Gigi spoke up. “Avila, boredom is not a good reason for spending time with a young man,” she said sternly.
“It is for me,” Avi responded, taking a bite of potato. A part of it fell from the side of her mouth, onto her plate.
Gigi looked at my father with a condemning I-told-you-so expression.
Dad moved his focus from his mom.
I slid my thumb across the glass of my phone, Luca’s message still on the screen. I opened it and responded. What time?
He answered immediately: I get out of school at 1 so 1:30?
I typed: Perfect. Do you remember how to get to my house?
LOL, of course. See you then. I’ll bring the food.
“He’s coming around one thirty tomorrow,” I said, and set the phone back on the counter, where it lived most of the time.
“Yay!” Avi clapped as she bounced in her seat. “Someone’s coming over!”
The same stern expression remained on Gigi’s face as she stared at my father.
“He’s not coming to visit you,” I said to Avi.
Avi’s face fell for a moment and then it brightened. She trilled, “Siena and Thomas, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”
Seven
Sitting up, I pulled my comforter around me. I dragged myself to the desk and turned on my computer screen. I had a history report due in a few days and hadn’t started it yet. I stared at the screen and yawned. I’d have plenty of time to work on it later, I decided, and stood and opened the drapes. It was a gray morning. I picked up my phone to check the weather. It would be overcast, windy, chilly.
“Perfect picnic weather,” I said sarcastically to myself.
As soon as I had accepted Thomas’s picnic invitation, I regretted it. Gigi was right; I never cared for him. All he had to do was say I was pretty and suddenly I want to spend time with him? That wasn’t a good enough reason. But in fairness to me, it was not the full reason. Avi was also right.
Thomas was the first person in years to want to spend time with me, so to turn him down would be ridiculous.
I went to my closet and pulled on some clothes. It was my week to take care of the chickens. I traipsed down the stairs and into the kitchen, where my father sat staring at his phone and drinking coffee.
“Good morning,” he said as I entered the room.
“Good morning,” I said.
I went past him and took my coat from the hook by the garage door and slipped on my rubber boots. Jackson came beside me and stretched lazily while I stepped into the dark garage and hit the light switch. He wandered near me, sniffing cubes of pine shavings. I put the shovel in the wheelbarrow and opened the wide garage door. Jackson trotted beside me; we left the gravel drive and went around the house, down the hill to the chicken coop.
He stopped and sat on the damp grass, and I went to the coop and opened the door. The chickens scuffled out as I went in, pushing the wheelbarrow against the opening. I took the shovel and began to fill the rusted wheelbarrow with the droppings spread beneath their roost. I pulled my sweatshirt over my nose to block the smell.
“Good morning.”
I jumped at the voice. I turned, allowing the sweatshirt to fall to its regular place. Luca was there, his own wheelbarrow loaded down with wood.
“I-I didn’t see you there,” I said, trying to slow my startled heart.
“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be quiet or anything,” he said.
He pushed his wheelbarrow to the side of the chicken coop. The roof of the coop overhung the chickens’ area, and we used this spot to store our freshest cut firewood. It gave the coop a bit more protection and kept the wood from getting rained on.
“That’s okay,” I said, my heart still beating too fast.
Luca began moving the remaining pieces of firewood to one side. He was clearly aware of our system.
“Are you taking over firewood delivery for Jason?” I asked, watching him begin unloading the new firewood. Jason’s leather gloves covered his hands.
“Yeah,” he said. “I figured it was the least I could do to help him out. He already had enough to worry about before I entered the picture,” Luca said, sounding defeated.
“He doesn’t mind having you here.” I watched Luca lift log after log onto our pile.
“No,” Luca said, “he doesn’t. Aunt Sam found one of the good ones, as my mom would say.”
The mention of his dead mother brought a gloom over an already bleak conversation.
“He is a good one,” I said. “He’s like part of the family. We love having him and Sam around.”
“You do, don’t you?” he said, surprised.
My face must have shown the confusion I felt.
He answered my unspoken question. “When Aunt Sam moved up here and told us she was going to live on a plot of land in the middle of a giant estate owned by a wealthy family,”—he paused—“I guess I figured she’d be surrounded by snobby rich people who would treat her like a servant.”
I let my mouth fall open at the shock of his words.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said, his body bent beside his wheelbarrow, hands on a piece of wood, eyes focused on me.
“Oh, no,” I said, recovering enough to speak. “Why on earth would a person be offended for being called a snob who treats those she loves as servants.”
“I didn’t say you did those things. I said I thought them. Like I told you, the truth isn’t anything like that.”
I turned from him, feeling offended. “That isn’t fair,” I said, deciding not to let it go. “It isn’t fair to assume a person is cruel because they have a little more money than most.”
He laughed and held his arms open. “You think this is a little more money than most?”
I stabbed my shovel into the pile of chicken poop in the wheelbarrow. “You’re a classist!” I said, and pulled the wheelbarrow out of the coop.
“A what?”
“A classist. You think people who are rich are bad simply because they’re rich.”
I emptied my wheelbarrow onto the active compost heap, its odor overwhelming me. I pulled the collar of my sweatshirt over my nose and quickly shoveled a thin layer of dirt onto the heap to deaden the smell. Luca stepped back and covered his nose with the wide fingers of the leather gloves.
Pushing the wheelbarrow, I stormed up the hill. Chickens were scattering in all directions. Luca ran after me and touched my arm.
“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t mean to upset you. I had those thoughts when I was a poor kid living in Florida with my poor single mom.”
“Oh, and now that you’re a poor adult living with your working-class aunt and uncle, you don’t believe that?”
“No,” he said, the fingers of his glove still touching my arm. “Now that I’ve met you, I don’t believe it.”
“Whatever,” I said, pushing the wheelbarrow toward the garage.
“I’m sorry I upset you,” he called after me. “But I don’t understand why the opinion of a creep who watches you at night matters so much to you.”
He’d said the last part with obvious self-hatred.
I turned. “You are not a creep—at least not that kind of a creep,” I said, my voice angry as I released the wheelbarrow. “I have no idea what you’re doing, but I know you aren’t watching me or my sisters.” I spun around and continued pushing the wheelbarrow up the hill.