Then I whisper too. “So, how do you think we catch one?”
His smile widens. “With patience.”
He says it like he knows that’s the very character trait I do not possess.
“They keep swimming toward the shade, so if we put one bucket in to create a shadow, maybe we can both scoop at the same time and get lucky.”
“Miles, you’re a genius!” I say, smiling so wide I show off my missing bottom tooth. I dunk my bucket in the water. It catches on the bottom of the lake, and all the tadpoles scamper away just as the water paints itself into a murky shade of sludge.
“Oops, sorry,” I cringe.
“It’s okay,” Miles says. “We’ll try again.”
And we do. We try for the next eight hours, stopping once for lunch—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the shape of a sandcastle—courtesy of my mom.
When I introduced her to Miles, she seemed thrilled for me that I made a new friend. Or maybe it was because he told her he liked her fedora. He must have a thing for hats.
After lunch, we relocated from the dock to the shell-covered shore. We waded out knee-deep until our arms were buried up to our elbows, and it’s where we’ve been for the past two hours—buckets circling just above the bottom.
Miles’s brow is pinched and I’m standing rooted in the sand when my mom interrupts us.
“Teddy, it’s time to head in, sweetie. Say good night.”
I let out a disappointed sigh. We haven’t caught anything yet, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to give up. When I look over at Miles, he’s already lifted his bucket from the water and is trudging back toward the grass. A sadness ghosts his eyes again. I don’t think he wants to go in either.
I stop him, resting my hand on his shoulder.
“Hey, same time tomorrow?”
He turns his chin and smiles right at me.
I love his smile.
“Yeah. Same time tomorrow,” he says.
An obnoxious whirring sound, followed by athump, thump, thump, wakes me the next morning. The source of the noise is the second thing I think about after opening my eyes.
I yank the Hudson Bay throw from where it’s tucked beneath my chin and exchange my Rapunzel nightgown for the first swimsuit I find in my closet.
When I round the corner at the bottom of the stairs, I’m greeted by my dad’s toolbelt-covered butt high in the air, his head buried as he drills into the inside of our kitchen cabinets. A collage of weathered paper resembling the ones on his office desk cover the countertop. When his drill comes to a stop, I lean in close and inspect his handywork.
“Whatcha doin’?”
He cracks his head against the top of the surface, sending one of the battered documents floating to the floor, and hollers, “Shit!”
I giggle as he begins backpedaling, pulling his head out from beneath the frame and rubbing the top of it.
“I mean,shoot. You scared me, Teddy Bear.”
I squat to retrieve the fallen paper and notice faint rectangular drawings marked with measurements around the outer edge, the word “kitchen” scrawled at the top.
Yep. They look exactly like his clients’ blueprints.
I hold it out to him.
“Thanks, kiddo. I was trying to get a good idea of the bones of this place when I got distracted by these wobbly hinges. Turns out they’re a lost cause because the screws are stripped.”
He returns the sketch from where it fell.
