The Big Dig Read online

  She sat back and judged her effort. She was pleased. A perfectly smooth coating of syrup—like amber glass. She almost didn’t want to eat it. Sometimes if she cut in the exact right place, in the very middle of the ridge, the syrup would stay put. She slowly cut into her waffle, then swore under her breath as the syrup flowed into a puddle on her plate.

  “I’ll be in the garden,” Josie announced, rinsing out her coffee mug and setting it in the sink.

  Lucy was about to say “Okay,” but decided to nod instead. It was easier and more effective. As a taste test, she stuck her finger in the syrup and gave it a lick. It was super sweet, caramelly, different, but yum. After finishing her waffles, she stayed at the table for a while. She was surprised that Josie hadn’t asked her anything, like how she was settling in, what she would like to do, if she needed anything. Josie was kind of leaving her alone. Good. That’s what I want.

  She wandered out to the front porch. What was she was supposed to do for the next two months that didn’t involve dying of boredom? Sarah was probably at the rec centre this very second, swimming, sailing, playing tennis with whoever her new best friend was. Who else was there? Everybody. Everybody except her. She plunked herself down on the porch swing and sulked. This was all too brutal, too unfair. She couldn’t wait for her dad to call so she could not to talk to him. He’d get the message pretty fast that she was still mad and that the silent treatment was totally back on.

  She looked around, trying to suss out where Josie’s garden might be. Her eyes fell on a wicker table by the railing. On top a book was open, upside down. She reached for it and flipped it over. Summer of Forbidden Love, a Harlequin Romance. Her mom had told her that Josie had read every single Harlequin Romance ever published. That she would plough through them like someone ploughed through a bag of chips. “Brain candy. Strictly for entertainment.” That’s what her mom had said. Lucy smiled and placed the book back on the table.

  The sun was shining, but the morning hadn’t quite warmed up yet. She shivered. Time to get dressed. As she pulled open the screen door, she glanced over at the Harlequin. Hmm. She let the door go and went back for a closer look. The guy on the cover was shirtless. He had bulgy muscles and long hair—long enough to put into a ponytail. And the girl in his arms…Lucy would have given anything for her hair to feather like that. Actually, the guy’s hair was feathered even nicer. She picked up the book and quickly read the back. The books her mom had kept around the house all seemed to be about history, and super boring. She memorized Josie’s page number and tucked it under her arm. This didn’t look boring at all.

  It was as she was brushing her hair a few minutes later that Lucy first heard the noise. It sounded like shovelling. She went to the window and peered out over the yard. There, in the field across the lane, a boy was digging a hole.

  Lucy watched for a moment. The boy dropped his shovel, took a swig of something from a plastic jug, and spat it out. Then he spat a couple more times. Gross. Obviously a bumpkin.

  He tossed the jug onto the grass, wiped his mouth on the bottom of his T-shirt, and then looked up. Right at Lucy. Mortified she’d been caught spying, she froze. To make matters worse, the boy pointed to his eye and then to her—the universal sign for “I see you” or “I know you see me.” Crap! She gasped and flung herself away from the window, mashing her back up against the wall.

  Her heart thumped in her ears as she waited for the shovelling sound to start up again. It didn’t. He better not still be staring at my window. She kept waiting, listening. Nothing. And then finally, there it was. The noise. Like music to her ears. He’d gone back to his shovelling. She laughed to herself. What do I have to be embarrassed about? I’m allowed to look out my own window. He’s the one who should be embarrassed.

  After she’d calmed down and shoved the encounter to the back of her mind, she got dressed, went back down to the porch, sat on the top step, and examined her toenails. She debated giving them another coat of bubblegum pink polish. It would kill a good twenty minutes. That only left 59 days, 22 hours, and 40 minutes.

  There was humming as Josie came around the corner of the house, cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She was wearing gardening gloves and a zip-up smock covered with bright green leprechauns and four-leaf clovers.

  Lucy’s eyes widened.

  “Got the material seventy-five percent off,” Josie explained.

  Gee. Wonder why.

  “Thought it was kind of snazzy,” she continued.

  Lucy nodded as if in agreement.

  “Finished my weeding.” Josie peeled off her gloves and smacked them together to loosen the caked-on dirt, creating a huge cloud of dust. “My neighbour Muriel’s heading to the village later today. Thought I might give her a note to drop off to your Aunt Ellen. I want to set something up. She just lives up the road, on the other side, you know.”

  Lucy didn’t react. She began picking at a piece of chipped toenail polish. The more she thought about it, the more she realized her feelings were mixed. Curiosity was killing her, but she didn’t want to actually come face to face with the enemy. What she really wanted was for Josie to just tell her what happened between Ellen and her mom. She wanted to ask, but something held her back. Maybe it was because she knew, for whatever reason, her mom hadn’t wanted to share it with her, so in a way it sort of felt like she was going behind her mom’s back.

  “She has a daughter,” Josie said after taking a couple drags of her cigarette. “I think she’s at some kind of summer camp right now. Might be nice for you to have a chum. She’d be around your age.”

  Lucy felt her insides instantly fill with dread. She shrugged. “Maybe.” She had zero interest in meeting any kid of Ellen’s.

  Josie snorted. “I’ve seen that look before.”

  Lucy frowned back at her.

  “On your mother,” Josie said. “Every time I made my Chicken Surprise Casserole. She’d get a look just like that—all wishy-washy and nervous-like.”

  Oh no. I hope she’s not planning to make Chicken Surprise Casserole for me.

  Josie took another drag of her cigarette and studied Lucy through a haze of smoke. “You think about it.” She huffed past Lucy on the stairs and went inside, letting the screen door smack shut behind her.

  A few seconds later, it squeaked open again. “I think you and me should go for a walk on the beach,” she announced, now sporting a straw hat with multicoloured pompoms hanging from its wide brim. It definitely did nothing to tone down her leprechaun ensemble.

  Is that a sombrero? Lucy realized she was staring. Worried her expression might give her away, she said, “Very unique look.”

  “Fairy you need a look?”

  “No. No.” Lucy shook her head. “Very. Unique. Look,” she corrected, enunciating carefully.

  “Oh, that’s all right, then. Come on.” Josie started down the stairs then stopped, glanced back at Lucy, and waited.

  Lucy let out a huge sigh. Fine. Nothing better to do. And she got up and followed.

  Suddenly a thought occurred to her. To get to the beach, they would have to pass the field where that boy was digging. As she traipsed along the lane behind Josie, she strained her ears. She didn’t think she heard any shovelling. Please let him be gone, please let him be gone. Lucy had her fingers crossed on both hands as they came around the corner of a giant hedge. The shovel was there, stuck in a pile of dirt, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. She almost fainted with relief.

  “Murray Wilson passed on last year,” Josie said, pointing to a house through the trees at the far end of the field with the shovel. “Broke Millie’s heart to sell, but she was just too old to keep up the place all by herself. And of course that Deenie…well, she wouldn’t lift a finger!”

  Lucy didn’t have the faintest idea who these people were, but that didn’t seem to matter to Josie.

  “And Ricky! That lazy, good-for-n
othin’ husband of hers. They both need a good kick in the arse.”

  In spite of herself, Lucy smiled. Wanting to hear more about the people whose arses needed to be kicked, she picked up her pace so she was walking a little more beside Josie, instead of behind. She had a funny feeling there were a lot of people whose arses Josie thought needed kicking. But Josie had finished with that topic and was now talking about the different wildflowers native to the area. Boring.

  The morning had warmed up nicely and the sun beat down on the back of Lucy’s neck. There wasn’t a breath of wind as they walked along the lane. Just ahead she could see the top of the stair rails that led down to the beach. She had a vague memory of digging with her mom on the sandbars, and hunting for beach glass.

  When the lane came to an end, the earth just seemed to drop away. Lucy stood on the edge of the clay-coloured cliff enjoying the breeze from the ocean as it lifted the stickiness off her body. She scanned the beach from one end to the other. The tide was almost all the way out and the crests of the sandbars were just beginning to break through the surface of the water.

  After they carefully made their way down the rickety wooden steps, Josie positioned herself on a large flat rock about the size of a kitchen table.

  “What about our walk?” Lucy asked, making walking motions with her first two fingers.

  “I thought I might let you poke around on your own for a bit while I finish the last chapter of my book.” She pulled a Harlequin out of the pocket of her smock.

  Lucy nodded. She had meant to tell Josie she’d swiped the one from the porch, but they were littered all over the house. Lucy got the impression she had a half dozen on the go at once.

  Lucy stepped towards the water, avoiding the mounds of seaweed. She didn’t mind the black stringy grass so much, but didn’t like the long, flat, brown stuff. It felt slimy and slippery, though it did have neat ruffled edges. Lucy remembered asking her mom if they were giant lasagne noodles. There was a tiny squeeze on her heart. From behind her she heard the strike of a match, smelled cigarette smoke.

  “The tide’s good for finding beach glass,” Josie called.

  Beach glass basically came in four colours—blue, green, brown, and white. Broken pieces of jars and bottles tossed around in the ocean, edges worn smooth over time from the salt and the sand, finally washed ashore waiting to be added to someone’s collection. With every turn of the tide, like magic, new ones appeared.

  Spotting a piece of green a few feet away, Lucy picked it up. She felt the smoothness of the edges with her fingers. As she slipped it in her pocket, she tried to imagine where it had come from, to whom it had belonged.

  A half hour of walking on the beach doubled over started to make her back ache. Stopping to stretch, she was surprised at how little a distance she’d covered. Hunting for beach glass was slow going. She turned and headed back.

  Josie was lying on the rock with the straw hat covering her face. Gurgling snores sporadically erupted from her body. Lucy sat on a patch of sand next to her and emptied her pockets. She lined up all her finds, examining each piece one at a time. She was excited she’d found a piece of blue. Blue was the prettiest, and the most elusive. Not a lot of things came in blue glass bottles. At home, her mom had kept a jam jar on the kitchen windowsill of blue beach glass—her favourite. It was still there.

  She sat quietly, waiting for Josie to wake up. Shading her eyes, she looked out across the ocean. There was a cluster of brightly coloured fishing boats tied to a wharf off on the horizon. It would have made the perfect postcard.

  The morning had gone from warm to hot, and the wind had completely disappeared as the tide reached dead low. She could see the skin on her arms starting to turn pink. Gently she prodded Josie.

  Josie lifted her hat and blinked a few times. “Just resting my eyes.”

  Lucy motioned her head towards the stairs and gathered up her pieces of glass as Josie hoisted herself off the rock.

  On the walk back to the house, Lucy kept patting her pocket with satisfaction. She couldn’t wait to rinse the salt and sand off and look at all the pieces again. Maybe Josie had something she could keep them in. Something big enough that she could add more, like if she found some tomorrow, or even the next day.

  Any blue pieces she’d add to her mom’s jar, back home on the kitchen windowsill.

  Chapter 6

  For the fourth morning in a row, Lucy tossed two waffles onto her plate. It didn’t seem to bother Josie. She didn’t say one word about it. Maybe she was trying out some kind of reverse psychology—the old “She thinks she wants waffles every day, but when she actually has waffles every day, she’ll get sick of them and choose my homemade porridge instead” strategy.

  On her way to the table, Lucy looked in the sink at the pot filled with globs of lumpy grey goo and shook her head. Never gonna happen.

  After she wolfed down her waffles, using her finger to squeegee up every last drop of syrup, she poured herself a half a cup of coffee. It wasn’t so bad once you added five teaspoons of sugar and a squirt of canned whipped cream—that was Josie’s idea—to help ease her into a morning routine of coffee drinking.

  Up in her bedroom, Lucy closed the door, stood perfectly still, and listened. Nothing. She checked out the window. Where was he? He’d been there earlier. Just like every morning. And every morning, in spite of the fact that he’d already caught her, she watched him. She couldn’t help it. It was like a car accident she couldn’t look away from. Every morning she would press herself against the wall and carefully slide one eyeball past the window frame until he came into view. And every morning, though she was perfectly hidden, he would stop and look up. It was as if he could tell. Which there was no way he could. Lucy figured he was doing it on purpose, trying to catch her. It was weird. He was weird.

  And yucky. Even from her window, she could see the ginormous pit stains under his arms. Not to mention his greasy hair—well, she assumed it was greasy, it had to be. It was plastered flat against his head with sweat. Also she was pretty sure he wore the same clothes every day.

  And what exactly was he digging? The hole kept getting bigger and bigger, but what was it for? A pool? A pond? A bomb shelter? Lucy scratched her head. Or is he looking for something? Does he think something’s buried out there? It was making her crazy.

  Whatever. Luckily, at this moment, he was nowhere to be seen. Her plan was to go hunt for beach glass, and now she didn’t have to wait till after lunch. That’s when he usually seemed to finish his…work?

  Lucy went in search of Josie. She didn’t want to leave without letting her know where she was going. She paused on the landing, stuck her nose in the air, and sniffed—Just follow the smell of smoke. Lucy found her outside sitting on the porch swing, reading. There was a cigarette hanging loosely from her mouth and she was wearing what looked like some kind of Hawaiian muumuu. Wow, those colours clash. What do you call someone who designs fabric? Well, whoever it was, bet they were fired on the spot.

  She waved her fingers across Josie’s open book.

  A gust of smoke filled the air as Josie looked up and exhaled.

  Lucy scrunched up her nose and stepped back. “I’m going to the beach.”

  Josie nodded. “You should take a hat and some Coppertone. It’s gonna be a hot one. My thermometer is close to ninety already.”

  Lucy grabbed her Red Sox hat from her room and did another check out the window. Still all clear. She stopped by the kitchen and slathered on some suntan lotion, knowing she was probably missing a ton of spots. But there was no time to lose. She had to get while the gettin’ was good.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky as she headed for the beach. The only noise came from the clicking and buzzing of insects hiding in the grass and flowers. It made her think of when she and Sarah had had to do that stupid project on bugs. They had to catch a bunch, pin them on a board, and label them. It was
disgusting.

  She missed Sarah, and wished she were here. This might not be so bad if she had someone to hang out with. She still had no clue what was she going to do with herself all summer. The beach glass thing was okay, but every day? And Josie didn’t even have TV. Well, she had one, but it only got channels 3 and 5, and they were fuzzy at the best of times. Josie told Lucy she might get better reception if she wrapped tinfoil around the rabbit ears and stood on a certain spot in the living room. It sounded like a lot of work. And not very comfortable for watching an entire show.

  Lucy was halfway down the lane and lost in her thoughts, and by the time she realized what was happening, it was too late. Stopping dead in her tracks, she felt her feet turn to cement blocks. She felt her throat squeezing shut, like someone tightening a twist tie.

  There, less than ten feet away, was the boy. The Digger. He’d tricked her. There hadn’t been any shovelling sounds. She wildly looked around for some tree or shrub to dive behind. None! He’d already seen her, anyway. She prayed for something to happen, the earth to swallow her up, a volcano to erupt, spontaneous combustion, anything!

  He stood there, leaning on his shovel, watching her. He was smirking but he didn’t say anything. He just did that thing again—pointed to his eye, then to her. She knew he knew. It was obvious. She knew he knew that it was her eyeball every morning. Her face was on fire and it had nothing to do with the ninety-degree heat. So, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do, she started speed walking towards the beach, forcing herself not to break into a run. His eyes were on her back the entire time, she could feel them, and it wasn’t until she scurried down the rickety steps and was safely out of sight that she finally let herself take a breath.