After Peaches Read online

  “Pick?” José asked, pointing to the rows of tulips beginning at our feet and stretching out to the top of the hillside. Julie grinned, and we both nodded. José bent over and put one hand to his back; then he wiped the back of the other hand across his forehead.“Much work,” he said.

  Julie pointed to herself and then made a pillow with her hands and pretended to sleep. She pointed to the ground at the end of one of the tulip rows, and José laughed.

  They liked each other. Just as I’d hoped they would.

  My parents and Ms. Norton caught up to us. Julie’s mother had swapped her white runners for pink rubber boots. I introduced José, who held out his hand, then blushed when he saw it was covered in dirt. He wiped it on his pants, but in the end, the adults only smiled at each other.

  I was about to step into one of the rows of flowers when I remembered something. “Hey, José,” I said. “Can I show Julie your picture of Analía? I always tell her Analía’s stories, and she wants to know what your daughter looks like.”

  Analía was ten years old, just like Julie and me, and she lived in Mexico City with her mother, brothers and sisters. I loved listening to José’s stories about her. A few weeks earlier, her detective club had discovered who’d been leaving boxes of fresh tortillas at the end of her street, enough for each house in the whole block. (It was a church group from a rich part of the city.) Another time, she and a friend rescued a puppy from a ditch, nursed it back to health and named it Fred because José had told her that Pedro Picapiedra is called Fred Flintstone in English.

  José handed Julie a picture in a plastic cover. A girl our age with a blue flower in her long black hair smiled up at us. She looked like she’d be as good at telling jokes as her father was.

  Above our heads, the adults kept talking.“Have you heard about the barbecue?” José asked Papá.“A bunch of us are organizing one this Sunday to celebrate the warm weather.” He chuckled and shook his head.“Can you believe it? It’s finally getting warm enough to pick without a jacket, and it’s time for us to leave! Of all the rotten luck.”

  I looked up, confused.“Time to leave? But you just got here, didn’t you? I thought you were staying until the fall.”

  José crouched down so his face was level with mine. “I wish we could,” he said. “Some years, we get to stay in one place for a whole season, or even two. But other times, we have to move around a lot. Pretty soon, we’re going to the mainland to a place called Oliver to pick cherries and peaches. We’ll really be seeing the province this summer!”

  He tried to smile, but his eyes were sad, and when I looked at my parents, they too had fake smiles on their faces. I frowned at all of them. Why was everyone pretending to be happy with this terrible news? If the other Mexican workers left the farm, Mamá and Papá wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. They’d come home exhausted and cranky. This summer was looking worse and worse. Too upset to think up anything new to say, I translated for Julie.

  She didn’t say anything, and I could tell she didn’t understand how awful this news was.

  All day, I tried not to think about José leaving. I tried to have fun with Julie and to concentrate on slicing the tulips from their bulbs and making perfect bundles. Julie tried hard too. She taught me how to play veo veo in English, a game Ricardo used to play with me when I was small. Soon I learned the English words by heart. “I spy with my little eye, someting that is…blue.”

  “Something,” Julie said gently.“Not someting.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “Something. You guess now!”

  We soon passed Ms. Norton, who was picking in the next row, close to Mamá who was trying to explain about staying close to the ground.

  “No too much stand,” Mamá said. “Like dees.”

  Ms. Norton smiled and shook her head. “I can’t believe how fast you pick,” she said, “and how you can hold so many bundles at the same time.” She tried to imitate Mamá—one bundle in her right hand, one under her left arm, and three between the fingers of her left hand—and they all fell to the ground like spilled matches.“I won’t even earn enough money for an ice-cream cone, the way I’m going,” Ms. Norton said, but she didn’t seem too upset.

  “Eees okay,” Mamá said.“You learn.”

  By lunchtime, Ms. Norton said she was exhausted and couldn’t imagine how anyone could work like this six days a week. She and Julie stayed for the rest of the day and picked 150 bundles. “That’ll cover the ice cream,” Ms. Norton joked when she got her cash at the end of the day. “It might even be enough for double scoops.”

  We all piled into the car, headed back into town and stopped at a little ice-cream shop by the water, halfway between the Parliament buildings and the blue bridge. I ordered rocky road and mango. Julie had lemon and vanilla. If I didn’t think about José and Julie leaving and just how lonely this summer was going to be, I could consider it a good day.

  When we got home, Mamá wanted to open the week’s mail, which meant I had to pull out the dictionary and help my parents read difficult English sentences, mostly about buying magazines or newspapers, or signing up for credit cards.

  One of the letters, though, didn’t offer us anything at all.

  In fact, it took everything away.

  CHAPTER 6

  My Wonderful, Impossible Plan

  “We must move away!” I told Julie on Monday morning, as soon as she opened her front door. The smile fell from her face, and she stopped pulling on her backpack and stared at me. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. “The owner of the house sent to my parents a letter. He wants us to pay more for rent, I tink—I looked up the biggest words in the dictionary. But we cannot pay more. My parents said now we must find anodder apartment.” My words tumbled out before I could check them for mistakes, and I was too upset to care about anything but where on earth we were going to live.

  “Oh,” Julie said, pushing up her glasses, twice. She stood there with one shoe on and the other off, her backpack hanging from one shoulder. “But you won’t move very far, right? I mean, you won’t move away from Victoria, will you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My parents want to move closer to the farm, but I don’t want to. Now dere is not enough work for José and some of de other Mexicans. So maybe later dere will not be enough work for my parents. I don’ want to live far away with no work!” The words flew out of my mouth, mistake after mistake piling up before I could even sort out what I was going to say next.

  Julie was ignoring the mistakes. We stood in silence for a few minutes. “If you’re near the farm, I could still visit you, right?” she whispered. “I mean it’s not the other end of the province or anything.”

  She looked as miserable as I felt, but at least one person in Canada cared where we moved. One person in the entire country. When we left Mexico, half the town turned up at our doorstep the night before, with cookies and tortillas, pictures of saints, lucky charms, photographs and even a Bible to bring along on our journey. Almost a year later, when we left Guatemala to come to Canada, everyone on our street threw a party for us. Now we had chosen to stay in Canada forever. We had been here for close to a year, and only one person would be sad to see us leave the neighborhood. Sometimes, I thought, no matter how much you want a place to be home, it simply doesn’t feel like it.

  And that’s when I thought of the plan. The wonderful, impossible plan. I wasn’t going to say a thing about it yet. Not to Julie anyway. We walked to school, talking about the math test instead, and when we saw the other kids, I went quiet as usual, and she told me about her latest notes for her summer adventures. She didn’t sound very excited anymore.

  In class, I made a few notes of my own in the notebook Julie had given me, but I wasn’t writing about what I’d do this summer. I was writing about how to get my parents to agree to my wonderful, impossible plan. With Julie and José leaving, I had nothing to lose. Anywhere would be better than here for the summer.

  As soon as Papá and Mamá got home that afternoon, I asked them what they thought.

  “It’s too risky,” Papá said. “Too much to plan in too little time. Too many things could go wrong.” He was sitting at the kitchen table with his arms crossed. Mamá was leaning back in her chair, looking exhausted. The empty supper plates sat waiting to be washed.

  I took a deep breath and was about to try again when Mamá said, “I agree with your father. We can’t just travel across the province right now, following the harvests like the other Mexicans. They have to do it because they signed a contract, and that’s why they’re here in Canada, but it’s different for us. Our home is here. We can’t just pack it all away and leave it behind.”

  “But why not?” I asked. Would Ricardo have backed me up if he were still alive? He used to do that sometimes, sticking up for me when he knew I wanted something really badly. Even though we didn’t always get along—he was so much older than me and we didn’t have much in common—I missed him now. “It would only be for a couple of months,” I said, “and it’s perfect timing. I won’t be in school in the summer, so I can help in the fields, like I do on Saturdays. And Papá’s been talking about exploring the province ever since we got here. And we have a car, and you two are really good at harvesting, and José said that farmers are desperate for help. Besides, imagine how much money José must be making if he can afford to fly back and forth to Mexico every summer!”

  For some reason, they smiled at that, but they still didn’t look convinced. “José doesn’t pay for those flights, Rosario,” Papá said.“The farmers do.”

  I frowned. That didn’t make any sense.“Why would they do that?”

  “Because the farmers need people to harvest their flowers and fruit,” said Mamá. “And Mexican workers need money to survive. It’s h
ard to find work in Mexico, and people would rather leave their families behind and put food on the table than let them starve.”

  “But lots of Canadians need jobs too,” I said.“Why don’t the farmers hire them instead of paying for all those flights?”

  “Because most Canadians don’t want to work so hard for so little money,” Papá said, pushing back from the table. “Getting up at five and working bent over for twelve hours a day. Most Canadians would demand higher wages if they had to work like that. But that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking about why we can’t just leave our lives behind and follow the harvests.”

  Mamá began clearing the dishes, and she motioned for me to help, as if the conversation was already over. I grabbed the knives and forks from the table and dropped them with a clatter onto the plates. Mamá ran water in the sink, and Papá stayed in his seat because, with two other people moving around in the tiny kitchen, he had no room to get up. He stared at the vinyl tabletop as though it might solve all our problems.

  “It’s not so easy,” Mamá said as she scrubbed. “First of all, we would need to find a place for all of our things. That costs money. Gas for traveling costs money, and where would we stay while we’re on the farms? José and the others always have somewhere to stay because the farms give housing to foreign workers, but we would have to find our own spot. That would take time and money, and so we’d still be no better off than we are here.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be that way,” I said, snatching a frayed pink dishtowel from a hook at the edge of the counter. “Julie’s family has a big tent that they haven’t used in years. Ms. Norton said that we could borrow it whenever we want to. She said there are campsites all over British Columbia, and some only cost a dollar a night. That’s much less than rent. And the other great thing is that Julie has a big basement with plenty of space in it. We don’t have much stuff, and I’m sure they’d let us keep it there if we asked.”

  I’d written all this stuff in my notebook that day, and I was ready for any excuse my parents could think up. Ricardo would have been proud of me. No matter what, I was going to win this discussion. It was my only shot at a summer with enough Normal Canadian Kid stories for my book. If I wrote about all the places we camped, I wouldn’t even have to mention that I worked with my parents during the day.

  Our few pieces of furniture and our winter clothes wouldn’t take up much space in Julie’s basement, and best of all, if our things were at her place, we’d have to come back here to live instead of going somewhere else. I wouldn’t have to start all over again at a whole new school that might have even more Robbie Zecs than this one, and I wouldn’t have to leave behind my only friend in the whole country.

  My parents looked at each other. They weren’t disagreeing with me anymore, so I kept talking as fast as I could. “We could travel all the way across, just like you said, Papá. First strawberries and raspberries in the Fraser Valley. Later cherries and peaches on the edge of the desert. We’ll meet all sorts of people and see a million places, and I’ll help you in the fields every day, and after peaches, we’ll be rich! And we can come back here and choose any apartment we want. Maybe even one in the big buildings downtown, with a pool, or a garden on the roof!”

  At last they smiled. Mamá even laughed.“I think,” she said, “we’d have to invest in some new furniture if we wanted one of those fancy apartments. They wouldn’t want lawn chairs in their kitchens and children sleeping on sofas.”

  She was teasing, of course—and changing the subject—but she looked less worried than she had since we got that letter about the rent going up.

  “So you’ll think about it?” I asked.

  Papá sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “A lot depends on the charity of Julie’s mother…”

  I bit my tongue and shook out my towel in a noisy thwap. I knew they hated accepting charity, but I also knew that they really liked Ms. Norton, and that she’d be more than happy to help.

  “We’ll think about it,” Papá said finally, and I tossed my towel onto the counter and bounded across the kitchen to hug him.

  CHAPTER 7

  Strawberries

  After that, I spent every spare moment researching farms on the Internet, helping my mother pack or learning to set up the big green tent in Julie’s backyard. Ms. Norton not only offered her tent and storage space in her basement, she also e-mailed each farm that we thought of visiting. “To make sure it’s okay for you to work, Rosario,” she said. “In Canada, kids have to be twelve years old to work, even with their parents’ permission, but hopefully it’ll be okay for you to help your parents while they’re working.”

  Thank goodness Ms. Norton knew these things. In our town in Mexico, everyone worked because otherwise families couldn’t make enough money to buy food. Canada had more rules than I’d ever imagined. Luckily the farms wrote back to say children were welcome.“As long as parents look after them and they don’t eat all the fruit,” Ms. Norton added, giving me a pretend-serious look.

  I have no idea why my parents eventually agreed to my wonderful, impossible plan. Maybe they liked the idea of not paying rent for two months, or maybe they were as curious as I was about seeing the rest of the province. I didn’t ask questions. I wanted to get on the road before they changed their minds again.

  The night before we left, Julie gave me a little white box. “So you don’t have any excuses not to write,” she said. When I opened it, I found a battery-operated light to clip onto my notebook when it was dark out.

  I threw my arms around her, and suddenly I missed her, even though we hadn’t left yet. When I left my friends in Mexico and Guatemala, I knew I might never see them again. I’d never had a chance to say good-bye to my brother. I knew this time everything was supposed to be different. The whole idea was to come back here in September with more money and a whole summer of adventures behind us. If there was one thing I’d learned though, it was that you could never know exactly what was going to happen. So I said good-bye to Julie as though I’d never see her again. She hugged me right back, and Ms. Norton gave us a bag full of chocolate-chip cookies for our trip.

  Early the next morning, our car was stuffed with everything we’d need for our summer adventure: a tent, sleeping bags, a cooler, cutlery and all sorts of other things my parents thought might come in handy. Maybe they were making up for how little we took when we left Mexico for Guatemala, and Guatemala for Canada. It was a wonder the old station wagon could move with all the stuff we’d crammed in.

  We took the first ferry of the day from Vancouver Island to the rest of Canada. Mamá and Papá and I sat outside on the upper deck, watching the seagulls above the ship and the sunlight sparkling on the water. Later, our car rumbled off the ferry with a long line of other cars, and we drove along big highways with farms or trees on either side. After what seemed like forever, we turned onto a smaller road and finally came to a stop in a gravel parking lot with a floppy-headed scarecrow and a big wooden sign that said Green’s Farm— Strawberry Capital of the Fraser Valley.

  “We’re here!” I shouted from the backseat.

  “Vamonos! Let’s go!” Mamá smiled at me in the rearview mirror.“We’ve got berries to pick!”

  I was out of the car in an instant. The farm was exactly like the photo I’d seen on the website. In the last month, Julie and I had spent hours at her computer, looking for farms, and later I brought Mamá and Papá to the computers at the library to show them what we’d found. Beyond the edge of the parking lot, little green strawberry plants stretched far into the distance, all the way to the edge of the forest.

  Two teenagers stood by stacks of white plastic buckets at the entrance to the field. “We pay thirty-five cents a pound,” said the one with pimples and glasses. “Leave the buckets at the end of the row, and we’ll weigh them on your way out. Make sure you get red berries with a bit of the stem on. Not green. Not brown. Red.”

  I held my breath and looked at my parents to see if they understood. They didn’t know about my decision not to speak English this summer, and they wouldn’t understand it if I told them. Sometimes, when they tried their own English with strangers, people talked to them like they were stupid or deaf. When I spoke English though, adults didn’t make fun of me the way kids did, so my parents thought my English was perfect. They were so proud to have a daughter who spoke two languages that I never told them the truth.