Where the Watermelons Grow: Chapters 1–6

But whatever she was doing to those slices on that plate was way worse than obsessing over a few germs.

I wiggled my toes against the bare linoleum floor.

My best friend, Arden, was the oldest of five kids, but the babies in her family had barely done more than toddle around and giggle when they were sixteen months old.

Maryville was so small—according to the newspaper, the last census had recorded only a couple hundred people—that Maryville Methodist Church was the only church for a half hour’s drive, which meant that pretty much anybody Christian ended up there come Sunday morning.

Miss Marvella bent down, trying to pry Mylie’s arms off me.

“Your mama not feeling well, sugar?” she asked, her voice quiet, like she was talking to a skittish horse.

“Suzie’s just feeling a little under the weather,” Daddy said, keeping a firm hold on Mylie’s hand so she couldn’t dash off through the open church doors and into the parking lot.

“Sorry to hear that,” said Miss Tabitha, putting a pale hand down on my shoulder in that absentminded way grown-ups sometimes did.

“Thanks,” said Daddy, with a grimace that was probably meant to look like a smile.

“It’s important for your mama to have dignity, Della,” he’d told me more than once, his eyes sad. “And lots of people, they don’t understand an illness like your mama’s, like schizophrenia."

“It’s important for your mama to have dignity, Della,” he’d told me more than once, his eyes sad. “And lots of people, they don’t understand an illness like your mama’s, like schizophrenia."

“Mm-hmm,” Daddy said into the phone handset. I could hear Grandma’s voice through it, tinny and garbled like it was coming from a million miles away, even though Alberta was just a little more than an hour in the truck.

Now the voice spilling out of the receiver was Grandpa’s deep and husky one. Grandpa’s voice sounded like his skin looked—suntanned and weathered, a little dry and a little crackly.

I stopped bothering to hide my eavesdropping and stared at Daddy.

The farm stand was as much a part of me as the farm itself, or the bay, or the sound of cicadas on a hot summer night.

They’d moved down from Boston and bought the farm just east of us, wanting to “live closer to the land” and “build a sustainable lifestyle” (says my mama with her fingers scrunched into little quotation marks).

That was the only part of drawing I didn’t like—the way the grit stayed on my skin, hiding deep in the cracks and crevices of my hands, until I washed them good with soap.

A ladybug flitted down to land on the top of my hand.

She was younger than Mr. Anton, with warm brown skin and tight curls that reached to her chin and looked touched with amber in the sunlight, and when she said that bit about the library being so far away, she gave a sly little grin in Mr. Anton’s direction.

She was younger than Mr. Anton, with warm brown skin and tight curls that reached to her chin and looked touched with amber in the sunlight, and when she said that bit about the library being so far away, she gave a sly little grin in Mr. Anton’s direction.

“But how does it work?” I asked, my voice timid in my own ears. My face heated, and it wasn’t just from the sun beating down on us all.

My favorite was a tiny little book with a sky-colored spine that just said POEMS in big letters and Emily Dickinson in small ones. I put up a finger and touched it, tentative as a feather. The jacket was cool and soft.

We’d got so behind on everything this month that lots of the tomatoes had swelled and split down the middle, turning to mush right on their plants so they were good for nothing but the compost heap.

“It’s getting to be the only thing I can think about, Suzie. We’re not set up for this much summer irrigation, and everything’s suffering for it. At this point I’ll be grateful if we just break even this year. It’s not looking likely.”

Mama stomped out of my bedroom, looking like a wild woman with her hair all jammed up into a ponytail and sweaty wisps plastered to her forehead.