselves comfortable.” Colonel Charlebois gestures toward an assembly of stiff-backed chairs.

The invitation is easier said than followed, as the furniture proves to be very uncomfortable, like you are sitting at attention. The air smells musty. The house is not haunted—Cari doesn’t have to be looking around with big spooked eyes—but it is dark and sad and somber, a house that never gets to hear kids laughing or arguing, dogs barking, never gets to smell potatoes being fried up or a cake baking in the oven.

The mood seizes Essie in a way she didn’t expect. Now she wants Colonel Charlebois to adopt her so she can come up here and throw open the windows and paint the walls bright colors and replace the furniture with beanbags and puffy couches you can fall into while watching a big-screen TV. That would be the first thing Essie’d buy, as the small one in the corner probably doesn’t even have a remote control. But mostly, Essie would sit down with the sad-looking old man, as she does now, and ask him a whole bunch of questions about when he traveled around the world and what he had to do to become a hero.

“That was a long time ago.” Colonel Charlebois waves her questions away at first. His hands are so shaky that the little teacups rattle violently when he picks them up to
pour tea in them. Tía Lola very tactfully intervenes. “Just so you can talk,
coronel.
”

“It’ll bore you all to tears, then you’ll never come back to visit me. Now go ahead and eat some cookies.” The old man has such a bossy way of talking. Nobody would think of contradicting him.

Except Essie. “If we thought we’d be bored to tears, we wouldn’t be asking, now would we?”

The colonel’s jaw drops. Essie can hear the little click of his old dentures. Then he is laughing so hard, it brings on a fit of horrible-sounding coughing.

“I can see you hit them back not only in baseball,” he says once he has recovered. There’s a sparkle in his eye and a smile on his thin lips. Even with his bad cough and his heavy sweater-vest in the middle of summer, Essie can see that the old man is already feeling better with the company.

Soon the colonel is launched on a journey down memory lane, taking three rapt girls and a delighted Tía Lola along. The room is transformed into a Korean jungle, a Japanese temple, a Saharan desert, shark-infested waters off the coast of India, the high seas where pirate ships prowl in search of friendly vessels, and submarines slice the darkness fathoms beyond where sunlight ever reaches. Now it’s Essie’s jaw dropping with wonder.

Upon Cari’s request, Colonel Charlebois gives them a tour of the house. They end up in an attic storeroom with a closet full of old mothball-smelling uniforms hanging in a row and boxes stuffed with what the colonel calls
memorabilia and a bunch of medals. There’s also a dragon mask from China, a snake charmer’s basket from India, and a ceremonial sword in a fanciful scabbard with a tassel, given to him by a Japanese official whose family used to be samurai warriors.

“Awesome!” Essie says. “It’s like another Excalibur!”

“What’s an excantaloupe?” Cari asks.

Essie sighs with impatience. “Excalibur is like
the
most famous sword in history. It belonged to King Arthur.”

Cari doesn’t know who King Arthur is either, but she’s not going to ask Essie another question and be made to feel even dumber.

“So, can I hold it?” Essie asks in a breathless voice.

“Of course,” Colonel Charlebois says, unsheathing the beautiful weapon. As Essie strikes a pose, Colonel Charlebois laughs. “By the way, am I mistaken, or did I see that you yourself had a sword sticking out of your backpack?”

Essie is so mesmerized by the sword, for once she doesn’t speak right up.

“We all have them.” Juanita has been trying to get a word in edgewise since the visit started. “Tía Lola gave them to us.”

“They’re supposed to be magic and help us with a … a …” Cari can’t remember the word Papa used. Something about girdles.

“Help with a challenge,” Tía Lola explains. “Like when you, Cari, needed extra courage, or you, Juanita, needed to feel like you were especial.”

“Those are certainly valuable swords if they can accomplish
so much.” Colonel Charlebois sounds impressed. “This one is only good for murder and plunder.”

Essie finally cedes the sword so Cari and Juanita can also hold it and strike poses and imagine themselves as samurai warriors. The afternoon begins to turn to evening. By the time they are ready to leave, it really is too late to ride their bikes home.

Colonel Charlebois comes up with a plan. “How about I give you all a ride now, and then tomorrow, I’ll pick you up, and you can ride your bikes back home? I get a second visit out of it.”

“But your cold,
coronel
,” Tía Lola reminds him. He really should not go out with a cold in the damp evening air.

“Nonsense! I’ve never felt better in my life,” the colonel says gruffly. “What’s more, I’ve had one of the most entertaining afternoons of my life, and I wouldn’t mind repeating it. Now, the sooner we get in the car, the faster we’ll get there.” It’s like he’s still in the army, barking out orders. Watching him, Essie wonders whom he reminds her of. And then she realizes: me!

Soon another treat awaits her: Essie has been hoping to ride in Colonel Charlebois’ wonderful silver car as big as a tank. The hood ornament is a little silver batter from when the colonel was part of an army baseball team in Panama, called Los Dorados. They won so many trophies, each player got to take one home. The colonel put his on his new Cadillac Eldorado, which he bought precisely because it had a similar name as his team. They heard all about his
posting in Panama this afternoon. That’s where he picked up his Spanish.

Like a gentleman, Colonel Charlebois insists on holding the door open for everyone. But before getting in, he remembers something he has to get in the house. Whatever it is, it goes in the trunk, and then he’s back, turning on the car. The engine sounds a little like it is having its very own coughing fit. Away they go, Colonel Charlebois telling about some championship game in Panama when the bases were loaded and he was up to bat. “Ever been south of the border?” he asks Essie.

“I was thinking of riding my bike all the way to Florida,” Essie confides.

Colonel Charlebois is intrigued. So Essie elaborates about being a hobo and not having to attend school and getting to go to Disney World, since plane tickets for her whole family are too expensive. The colonel listens carefully, like he is just as enchanted by Essie’s stories as she is by his.

“What made you change your mind?”

How does Essie tell him about the million dollars she was hoping to inherit from him? How if she was on the road without a cell phone, the lawyers couldn’t reach her to give her the news? The last thing in the world Essie would want to do is hurt the colonel’s feelings by mentioning something as rude as his death. He’d think she was eager to visit and listen to his stories only because she wanted his money. For the second time in an afternoon, Essie doesn’t have a whole lot to say.

“I guess I changed my mind on account of I’d miss my
family too much.” Once she says so, Essie knows it’s the truth.

“Wise choice,” the colonel says thoughtfully. “One that sometimes I wish I had made. But that’s neither here nor there. We make our beds and we have to lie in them.”

“It’s never too late to buy a softer mattress or change for a bigger model!” Tía Lola reminds him, laughing.

They pull up to the house, already wrapped in that soft haze of a summer evening. Colonel Charlebois agrees to stay for dinner. By the time he is ready to leave, it’s already dark. He asks Essie if she wouldn’t mind accompanying him to the car. He has something for her in the trunk.

Essie’s heart soars. She is going to get a gift from Colonel Charlebois, without him having to die first!

When Essie shines the beam of her treasure-hunt flashlight into the trunk, which the colonel has thrown open, she can hardly believe her eyes. The samurai sword in its elaborate scabbard! “For me?” she gasps. But a second later, her heart plummets. Papa will never let her accept such a precious gift. He’ll think that, Essie being Essie, she must have hinted that she sure could use a samurai sword down in the dangerous streets of New York City.

“I can’t,” she has to admit sadly. “Papa’ll make me give it back. He thinks we’re imposing if people give us stuff.”

“We won’t call it a gift, then,” Colonel Charlebois suggests.

Essie can feel the skies of possibility opening. Like when a roller coaster climbs slowly, with effort, and you know once you get to the top, you’re going to plunge down, but that means you’ll soon be swinging back up in
a wild, wonderful arc of a ride. You need the down part to make the up part so thrilling.

“Let’s just call it a trade.”

A trade? But Essie doesn’t have anything as special to exchange for a genuine samurai sword.

“Didn’t you say you had a magic sword?”

“But it’s not really, it’s just a plastic—”

The colonel shakes his head. “If Tía Lola says that sword is magic, then that’s guarantee enough for me. Lord knows I have a bunch of challenges I need help with right now, including this cold. So, what do you say, is it a swap or not?”

Is this really happening? Essie wonders as she races back to the house to retrieve the sword from her backpack. Before handing it over, she says, “Thank you, sword, for granting my wish.” She did not inherit a million dollars or get to play baseball instead of Miguel, but she is now the proud owner of a genuine samurai warrior sword. She has also had a magnificent day and made several new friends. True to her name, Esperanza has everything she could hope for.

Eight
thursday night
and friday