Monsoon Summer Read Free Page B

won’t,” Steve said. “Hope you guys survive the visit.”

FOUR
    We were driving all the way to Palm Springs to drop
Eric’s bug collection at Grandma and Grandpa Gardner’s for the summer. We weren’t going to spend the night; we hardly ever did, so we had to endure the long drive there and back every time we visited. Dad had rented a van for the trip.
    I still didn’t know how my brother had managed to convince our grandparents to take care of his bugs. Only Eric could have pulled that off. He was such an easygoing little guy, it was tough for anybody to say no to him.
    He was sitting in the back, taking his bugs out one by one, humming songs to them, telling them the current top ten fourth-grade jokes in a quiet voice. He kept only the rarest of specimens and brooded over them like a mother hen. Any time one died, he and I planned the funeral together. I was sure Grandpa and Grandma had agreed to take in the bugs so they could see us and have one more chance to talk us out of the trip. My father’s parents had been doing their best to change our minds ever since the orphanage had invited Mom to come.
    I sat squashed between my other set of grandparents, who’d decided to come along at the last minute. Eric and I called them by their first names, Helen and Frank, because nothing else seemed to fit. Tall, wide, and regal, they both wore African-print cotton caftans. Helen had added an Indian scarf around her head, Navajo earrings, and huaraches. Frank’s accessories for today included a fedora and a silver link bracelet from Morocco—both gifts from international students they’d hosted in their cozy apartment. They were the most global pair of blond, blue-eyed Nordic Americans I’d ever seen, and I thought they looked outstanding.
    â€œYour mother might need our support,” Helen was whispering to me. “I wish we could have taken Eric’s bugs, but we’ll be gone as well.”
    â€œHope your grandparents don’t mind that we came along,” Frank muttered on the other side of me. “They aren’t too thrilled about this trip to India, are they?”
    I shook my head. That was certainly an understatement.
    â€œDon’t know what they’re worried about,” Helen said. “India’s the most magnificent place I’ve ever seen. Of course, I may be romanticizing it because it was where we found Sarah, but the monsoon rains worked some kind of magic on me.”
    Frank reached over my lap to squeeze Helen’s hand. “Quite a romantic place, wasn’t it, sweetie?” he asked. Obviously he was remembering some monsoon magic himself.
    After adopting my then-four-year-old mother all those years ago, Helen and Frank never managed to save enough money for another overseas adventure. They built houses every summer down in Mexico, hosted international students for lavish meals, and gave everything away to charity except a bit of retirement money. That’s how Mom had picked up the giving habit. Dad’s job was maintaining a complicated computer network at the university. He earned a decent salary but only kept enough to pay the bills and tuck away a little for the future. Then he gave the rest to Mom to fund her “giving opportunities,” as she liked to call them. That’s why we’d never owned a car
or
a house—my parents couldn’t afford a down payment, and they refused to borrow money from Grandma and Grandpa Gardner.
    Helen and Frank didn’t have anything to offer except a lot of affection. Eric and I hung out in their tiny apartment as much as we did at home. After Mona disappeared, I’d spent a lot of time there, eating whole-wheat carob chip cookies and basking in the comfortable silence. Mom and Dad hadn’t been much help, although they had both tried to comfort me in their own way.
    Dad had worried about my getting involved with Mona from the start. “Too risky,”