April Love Story by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online Page B

that.
    “Uh oh,” said Lucas.
    “I guess I forgot to mention it, Marnie,” said my mother, “but this house doesn’t have indoor plumbing.”
    “I think this is Tibet,” said Lucas.
    “Do you mean to tell me this house doesn’t have a bathroom?” I shrieked. After two solid days of driving, when all I wanted was a tiled bath and a long soaking tub or a good hot shower and some nice humid privacy where I could cry in peace—and there was no bathroom?
    Lucas and I located the outhouse without difficulty. It looked just the way they do in cartoons. “Another field trip,” said Lucas.
    “The first of many, I’m afraid,” I said. “Lucas, I can’t believe this.”
    There was no question of whether to laugh or cry. Crying won very easily.
    Sitting on the side porch was a pile of split wood. Uncle Bob lit a fire in the huge black wood stove in the kitchen and hauled buckets of water from the well pump to heat up in an enormous bucket on the stove. “In summer,” said my father, “we’ll rig up an outdoor shower. Gravity will be enough to make the shower work from the spring up on the hill, and the sun’s heat will warm it up right through a rubber hose.”
    “For now?” I said.
    “For now, we sponge off.”
    So we had a women’s bathtime and a men’s bathtime. There wasn’t enough water to hide my weeping.
    “This is fun, Marnie,” said my mother and Aunt Ellen together.
    “This is insane,” I said.
    Our parents were on a high that never touched Lucas or me. In the other world my only chore had been making my bed, if I felt like it. Now the chores never ended. I lay like glue on the mattress, while the adults leaped up at dawn—yes, dawn—full of verve and energy and even joy.
    The vegetable garden was a staggering chore. Although we tilled it with the tractor (Uncle Bob turned out to know all about driving tractors and even all about fixing tractors, which was particularly good, since our twelfth-hand wreck broke down regularly), we had to hand-rake the entire two-acre garden until it satisfied the grownups as to tilth and texture. Then we planted about fifty things at intervals so we’d have harvest all summer and fall instead of everything coming ripe at one time. Seeds are very small. You have to plant them one at a time. Stooping.
    And in my case, you have to do this with Lucas. Once we had an actual conversation in which we talked about sabotaging the garden. But we decided that wouldn’t get us back to the city. We’d just have to live here and starve, instead of live here and eat.
    The asparagus trench was probably the worst chore of the summer. This had to be dug, with shovels, eighteen inches deep. Eighteen inches doesn’t sound like much until you have to lift it up on the end of your shovel. Furthermore you’re supposed to backfill half of that with rotted manure. We obtained the manure from our nearest neighbor, Mr. Shields, who was a very nice man who nevertheless had a small mountain of horse manure he’d been shoveling out of his stable for years. We forked this up on a flat trailer we pulled behind the tractor, and it took one load of manure for the asparagus trench and eleven loads for the rest of the garden. If anybody had told me I’d be shoveling manure instead of dating Joel or experimenting with eye shadow …!
    “And I don’t even like asparagus,” said Lucas. “It’s slimy and green. It looks like congealed scum from a pond.”
    “Look at that,” I said.
    We stood there like convicts on a road gang. Through the meadow on the hillside, our parents ran up to the orchards, laughing, kissing, and actually singing from pure pleasure. “Morning has broken,” they sang, “like the first morning. Blackbird is singing, like the first dawn.”
    According to my father’s manuals, wood for heating homes had to be cut at least six months before burning, so it would season, or dry out. We took to our woodlots, cutting down only the dead trees, using the chain saw to