the stands.
I shook my head. Nothing. Everything. The way I was sweating, it might have been me out there, falling in love.
Mom turned from the conversation she’d been having with an internist from the hospital and studied me. “I think you’ve been having too much sugar, Kirsten.”
“No, I haven’t—” I protested, and by the time I looked back, Stacy was gone and Johnny was standing with the guys in the dugout.
It was like this at every game for the rest of the tournament. Bud Hirsch led the team in a cheer for the competitors, and the men worked their way through the line slapping sweaty hands: “Good game”...“good game”...“good game.” Then Stacy and Johnny began a slow, purposeful wandering toward each other while I held my breath. Even Mom had started to notice, and the two of us would watch them together, Mom shaking her head, and me grinning like an idiot.
With everyone else packing coolers and blankets and finding rides home, Johnny and Stacy stood in a little bubble of quiet, whatever words they said meant for each other alone.
“Don’t stare, shrimp,” Emilie nudged me once when I was lost in their romance. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, anyway?”
I followed her to the car, kicking against the grass with the toes of my tennis shoes. When I looked back, Johnny and Stacy were still talking, and his truck didn’t pull into our driveway until we’d been home for twenty minutes.
five
It was a hot, lazy Wisconsin summer. In the barn, flies descended by the thousands onto the backs of our cows, but it was too warm for them to protest with even the simplest flick of a tail. It was too warm in our house, too—upstairs, Emilie and I opened our bedroom window one day in June and didn’t bother to close it for weeks. We woke up sticky in the mornings, the humidity coating our bodies like fur. It seemed to me that the whole world was taking a break, holding its breath, waiting for Johnny and Stacy to fall in love.
Aunt Julia rescued us on weekday afternoons, inviting us to cool off in her aboveground pool. Emilie and I traipsed the half mile down Rural Route 4 to her house, our beach towels draped over our shoulders. I lagged behind, pulling at fuzzy cattails and listening to mosquitoes swarm over the stagnant water in the ditch. Toss a stone through their midst and they would part like the Red Sea letting Moses and his people cross, then swarm back in a rush. Emilie marched ahead, preening for the service vehicles that lumbered past on the road.
Aunt Julia, older than Dad by almost twelve years, was my favorite aunt. Her husband, Uncle Paul, was a general manager for John Deere in Manitowoc, and their son, Brent, only a few years older than Johnny, was training to be a firefighter in Milwaukee. Emilie and I were the girls she’d never had. Uncle Paul had built them a fancy deck around a four-foot Doughboy, and she loved to serve us Popsicles and sugary glasses of lemonade and lay her wrinkly, too-tan body on the deck while we swam. Sometimes she smoked cigarettes, too, although about this we were sworn to secrecy. “I’m supposed to be quitting,” she had explained, although she never seemed to try all that hard.
“What’s new, girls?” she asked from beneath a broad sun hat.
“Unfortunately, nothing is ever new around here,” Emilie said, splashing dramatically onto her back. “That’s the problem.”
“Well,” I said, staying close to the deck, “I think Johnny has a girlfriend.” Suddenly Johnny had been asking to use the phone every night after dinner. On weekends, he showered after the last milking and disappeared in his truck.
Aunt Julia’s eyebrows rose over the tops of her sunglasses. “I think I’ve heard that myself.”
“Really? From Mom?” I asked.
“From everyone in Watankee, more like it,” Emilie scoffed. “He took her on the youth group rafting trip last weekend, and they’re going to a movie tonight. In Watankee terms, they are officially a couple.” She lifted her hands out of the water to put air quotes around the word.
Aunt Julia laughed. “So what do you think? Do you like her?”
Emilie made a sound like “ehh.” She wobbled her hand in the air in a so-so motion.
“I like her! She’s really nice,” I said. In Stacy’s defense, I splashed in Emilie’s direction, but the water landed a foot short of its mark.
Emilie laughed. “You don’t even know her.”
“I do, too! You don’t know who I know.” I did know Stacy. She had visited our house twice now, and each time she’d asked me about what I was reading, what I liked to do during the summer. She and Johnny and I had walked out to the barn, and I’d convinced her to let a calf suckle two of her outstretched fingers. She’d squealed at first and then got used to it and started stroking the calf behind its ears with her free hand. This felt like the most essential thing to know about a person.
There was a familiar hissing sound as Aunt Julia struck a match to light her cigarette. “What don’t you like about her, Emilie?”
Emilie considered for a moment. “She’s just so clingy, you know? She hangs all over him.”
Aunt Julia blew some smoke out of the side of her mouth and gave a little chuckle. “Seems like she’s the kind of girl who likes to have a boyfriend. Plenty of girls like that.”
“I think it’s pathetic,” Emilie pronounced. “She spent the whole past month just trying to catch his eye—”
“She did not!” I sputtered defensively. Of course she hadn’t. She’d only been at that softball game because her Dad was playing; she’d only talked to Johnny in the first place because I’d passed on her message. “You’re just jealous because you don’t have a boyfriend.”
Emilie shrieked with laughter. She tipped her head backward into the water and came up again, her hair lying sleek against her head. “Oh, puh-lease. Plus, ask anyone at school. She was dating this guy last year and she just about drove him insane, she was so needy.”
I flopped onto my back, kicking my legs angrily in her direction. She skimmed her arms across the surface of the pool in response, serving up an impressive wall of water that splashed onto the deck.
“All right, girls.” Aunt Julia sighed, a gray strand of smoke curling out of her mouth.
“I’m only saying,” Emilie smirked.
“Well I like her,” I announced.
“I do, too, sweetie,” Aunt Julia said. “And I bet Johnny’s big enough to handle himself.”
Emilie rolled her eyes but let it go. “I’m going to start a whirlpool,” she announced, kicking off from the edge of the pool.
Aunt Julia laid her head back, closing her eyes, and I flopped back onto an inner tube, letting the momentum from Emilie’s vigorous one-person whirlpool spin me in lazy circles. Every now and then I splashed water onto the inner tube to cool off my legs. The sunscreen that had been slathered on me only an hour before had melted away with the heat, and I could feel my skin pinking from head to toe.
That night, with barely any warning, a thunderstorm rolled through on dark, menacing clouds that hung low on the horizon over our still-fragile
