Into the Wind Read online

  In the moment it took for my eyes to adjust to the darker light inside, something rubbed against my shin and made me shiver.

  “Hello, Marigold!” Hazel said.

  A yellow and brown cat with white mitten paws and fur so fluffy it look electrified came into focus. She must have liked my leg.

  “Well, you seem to have found a friend,”

  Hazel said.

  We were in her living room, or at least that’s where I thought we were. It was hard to tell because it was so full. On the floor stood teetering stacks of books and magazines. A tower of National Geographic magazines came up to my waist. Other stacks included file folders, encyclopedias, and old record albums. A number of big clay pots occupied one corner, each sprouting with tall, dried grasses and giant feathers. Near a doorway was a wooden statue with faces carved into it, like part of a totem pole. And the walls? Well, you couldn’t see them. They were either lined with bookcases crammed with books, shells, pottery, dried seaweed, lacy snake skins, birds’ nests, dusty carvings of gulls, a pair of

  binoculars, a wooden yo-yo, an old brass pocket compass with a lid, and an entire standing skeleton of what might have been a fox… Or they were

  covered with postcards, framed paintings, photographs, and maps of just about everywhere, including places like China and Antarctica, which got me thinking about the great explorers, who, of course, were sailors.

  “Cool!” I said under my breath.

  The room was like a little museum that could have used Lizzy’s cleaning and organizing, except that it seemed more interesting just as it was. There was no TV. No sofa. No coffee table. No computer. On a desk was an ancient record player, and near the fireplace stood a worn armchair with a newspaper open to the crossword puzzle and a book tented on the seat. So yes, I guess it was a living room, but for a different kind of living than I was used to.

  While I was looking around, Hazel closed the front door. “Home sweet home,” she said. “As you can see, it can use some tidying up, but I never seem to get around to it.” She glanced through her mail, then unhooked the seatbelt around the watermelon. “Now you can do me a favor,” she said, as if she’d read my mind when we’d started walking here. “Could you carry this into the kitchen? Just take it straight back through that doorway and across the hall.”

  I took the watermelon and put it on the counter in the kitchen, which was pretty much a regular old kitchen: a sink, a refrigerator, a toaster, an old telephone on the wall with a stretchy spiral cord, a couple of bowls in the corner for Marigold, and beneath an open window, a small wooden table with a brass lamp made from a candle holder.

  When I came back into the living room, following a path between the stacks of magazines and folders, I was surprised to see Hazel standing. She had one hand on a handle of her wheelchair and the other holding a wooden cane. She might have been about as tall as me, if she wasn’t bent forward at her waist, and if her shoulders weren’t so hunched. Still, she held the cane straight out toward me, like she was sword fighting.

  “On guard!” she said, with a big smile on

  her face.

  “You can stand!” I said.

  “Of course! And with my helper here”—she rapped her cane on the planked floor—“I can get around the house just fine. If I put my mind to it, I can still do a lot of things,” she said, not bragging, but in that plain way of hers. “So much in life just depends on putting your mind to it. Not everything, of course, but probably more than you think.” She waved the cane at me again. “Would you mind stepping out of my way?”

  CHAPTER 6

  Milk (sort of)

  and a Sandwich

  Favoring her right leg, which seemed stiffer than the other, Hazel hobbled away from her

  wheelchair, through the doorway, and across the hall, her cane tapping with each step. When she could, she put her free hand on the wall or a doorknob to steady herself, and in this way she got around pretty well but slowly, like she was wading through thick mud that I couldn’t see. I followed her into the kitchen. Leaning awkwardly, she poured dried food into one cat bowl. The other was half full of milk.

  Turning to me, she said, “So it’s egg salad, right?”

  “Yes. Please.” Without thinking about it, I was using what my mom called “manners.” I hung my backpack over a chair.

  Hazel opened the refrigerator and pulled out a head of lettuce, a loaf of bread, and a container of egg salad. “Do you like bread or toast?”

  “Toast. Thanks.”

  “That’s my favorite, too.”

  The refrigerator door was covered with photos stuck on with little magnets.

  “That top one there is my daughter, Ann, when she graduated from college twenty-five years ago,” Hazel said, dropping slices of bread into the toaster. “She’s an accountant in Phoenix. Very busy.” The next photo was of a friendly-looking old man in a straw hat. “That’s Malcolm, my late husband. And by ‘late’ I don’t mean that he was never on time.”

  “I know what ‘late’ means,” I said. It means

  he died, I said to myself. I bent toward another photo of a younger man with narrow shoulders in a

  wrinkled coat and tie, and with a girl in pigtails standing beside him.

  “That’s my son, Charlie,” Hazel went on. “And he is the one who’s always late. He was late

  getting himself born and late all the time for the school bus. He was even late for his own wedding and late for Emily’s birth—she’s the girl, my granddaughter, there. Cute as a button. They all live on the west coast, in

  Oregon, so I don’t see much of them.”

  For a moment, she seemed lost in her thoughts, as she spread egg salad on slices of toast.

  “Do you have friends?” I asked, surprised that the question popped out of me.

  “They’re almost all gone. I see lots of people at the Art Barn, but I can’t really call them friends.” After a pause, she said, “Truth is, I don’t get along so well with most people my age.” She laughed, then shook her head. “They’re all so old! And the ones I know complain too much. They seem too scared to live, I mean really live. I guess I rile them up. They say I don’t ‘act my age.’ They always want to ‘fix’ me. Milk?”

  From a cupboard, she got two glasses and, to my surprise, took a red and white box, the size of a cereal box, from the cupboard. “Carnation Powdered Milk,” I read. She shook some white stuff into the glasses, added water, and stirred it. “Real milk goes bad too fast. I prefer this,” she said. She handed me a clean, plaid napkin, and we sat on either side of the little table.

  The sandwich was good, but the powdered milk was the worst thing I’d ever tasted, like liquid chalk. It was horrible. It didn’t seem to bother Hazel, though. Nor did the horrible face I made.

  “More milk?” she asked with that amused look coming back to her. “Marigold loves it, too.”

  “No,” I managed to say. “Thanks.”

  For a time, then, we ate without speaking, like we were being cautious, waiting for each other to say something, and I wondered what Mom might think of Hazel, if she’d known her better. You can’t imagine two more different people, Mom so calm and quiet, and Hazel so… out there, I guess you could say. But I think Mom would have liked her. And maybe vice versa. A real character, is what Mom might have called her. Her very own person.

  Meanwhile, Marigold jumped up in my lap and purred like a motor. A midday breeze, smelling like pines warmed by the sun, came in through the open window. Beyond the window, I could see a small brick patio with a couple of green plastic chairs, a side table, some potted herbs, a bird feeder on a tall pole, and beyond that the woods.

  “Believe me, I’m not asking you again to take me sailing, but could you tell me about that boat of yours?” Hazel finally said, like she’d been wondering about it a while. “I’ve never seen a catboat without a centerboard. It must have a fixed keel,
right?”

  I was impressed that she’d noticed this, so I told her how Mr. Clark had modified it, and how for years it’d been upside down in his yard, with the mast and sail stowed beneath it. Each winter, snow mounded over it, and in the summers ivy crisscrossed it, until you couldn’t tell if it was there at all, except for the keel sticking up like a fin. I told her how Mr. Clark had said I could have it, and how Dad and I had hacked away the ivy and carried the hull to our work shed and set it on sawhorses. Then I told her that I’d worked on it every day after school for weeks. Scraping. Sanding. Caulking. Varnishing. Polishing all the brass. When he had time, Dad would help, and so would my friend Walter, even though he never went sailing because it made him sick. “Then one day—it was the Saturday after school ended—Dad, Mr. Clark, Walter, and me carried the boat all the way to the beach, waded in, and put it in the water. It didn’t leak a drop!”

  “Wonderful!” Hazel said, and I could tell she understood. Something about boats made both of us happy.

  So I kept going. I’m not usually a talker—that’s Lizzy’s department—but the words kept coming. “The next afternoon, Mr. Clark helped me attach the rudder to the transom on the back of the boat. I got the mast up and rigged the sail—that’s very complicated, you know. Then I organized everything else that Mr. Clark had given me—the anchor, extra lines, life jackets, foot straps, tool box, first aid kit—all in the compartments under the seats. Everything has its special place on a catboat.”

  “Ship shape!” Hazel said. “And since then, you’ve learned to sail?”

  “Well, I’m learning. I’m not very good. I can do some things in an easy breeze. Usually I can tack—that’s when you turn your boat to go across the wind. And I can come into the dock on the leeward side—that’s the downwind side…”

  Hazel seemed to smile to herself. “I think I’ve heard those words,” she said gently.

  “… And I have some sailing books that I bought,” I went on. “They have pictures, directions, checklists, and quizzes you can take. And I’ve been practicing out on the water most afternoons!”

  “Amazing! You must be determined!” She paused, thinking. “But why, after all those years, did Mr. Clark give you the boat now?”

  I didn’t want to say, Because he felt sorry for me, so I took another bite of my sandwich.

  Hazel’s eyebrows knit together, and then after a moment, leaning forward with her elbow on the table, she asked, “Did this have something to do with your mom?”

  I nodded.

  “I see,” she said, looking me in the eye. And it seemed that, just as she knew about trees and boats, she knew something about this sort of thing, as well. “Will she be home soon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I hope so.”

  For a time, we were silent again, and when Hazel had finished her sandwich, she picked up a small rectangular plastic container from beside the lamp. It had seven square sections in it, all lined up in a row, and from the one labeled “Tues” she took three pills, one red, one white, and a brown one shaped like a football. She swallowed each with a quick gulp of milk.

  “What are those for?” It was odd, but I felt like I could ask her anything.

  “Oh, they’re for my creaky joints, and a few other things. Can I make you another sandwich?”

  I said no, I was leaving room for watermelon.

  “Well, before we have dessert,” she said, “we both have some work to do.”

  I stared at her.

  “I bet you have math homework. Right?”

  I could see where this was going, and I wasn’t crazy about its direction.

  “Why don’t you get started on it for twenty minutes,” she said, “while I do some work of my own.” It was more of a statement than a question. In fact, there was no question about it at all. “Then we’ll have watermelon,” she added.

  She pushed herself up and out of her chair. “Clear your place so you can work here.” She hobbled into the living room and put a record on her record player. I heard scratching and drums and trumpets. Then I heard her cane tapping along the hallway and into a room down there.

  I set Marigold on the floor and put my dish in

  the sink.

  “Have you started your math?” she called over

  the music.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, our twenty minutes begin as soon as you get started. Let me know.”

  I pulled my math textbook from my backpack and looked at today’s assignment: converting

  fractions into decimals and rounding to the nearest hundredth. What a pain. As always, the book was heavy as bricks. What a waste of ink and trees. When I opened it, it gave off a faint smell, like onions, that made my eyes water. “I’m starting now,” I called, and began with the first problem, dividing the numerator by the denominator.

  CHAPTER 7

  Spitting Seeds

  Exactly twenty minutes later, according to the clock on the stove, I heard Hazel’s cane tapping in the

  hall. “Isn’t that stirring!” she said, referring to the music that reached its very loud ending as she came into the kitchen. “Makes me want to climb a mountain!” At the kitchen counter, she began slicing the watermelon on a cutting board. “You make any progress on your math?”

  “A little.”

  I thought she might ask me to show her my homework, but she said, “Good. Finish it at home tonight. Then double check your answers. Let’s take these out on the patio. Bring your napkin. Marigold stays inside.” Hazel handed me two plates, each with a fork and a thick wedge of watermelon, and we passed through a tiny room that she called a “mud room,” where she kept Marigold’s litter box. Then we went out the back door and sat side by side in the green chairs, Hazel’s cane hanging over the arm of hers, and our plates balanced on our laps.

  I’d never eaten watermelon with a fork, and each time I stabbed into my wedge, a bite-sized piece shot off my plate and onto my shorts.

  Hazel considered this. “Well, I guess we aren’t at the Plaza.” Then, giving me a wink, she said, “The heck with these forks,” and picking up her watermelon in both hands, she went at it, teeth first.

  I followed her lead. Isn’t that how you’re supposed to eat watermelon? And if you’re like me, when you take your first big bite, you forget all about… the seeds. What do you do with them? Lizzy, never wanting to make a mess, actually swallows the seeds, and I’ve seen Mom neatly drop them one by one from her lips to a spoon, and then put them in a line on the edge of a paper plate.

  I figured Hazel might do something like that, but no. Her face got all serious and not-serious at once. She took in a deep breath through her nose, slowly pulled her head back, and then, in the instant of snapping it forward and making a sharp sound like ppphaah!, she spat out a seed, shooting it across the patio, over a potted geranium, and into the grass near the woods.

  “Whoa!” I’d never seen anybody but kids spit watermelon seeds.

  She nodded at me, her eyes twinkling: my turn. So I chewed more watermelon, curled my tongue like a tube around a seed, and spat it, bazooka-style, as far as I could. It landed a little closer to the woods than Hazel’s. I raised my arms in victory. “Yes!!!”

  But then she, after another bite and gathering herself like a shot-putter, breathed in even more deeply, puffed out her cheeks like a hamster, and launched another seed farther yet. You’d never guess she had so much breath! The seed dinged off the metal squirrel baffle beneath the bird feeder. “A new world record!” she said, with red juice on her cheeks and arms. “Bet you can’t beat that?”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Then back and forth we went, biting in, chewing, slurping, loading, aiming, cocking our heads, and firing. It was fun. It was a mess. We laughed. And as we went on, there was something else to it, something that somehow seemed important, as if we needed to do this. So we
just kept going and going, spitting farther and farther, with all our might, like there were things inside us that we had to get out, like we were spitting more than seeds.

  Eventually, we chewed down to the hard, green rinds. Hazel looked at her watch. “Time to go,” she said, grabbing her cane. “Time to get back to the Art Barn.”

  We took our plates and rinds into the kitchen and left. At the end of her street, near that high stone wall, we turned to go our separate ways. “You can stop by the cottage any day for lunch,” Hazel said before wheeling off. “See you.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Some Calculations

  For the rest of that afternoon and evening, I couldn’t stop thinking how both strange and

  ordinary it’d felt to be at Hazel’s cottage. Strange because I’d never been to a place like that with a person like that, and ordinary because it actually seemed pretty normal to be there with her. I wondered what Walter would think about this. Some kids, I knew, called Hazel a “crazy old lady.” But was she crazy? Or was I crazy for even going there?

  Over the next two days, I didn’t stop at Hazel’s. From summer school, I went straight home for lunch and watered Mom’s garden. Then I rode down to the dock and took my boat out on the water, never far from the marina, and practiced tacking: pushing the tiller (a long handle which operates the rudder) toward the sail, crossing to the other side of the boat as it crosses the wind, and trimming (adjusting) the sail to the new tack (a new direction). I didn’t see Hazel at all.