A Summer of Sundays (7 page)

For now, the story was just mine.

I HAD
just poured the milk into Bo’s cereal bowl the next morning when there was a knock at the front door. Jude. I don’t know how I knew it before the door even opened, but I did.

Mom, who’d probably been up and dressed since five o’clock as usual, walked to the door and opened it wide. “Good morning. Jude, right?”

He nodded. “Good morning.”

Mom could get his name right, but not mine? I plopped into a chair, grabbed my spoon, and stabbed at the mound of flakes swimming in my bowl.

“It’s good to see you again. Have you had breakfast?”

“Hi, Jude!” Bo said, jumping up and spilling half of his cereal onto the table. He rushed over like he was going to wrap the boy in a hug, then hung back behind Mom.

“Hi.” Jude walked in, looking more comfortable and normal in his loose blue T-shirt and shorts than he had yesterday in that white getup he’d been packed into. Still,
I marveled at how clean he was. He looked like something out of a commercial for laundry detergent.

“Sunday,” Mom said, leading Jude to the dining room. “It’s your friend Jude.”

Jude smiled at me and took a seat as if that’s what he did every other morning of his life. “Hi, Sunday,” he said.

I swallowed a bite of cereal, wiped the dribble of milk from my chin, and mustered up a halfhearted
hi
.

“What can I get you? I’m sure you could still eat a little something?” Mom asked. “Toast maybe?”

He smiled. “Yeah, sure. And thank you again for the pumpkin bread. It was the best thing I’ve ever had. My mom makes it sometimes, but not as good as yours.”

I rolled my eyes. He must’ve taken a class on how to win over moms. She smiled, pleased, and then disappeared into the kitchen.

“Where’s everybody else?’

“Me and Sunday always eat breakfast together.” Bo smiled at me. “CJ and Henry are washing off the wall in the bedroom, ’cause they played tic-tac-toe on it last night. Mom said she’d skin them alive if they ever did something like that again. May and Emma are getting ready, trying on clothes and putting gunk in their hair, shaving their legs and plucking their eyebrows out. Stuff like that.”

I stifled a laugh, thinking what my sisters would do if
they knew Bo was telling a random boy about everything they do in the bathroom.

Mom came in and set a plate of buttery toast in front of Jude along with a glass of orange juice and a jar of strawberry jam. “Now, don’t hesitate to ask for more,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You have any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

Jude shook his head no through a mouthful of toast.

“Really? It’s just you and your parents?”

“Yeah, well, just me and my mom. And then there’s Wally, my mom’s boyfriend.”

“Oh. Your parents are divorced then?”

He looked down at his plate and nodded.

“Sunday!” Mom said, giving me another look.

I shrugged. “I was just asking. He knows that Emma and May pluck their eyebrows out. I think we should at least know a little about him.”

“What does ‘divorced’ mean?” Bo asked. His chin was covered in a white crust of dried milk.

Mom smiled and took Bo’s near-empty bowl. “Come on, Bo, let’s get you washed up.”

They disappeared into the kitchen.

I waited until they were gone, then whispered. “So, you aren’t gonna tell, right?”

“Tell?” Jude acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “Tell about what?”

I sighed, exasperated. “About … well, forget it.” If he didn’t remember, I wasn’t going to remind him.

“Oh, about the thing you were hiding last night?”

I nodded.

“No. I won’t tell.”

“Thanks.”

“Can you tell me what it was, though?” He took a swig of orange juice and wiped his mouth with of his hand.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause … ’cause I hardly know you, and because I don’t know if it’s anything yet. I took it so I could read it and see.”

“So it’s a book, then?” He popped the last piece of toast in his mouth. “Oh, come on, tell me.”

“Why should I? You were going to tell on me and, like I said, I hardly know you.”

“Sure you do. My name is Jude Zachariah Caleb Trist the Third. I’m an only child. My parents are divorced, and my mom’s boyfriend is a dork.” He paused. “And I wasn’t going to tell.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I wasn’t.” He took his plate and stood up. We walked to the kitchen and put our dishes in the dishwasher. “I just saw your family over the past few days and, well, I wanted to say hi. My mom says you should always be friendly to newcomers.”

“You only wanted to meet Emma. Admit it.”

His cheeks filled with red. “No, I didn’t even see her up close until last night. It’s like I said, I just wanted to meet you and your family.”

“I don’t see why.”

I walked outside and sat down on the porch stairs, picking at a scab on my knee. Jude plopped down next to me. Butters trotted out through the open door and disappeared into the bushes, her nose to the ground. “So tell me again why you wanted to meet my family.”

Jude gave a halfhearted shrug. “I don’t have any brothers and sisters. I don’t know what it’s like.”

“Well, it stinks,” I said, thinking of sitting at the gas station alone. But Jude wouldn’t understand that. I bet he never felt invisible. He would never get left behind.

“It’s okay being an only child. But sometimes it gets lonely, and my mom can be overprotective.” He turned to me. “You don’t like being in a big family?”

“It’s not that I don’t like my family. They’re all right. It’s just that it’s easy to get forgotten.” I looked at him. “But how about you? You said your stepdad’s a dork.”

He glared at me. “He’s not my stepdad.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Your mom’s
boyfriend
then. Why don’t you like him?”

Jude shrugged. “He’s just always trying to do stuff with me. Teach me things and be my best friend. Like, right
now he’s trying to get me to play with him in the father-son baseball game at the fair that’s coming up.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“I had a dad and he was lousy, and I don’t want another one. All my mom’s other boyfriends were lousy, too. They were only being nice to me so they could get close to my mom. That’s what Wally’s doing. Besides, my mom and I are fine when it’s just the two of us. We don’t need anyone else.”

“But you come over to my house to see what it’s like to have brothers and sisters? That doesn’t make any sense.”

He untied and retied his shoelace. “Just forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Well, excuse me.”

We sat for a few moments before Jude broke the silence. “So why are you trying to hide the book or whatever it is you found?”

I looked hard at him and lowered my voice. “Because I need to make my mark this summer.”

“Make your mark?”

“Yeah, you know, do something that sets me apart from everyone else. Do something big. Something that will get me noticed by everyone. Something important.”

“What’s so secret about that?”

“Because if one of my sisters or brothers finds out, then all the attention will go to them.”

“How?”

Standing up, I walked the rest of the way down the stairs. “That’s how it always goes with my brothers and sisters. Now, stop asking so many questions.”

“But if I don’t know what you’re trying to do, how am I supposed to help?”

I whirled around. “Help?”

“Yeah. Help you make your mark, or whatever.”

Stepping closer, I looked him up and down. “You really want to help?”

He nodded. “Sure. I don’t have anything else to do. My best friend, Griffin, spends the summer with his grandparents, and most of my other friends live in the next town over and are probably at camp. Besides, it’ll give me a good excuse to say no to Wally if he asks me to go somewhere.”

“And you won’t tell a single soul—especially anyone in my family—about anything that I come up with to try?”

He crossed his heart and then spat on the ground. “That’s how my grandpa taught me to make a promise. He said if you ever break a promise like that, then your spit rises up from the ground like fog and turns into a ghost that haunts you the rest of your life.”

“You believe that?”

Jude shrugged.

I turned up my chin. “Well, I do. So don’t you break
it, Jude Zachariah—” I couldn’t remember the rest of his name.

“Caleb Trist the Third,” he finished. “I won’t.”

I nodded and found myself smiling at him. “I’ll tell you everything later, okay?”

“All right.”

Dad hailed us from the library stairs, his tool belt hanging around his waist. “Sunday! You coming to help?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a sec.” I turned to Jude and asked if he wanted to come along.

“Sure. But I have to call my mom. She freaked out last night when I came home late.”

Jude went to use the phone, and I ran over to the library. Dad had brought one of the desks outside and was staring. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m going to start refinishing the desks and some of the shelves. I have to sand them down and then stain or paint them. What do you think? Stain or repaint?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“The librarian is coming today so she’ll decide. Your friend coming over, too?”

“Yeah. Is that okay?”

He smiled and ruffled my hair. “Sure.”

I stepped into the library and started in on another stack of books. From the looks of it, Mom and the librarian were going to have to order a whole lot more copies.
I flipped through book after book, sorting them into separate “bad condition” and “good condition” piles. Finally, when I thought that Jude must’ve gotten lost on the thirty-second walk over, I heard his voice.

“You’re making the costumes?” he asked.

I stood up and stepped out the open door. “Where in the world were—” But I stopped. There he was, his eyes big and round just like Butters’s when she wants a treat, gazing up at Emma. “I bet your costumes are the best,” he said all swoony-like.

Emma smiled at him, which I could tell just about sent him over the edge. “Thanks.”

I should’ve known. One of my siblings was already stealing a friend I’d had for not even a full two hours.

I rolled my eyes, tromped down the stairs, and grabbed Jude’s hand, tugging him up into the library.

“Come on, loverboy. I thought you were going to help me.” The door closed behind us, and the trance my sister had put over him broke. At least for the moment.

I sat him down next to stack of books. “Start sorting.”

“Is Emma gonna—” he started.

Glaring at him with an I-will-kill-you-if-you-say-anything-more-about-my-sister look, I shoved a book in his hand. He turned it over, confused.

“Snap out of it, Jude. Look at the book and see if we should keep it.”

He looked at me, his eyes still hazy. “What?”

“See. If. We. Should. Keep. It.”

He shook his head, the last of her trance disappearing, and smiled. “Oh, yeah.”

Instead of ringing the triangle for lunch, Mom and May carried over a plate of sandwiches, celery sticks slathered with globs of peanut butter, two pitchers of pink lemonade, and some of Dad’s Famous Fowler Family Chocolate Chip Cookies.

I grabbed a slice of celery and licked out the peanut butter in one swipe, then sat down on one of the steps. Jude eyed the cookies and the sandwiches dripping with jelly and cream cheese (Bo’s and my favorite).

“You can have some. Mom always makes enough.”

Jude reached for a sandwich just as a clean white car pulled up. A woman stepped out and glanced around at the pile of us spread all over the library stairs and grass. She held a brown paper bag in one hand, the name JUDE written in neat bold letters across the front, and a tall water bottle in the other.

“Is that your mom?” I asked. She looked young and nervous but pretty. Her brown hair was pulled in a neat ponytail, and she was dressed really nice in a skirt, high heels, and a silky blouse like Mom wore on Christmas Eve.

Jude nodded, his cheeks red as an apple, and got up.

A man got out of the passenger side. He was tall and thin and wore a mechanic’s outfit streaked with black grease and oil, the complete opposite of Jude’s mom. He had a rough yet kind look about him as he reached out to shake hands with my dad. “Is that—?” I started.

“Yes.”

Mom had already made her way down the stairs and was greeting Ms. Trist with a warm hug. Dad looked like he was explaining what he’d done with the library. Wally nodded and smiled.

But everywhere else, chaos was breaking out, and I watched Ms. Trist’s reaction change from “this woman is nice” to “these kids are out of control.”

CJ was chasing after Bo with a booger on the end of his finger yelling, “If I catch you, then you have to eat it.”

May was crying because Dad was going to make her apologize to the people down the street for hitting their garbage can earlier that morning trying to parallel park. Emma was complaining about a stain on her tank top, and Henry had his pants down around his ankles and was peeing on one of the trees.

“May … I mean, Sunday,” Mom called. “Why don’t you come over and meet Jude’s mom?”