The Stormchasers: A Novel by Blum Jenna

Author:Blum, Jenna [Blum, Jenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

31

But then, two days later: July fourteenth, the twins’ eighteenth birthday, and Karena is in the kitchen, cubing cheese for pea salad. Normally the Hallingdahls go to the Wagon Wheel in Creston for birthdays and special occasions. Since Charles’s incident at the Starlite it’s too embarrassing to go there. But Karena has begged for one last dinner at the house, anyway. It’s only a little over a month until Siri drives her up to Minneapolis and the U, and who knows when her next supper with her family will be? Siri has agreed, and Frank has sworn to close his practice early and be here, and Karena is making all of her and Charles’s favorite foods. Hamburgers for the grill. Grandmother Hallingdahl’s potato salad. And the pea salad, a goopy concoction of canned peas, onions, mayonnaise, and cheddar cubes that only the twins will eat. Even Siri can’t stand it, although the pea salad is as much a part of the Hallingdahl gastronomic tradition as lefse and lutefisk and summer tomatoes sliced and piled high with sugar.

Karena rubs the dirty sole of one bare foot against the other and sings along with the radio as she cuts. Late midsummer is a dreamy, peculiar, dangerous time of year, a feeling in the thick air that all bets are off. Just this morning Karena gave her notice at the Chat ’n’ Chew, and this afternoon she and Siri went to La Crosse to shop for Karena’s college wardrobe. Of course, Karena will buy her own clothes when she gets to the Cities, but she didn’t want to hurt her mom’s feelings. So she acquiesced to the sweaters and cardigans and new parka, and now as she looks out the window over the kitchen sink at the lawn and the old boat swing set and the enormous pine bush Frank keeps promising to trim but doesn’t, Karena is imagining her transformation. She will wear all black and high-heeled boots. She will have gold bangles and hoop earrings. She will smoke those little skinny cigarettes that look like joints—Capris. And although Karena’s English score on the SAT is the highest ever in New Heidelburg, she might go premed. Or maybe not, but it would be nice to have an office full of grateful patients, whom Karena will know how to help because of her early experience with Charles. And Charles himself will have long passed the danger point and be a prize-winning scientist, and they’ll meet for lunch and congratulate each other in a sunny restaurant with classical music and ferns. Maybe Charles will have a beard.

It is because Karena is dreaming, being impractical and unwary, that she doesn’t hear Charles come up the stairs. It’s because she is counting her chickens and singing that she doesn’t register him yelling at Siri. Karena is being stupid, pretending that once she’s gone, everything will just magically be normal. So it’s not until the radio goes to commercial and she turns it down that she hears Charles shouting at their mom.

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