Three Bird Summer Read Free Page B

there,” I pointed out.
    “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Martin with a pet fish,” Mom said.
    I gave up. Mom was in one of her arguing moods. I knew she’d just pick apart anything I said.
    “And I’m supposed to go to Madison in two weeks for a conference,” she went on.
    “So go,” I said.
    “And leave you here?” she asked.
    A skinny tree branch whipped in through my open window, and I jerked my head to avoid it. The drive was a challenge under any circumstances, and Mom wasn’t driving her best.
    “Mom, we’ll be totally fine,” I said. “Why are you so worked up?”
    Just then a deer burst through the trees. Mom braked hard as it bounded across the road. I could see the muscles ripple under its brown hide as it leaped past us and disappeared into the roadside shrubs.
    “This place gets wilder and wilder as the rest of the lake gets more and more tame,” Mom said.
    “Yeah. So?” I asked. I had a strong desire to bolt from the car and run through the bushes like the deer.
    “Maybe you could come with me to Madison,” she continued as she started driving again.
    “Mom, that’s stupid,” I said. “You just said you don’t trust Grandma by herself.”
    “That doesn’t mean I want you looking after her.” She shook her head. “You don’t see the things I do, Adam.”
    I was glad for that. More and more, it felt like my mom was one big worry machine. “Well, I still think we can survive a few days,” I said finally.
    She pursed her lips and drove the rest of the way without saying a word. I stared out the window, relieved to have some silence.
    The town of Hubbard Falls looked the same as always. The main street was like something from an old-fashioned movie set, with a dime store, a movie theater, a candy shop, a soda fountain, and an antique store filled with old snowshoes, painted duck decoys, and a real Indian birch-bark canoe. But that part of town lasted only a few blocks before it intersected a long stretch of fast-food restaurants and the kinds of chain stores you could find anywhere in America.
    Once we were at the grocery store, Mom shopped with attitude. She piled the cart high with milk, cheese, and fresh produce, and stuffed the bottom with a ton of nonperishables.
    “You expecting a snowstorm?” I asked her at one point.
    “Ha-ha.”
    But it wasn’t really a joke. She was like a grocery shopper with road rage, overfilling the cart in what I guessed was some kind of statement to Grandma. “This is food,” she seemed to be saying with every box of cereal. “This is how you stock a kitchen,” said the oatmeal, the sugar, the jam. I finally drifted away to flip through baseball magazines. The Cubs were having a rough season, but I still followed their every game. I didn’t rejoin Mom until she was at the register.
    As expected, Grandma looked grim when we brought all the bags into the cabin.
    “I’m not sure where we’re going to put all this,” Grandma said as Mom started pulling out bags of rice and pasta, cans of soup and tuna.
    “I’ll take care of it, Ma,” my mom said.
    Grandma started to empty a bag, then gave a small shrug and returned to the living room, where she had been dusting the mantel.
    “All these little nooks and crannies,” she complained, poking her dust rag along its edge.
    The mantel had an intricate wooden rail around it carved with cutouts of animals. There was a loon, a bear, a beaver, a fish, a squirrel, a wolf, and a deer. As a kid, I’d climb on the brick foundation that wrapped around the fireplace and stretch up to the mantel, running my fingers along the inside of the animal shapes, like tracing stencils in the air.
    “I thought you liked that mantel, Grandma,” I said now.
    “Oh, sure I do,” she said. “It’s just a pisser to keep the dust out.”
    She slid the rag into the narrow opening of the loon’s beak.
    “You can make that my job, if you want,” I said.
    “You just enjoy the lake,” she said. “That’s the job for