“I’m sorry I took your book,” he said softly. “Mr. Bertrand lent it to me, so I didn’t know it belonged to anyone else. And I didn’t know about the tree being yours either. I apologize.”
She was so astonished she couldn’t speak. Her mother said that males didn’t know the meaning of the word
sorry
. But this one did. She took the book he was holding out to her and watched as he turned away and started back toward the house.
He was halfway there before she could move. “Wait!” she called out and was shocked when he stopped walking. None of her boy cousins
ever
obeyed her.
She walked up to him, the book firmly clutched against her chest. “Who are you?” she asked. If he’d said he was a visitor from another planet, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Travis . . . Merritt,” he said. “My mother and I arrived late last night. Who are you?”
“Kimberly Aldredge. My mother and I are staying in there”—she pointed—“while my father and brother go fishing in Montana.”
He gave a nod, as though what she’d said was very important. “My mother and I are staying there.” He pointed to the apartment on the other side of the big house. “My father is in Tokyo.”
Kim had never heard of the place. “Do you live near here?”
“Not in this state, no.”
She was staring at him and thinking that he was very much like a doll, as he didn’t smile or even move very much.
“I like the book,” he said. “I’ve never read anything like it before.”
In her experience she didn’t know boys read anything they didn’t have to. Except her cousin Tris, but then he only read about sick people, so that didn’t count. “What do you read?” she asked.
“Textbooks.”
She waited for him to add to that list, but he just stood there in silence. “What do you read for fun?”
He gave a slight frown. “I rather like the science textbooks.”
“Oh,” she said.
He seemed to realize that he needed to say more. “My father says that my education is very important, and my tutor—”
“What’s that?”
“The man who teaches me.”
“Oh,” she said again, but had no idea what he was talking about.
“I am homeschooled,” he said. “I go to school inside my father’s house.”
“That doesn’t sound like fun,” Kim said.
For the first time, he gave a bit of a smile. “I can attest that it is no fun whatever.”
Kim didn’t know what
attest
meant, but she could guess. “I’m good at having fun,” she said in her most adult voice. “Would you like me to show you how?”
“I’d like that very much,” he said. “Where do we begin?”
She thought for a moment. “There’s a big pile of dirt in the back. I’ll show you how to ride my bike up it then race down. You can stick your hands and feet straight out. Come on!” she yelled and started running.
But a moment later she looked back and he wasn’t there. She backtracked and he was standing just where she’d left him. “Are you afraid?” she asked tauntingly.
“I don’t think so, but I’ve never ridden a bicycle before, and I think you’re too young to teach me.”
She didn’t like being told she was “too young” to do anything. Now he
was
sounding like a boy. “Nobody teaches you how to ride a bike,” she said, knowing she was lying. Her dad had spent days holding her bike while she learned to balance.
“All right,” he said solemnly. “I’ll try it.”
The bike was too short for him and the first time he got on it, he fell off and landed on his face. He got up, spitting dirt out of his mouth, and Kim watched him. Was he one of those boys who’d go crying to his mother?
Instead, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then gave a grin that nearly split his face in half. “Huzzah!” he said and got back on the bike.
By lunchtime he was riding down the hill faster than Kim had ever dared, and he jerked the front wheel upward, as though he were going over a jump.
“How’d I do?” he asked Kim after his fastest slide down the dirt hill. He didn’t look like the same boy she’d first seen. His shirt was torn at the shoulder, and he was filthy from head to toe. There was a bruise forming on his cheek where he’d nearly crashed into a tree, but he’d pulled to the left and only grazed it. Even his teeth were dirty.
Before Kim could answer, he looked over her head and stiffened into the boy she’d first seen. “Mother,” he said.
Kim turned to see a small woman standing there. She was pretty in a motherly sort of way, but whereas Travis had pink in his cheeks, she had none. She was like a washed-out, older, female version of him.
Without saying a word, she walked to stand between the two children and looked her son up and down.
Kim held her breath. If the woman told Kim’s mom that she’d made Travis dirty, Kim would be punished.
“You taught him to ride a bike?” Mrs. Merritt asked her.
Travis stepped in front of Kim, as though to protect her. “Mother, she’s just a little girl. I taught myself to ride. I’ll go and wash.” He took a step toward the house.
“No!” Mrs. Merritt said, and he looked back at her. She went to him and put her arms around him. “I’ve never seen you look better.” She kissed his cheek then smiled as she wiped dirt off her lips. She turned to Kim. “You, young lady . . .” she began, but stopped. Bending, she hugged Kim. “You are a truly marvelous child. Thank you!”
Kim looked up at the woman in wonder.
“You kids go back to playing. How about if I bring a picnic lunch out here for you two? Do you like chocolate cake?”
“Yes,” Kim said.
Mrs. Merritt took two steps toward the house before Kim called out, “He needs his own bike.”
Mrs. Merritt looked back, and Kim swallowed. She’d never before given an adult an order. “He . . .” Kim said more quietly. “My bike is too small for him. His feet drag.”
“What else does he need?” Mrs. Merritt asked.
“A baseball and bat,” Travis said.
“And a pogo stick,” Kim added. “And a—” She broke off because Mrs. Merritt held up her hand.
“I have limited resources, but I’ll see what I can do.” She went back to the house and a few minutes later she brought out sandwiches and lemonade. In the afternoon she returned with two big slices of freshly baked chocolate cake. By that time Travis had learned to do wheelies, and she watched him with a mixture of awe and terror. “Who would have thought that you’re a natural athlete, Travis?” she said in wonder, then went back in the house.
In the early evening, Kim’s uncle Benjamin, her cousin Ramsey’s father, yelled, “Ho, ho, ho. Who ordered Christmas in July?”
“We did!” Kim yelled, and Travis followed her as she ran to her uncle’s big SUV.
Uncle Ben wheeled a new shiny, blue bicycle out of the back. “I was told to give this to the dirtiest boy in Edilean.” He looked at Travis. “I think that means you.”
Travis grinned. He still had dirt on his teeth, and his hair was caked with it. “Is that for me?”
“It’s from your mother,” Uncle Ben said and nodded toward the front door.
Mrs. Merritt was standing on the step, and Kim wasn’t sure but she looked like she was crying. But that made no sense. A bicycle made a person laugh, not cry.
Travis ran to his mother and threw his arms around her waist.
Kim stared at him in astonishment. No twelve-year-old boy she knew would ever do something like that. It wasn’t cool to hug your mother in front of other people.
“Nice kid,” Uncle Ben said, and Kim turned back to him. “Don’t tell your mom but I went over to your house and did a little cleaning. Any of this look familiar?” He pulled a box toward the back of the car and tipped it down so Kim could see inside. Five of her favorite books were in there, her second-best doll, an unopened kit for making jewelry, and in the bottom was her jump rope.
“Sorry, no pogo stick, but I got one of Rams’s old bats and some balls.”
“Oh thank you, Uncle Ben!” she said, and followed Travis’s example and hugged him.
“If I’d known I was going to get this, I would have bought you a pony.”
Kim’s eyes widened into saucers.
“Don’t tell your mom I said that or she’ll skin me.”
Travis had left his mother and was looking at his new bike in silence.
“Think you can ride it?” Uncle Ben asked. “Or can you only handle a little girl’s bike?”
“Benjamin!” Kim’s mother said as she came out to see what was going on. Mr. Bertrand was still inside. As far as anyone knew he never left the house. “Too lazy to turn a doorknob,” Kim’s father once said.
Travis gave Kim’s uncle a very serious look, then took the bike from him and set off at a breakneck speed around the house. When they heard the unmistakable sound of a crash, Uncle Ben put his hand on Mrs. Merritt’s arm to keep her from running to the boy.
They heard what sounded like another crash on the other side of the house, and at last Travis came back to them. He was dirtier, his shirt was torn more, and there was a streak of blood across his upper lip.
“Any problems?” Uncle Ben asked.
“None whatever,” Travis said, looking the man straight in the eyes.
“That’s my boy!” he said as he slapped Travis hard on the shoulder. He closed the lid of the SUV. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“What work do you do?” Travis asked in an adult-sounding voice.
“I’m a lawyer.”
“Is it a good trade?”
Uncle Ben’s eyes danced with merriment but he didn’t laugh. “It pays the bills, and it has some good points and bad. You thinking of trying the legal profession?”
“I rather admire Thomas Jefferson.”
“You’ve come to the right place for him,” Uncle Ben said, grinning as he opened the car door. “Tell you what, Travis ol’ man, you get out of law school, come see me.”
“I will, sir, and thank you,” Travis said. He sounded very adult, but the dirt on him, the twigs, and the bruises, made what he was saying funny.
But Uncle Ben still didn’t laugh. He looked at Mrs. Merritt. “Good kid. Congratulations.”
Mrs. Merritt put her arm around her son’s shoulders, but he twisted away from her. He didn’t seem to want Uncle Ben to see him so attached to a woman.
They all watched Uncle Ben leave, then Kim’s mom said, “You kids go play. We’ll call you in time for dinner and afterward you can catch fireflies.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Merritt said. “Go play.” She looked as though she’d been waiting for years to say that to her son. “Mr. Bertrand is going to teach me how to sew.”
“Lucy,” Kim’s mom said, “I think I should tell you that Bertrand is using you for free labor. He wants his curtains repaired and—”
“I know,” Lucy Merritt said, “but it’s all right. I want to learn to do something creative, and sewing is as good as anything else. You don’t think he’d sell me his machine, do you?”
“I think he’d sell you his feet, since he rarely uses them.”
Lucy laughed.
“Come on,” Kim’s mom said, “and I’ll show you how to thread the machine.”
For two weeks, Kim lived in her idea of heaven. She and Travis were together from early until late.
He took to having fun as though he’d been born to it—which Kim’s mom said he should have been.
While they played outside, inside the two women and Mr. Bertrand talked and sewed. Lucy Merritt used the old Bernina sewing machine to repair every curtain in the house.
“So he can get a better price when he sells them,” Kim’s mom muttered.
Lucy bought fabric and made new curtains for the bathrooms and the kitchen.
“You’re paying him rent,” Kim’s mother said. “You shouldn’t be paying for them too.”
“It’s all right. It’s not as though I can save the money. Randall will take whatever I don’t spend.”
Mrs. Aldredge knew that Randall was Lucy’s husband, but she didn’t know any more than that. “I want to know what that means,” she said, but Lucy said she’d told too much already.
At night the children reluctantly went inside their separate apartments. Their mothers got them washed and fed and into bed. The next morning they were outside again. No matter how early Kim got up, Travis was always waiting for her at the back of the house.
One night Travis said, “I’ll come back.”
Kim didn’t know what he meant.
“After I leave, I’ll return.”
She didn’t want to reply to that because she didn’t want to imagine him being gone. They climbed trees together, dug in the mud, rode their bikes; she tossed the ball, and Travis hit it across the garden. When Kim brought her second-best doll out, she was nervous. Boys didn’t like dolls. But Travis said he’d build a house for it and he did. It was made of leaves and sticks and inside was a bed that Kim covered with moss. While Travis made a roof to the house, she used her jewelry kit to make two necklaces with plastic beads. Travis smiled when she slipped one over his head, and he was wearing it the next morning.
When it got too hot to move, they stretched out on the cool ground in the shade and took turns reading
Alice
and the other books aloud to each other. Kim wasn’t nearly as good a reader as he was, but he never complained. When she was stumped by a word, he helped her. He’d told her he was a good listener, and he was.
She knew that at twelve he was a lot older than she was, but he didn’t seem to be. When it came to schooling, he seemed like an adult. He told her the entire life cycle for a tadpole and all about cocoons. He explained why the moon was different shapes and what caused winter and summer.
But for all his great knowledge, he’d never skimmed a rock across a pond. Never climbed a tree before he came to Edilean. He’d never even skinned his elbow.
So, in the end, they taught each other. Even though he was twelve, and she only eight, there were times when she was his teacher—and she liked that.
Everything ended exactly two weeks after it began. As always, as soon as it was light outside, sleepy-eyed Kim ran out the back door, past the back of the big old house, to the wing where Travis and his mom were staying.
But that morning, when Travis wasn’t already outside and waiting for her, she knew something was wrong. She started pounding on the door and yelling his name; she didn’t care if she woke the whole house.
Her mother, in robe and slippers, came running out. “Kimberly! What are you shouting about?”