Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,63
said, her voice so perky that it had gone up a whole octave. Chloe was there too, wearing overalls that exactly matched Ken’s. Chloe was beaming proudly. “Aren’t they, uh, cute?” Mom said.
She was holding two little ceramic chickens, made of rough-looking red clay with plenty of visible fingerprints. They had bulgy eyes with big, bluish lids half-closed over them. Their beaks looked sort of smushed-in. One was a rooster, the other a hen.
“We’re calling them Josh and Chelsea,” Hannah said with a glare.
I turned to Josh.
“You know we’re totally getting sterilizing duty for this.”
Sterilizing the jars is the worst part of making jam. You have to hand wash every jar in steaming hot water, then submerge them in boiling water for at least twenty minutes. We always used Granly’s roasting pan, balanced over the stove’s two back burners, to boil the jars, while two pots of sugared blueberries frothed away on the front two. You had to plunge your arm through the sticky blueberry steam to fish out the clean jars with a pair of wobbly metal tongs, timing it so they were still freshly scalded when the blueberries reached the right temperature and you could pour them into the jars—bubbling and spitting and flecking your clothes with tiny purple dots.
Sure enough, when we got home with our buckets of berries, my mom pointed Josh and me to the sink, where two dozen Ball mason jars were waiting to be scrubbed.
“Here,” Hannah said, placing Chloe’s clay chickens on the windowsill above the sink. “They can keep you company.”
She placed them beak to beak so it looked like they were kissing.
“Now you’re awful,” I said, rolling my eyes at her. I gave Josh a sheepish glance. His face was definitely a little pink, but maybe that was just from the sun and the steam, because he refused to inch away from his spot right next to me at the double sink. He stood so close that my hip nestled comfortably against his leg, and every time he handed me a soapy jar to rinse, our forearms brushed against each other. I noticed the downy hair on his arm had gone blond, and his skin was a bit more golden than it had been when we’d first met. That was back when he’d spent most of his time at Dog Ear, back before he’d had a reason to escape to berry patches and Wex Pond.
Just when the kitchen started to feel oppressive, with the windows steamed up and the air smelling syrupy, my mom put one of Granly’s Beatles CDs into the little countertop stereo. Abbie and Hannah started dancing each other around the kitchen, dripping blueberry syrup onto the floor and laughing hysterically. Josh and I bumped hips (or my hip and his leg) and clinked jars together like they were cymbals.
I thought of those stacks of paper that Abbie had made on our bedroom floor, and I knew—this was one of those days that I needed to write down. Maybe on a scrap of paper that nobody ever saw. Maybe in a letter to Josh. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that my pen on paper preserve this moment, so I could know it had really happened when I was back in LA.
That it hadn’t been a dream.
The dreamy feeling didn’t go away after Josh headed home for dinner—a jar of still-warm blueberry preserves in each hand. Hannah and I crawled around the kitchen with hot soapy rags, scrubbing at the worst of the jam drips, while my mom got ready to go over the whole floor with Granly’s old string mop.
Meanwhile Abbie scrubbed pots in the sink. She kept making new sticky splashes on the floor, and we laughed and screeched at her.
Finally cleanup was done, and the only sounds we heard were the jars of jam settling on the kitchen table. The cooling, and some law of physics that Hannah could probably teach us, sucked the mason jar caps downward. Eventually they would all have slight scoops to them, which meant they were safely sealed. As this happened, the jar tops made little pings and pops and squeaks. It gave the strangely cozy illusion that the jam jars were alive. Which I guess was why I winced a little bit when my dad arrived home from a long walk and excitedly popped open one of the jars so he could spread some of the new jam on toast.
While my dad munched and he and my mom