Three Bird Summer by Sara St. Antoine

Author:Sara St. Antoine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780763670467
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2014-10-14T21:00:00+00:00

THE NOTES CAME in waves. One morning I’d find two squeezed side by side in the mirror, and another the morning after that. Then a week would pass with nothing. Grandma had a few more confused evenings, but if it hadn’t been for the notes, I might have thought it was just typical old-person stuff. I was tempted to ignore the notes, to toss them in the trash without reading them and pretend that everything was normal. But Alice wouldn’t hear of it. She kept the entire collection, reading and rereading them for clues about who the mysterious G was. I told her to stop wasting her time, that whoever he was, he was an old man by now — maybe just as forgetful as Grandma. Either that or dead. No matter what Grandma wrote in those notes, I doubted she’d actually want to see him now even if she could.

There was only one note I didn’t show Alice right away. I found it in the mirror one night in July after Mom and I returned home late from dinner and a movie in town. Grandma had insisted on staying back at the cabin, saying she’d rather listen to her old records than see a loud Hollywood movie. She was already asleep when we got home.

G,

You know I don’t care how strong you are. A little shy. My strange enchanted one. Love you and be loved in return, that’s the greatest. You’re my nature boy.

Viola

As usual, the note blended words and ideas together in ways that made no sense to me. Alice always insisted that we just didn’t understand Grandma’s mind well enough — that if we could get inside her memory, the notes would seem much more coherent. But one thing was clear even to me: whoever G was, he wasn’t anything like my tree-felling grandfather. Not so strong? A little shy? G didn’t sound like Paul Bunyan at all. If anything, he sounded like he could have been a dock-sitter.

I tucked the note away in the back of my sock drawer, trying to sort it all out. If Grandma had been so crazy about a shy nature boy, why did she always tell me and my cousins we had to be tough and strong like my grandfather? And was Alice actually right all along about the reason Grandma left the notes in my mirror: did I remind her of this guy, G?

The thought made me a little embarrassed, so it took me a few days to share the note with Alice. When she finished reading it, she said, “Nature boy. Ha!” and gave me a knowing look. But thankfully she left it at that.

Then one day in late July, there came a note that I knew I had to show Alice right away. Sharing it with her would be like handing a dog a rib-eye steak. I made my way over to her place and waited impatiently for her parents to finish doing some work around the yard. As soon as they disappeared inside the house, I handed Alice the note.

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