Spring Melons

RICK KRIZMAN

“Got your buckets?” Mom asks and of course we do. Of course we have our buckets, and catchers mitts, and a helmet for Bitsy because of how she got her noggin popped last time. She’s too little, I’d said then, but Marcy’d said You used to be too little, but I said That was before.

We never go anywhere together, the five of us girls and Mom, at least not since Dad’s gone. But it was him told us about the spectacular sight, and of course he was right. Like how he’d showed us the Mystery House where water runs uphill and if you stood in one place I could be as tall as Janey, even though she’d shot up two inches last year. Or when he took us to that hole in the desert where the Big Bear threw down the giant snowball from way out at the North Star, which Dad said was a pinhole and the Universe was leaking out, but it’d be fine for now, we’d all be dead anyway, which made Bitsy cry but she didn’t know what for. Sometimes he’d hold his hand up in the sky and act like he was moving a cloud across the sun, but I’m older and knew it was a trick, that it was the sun doing the moving. But I didn’t say, because of Cassie, who of course believed everything.

“Okay, hop in,” Mom says, sounding tired, like she doesn’t want to do this. Of course she’s always tired, since Dad. Maybe you just get tired eventually. I’m never tired and sometimes I think whether the tiredness has been spread fairly.

We drive a long ways to the farm and Bitsy cries four whole times, which Dad would say was a New World Record, which always happened when he was around. Look, he’d say, three rainbows, a New World Record, just for example. Or having the hiccups for so long. Or eating the most ice cream.

We get to the melon field and pile out with our buckets and baseball gloves, and look across the big heart-shaped leaves with the tan cantaloupes peeking out under. Dad always said Get close, real quiet, and don’t startle them. We tiptoe down the rows, I’ve got my bucket ready, then Bitsy giggles and we shush her but too late, and a cantaloupe springs up in the air. Marcy can’t get it, but she trips in the dirt and another melon flies off and I chase it with my bucket, but it’s too far, and of course I fall down too, but then I see cantaloupes flying everywhere, springing out of the heart-shaped leaves, and we’re all chasing them and I get one in my bucket, look over at Mom and wave. But she doesn’t see me, leaning against the car and smoking a cigarette, looking off at something else.