The Secrets of Blueberries, Brothers, Moose & Me Read online

  DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2015 by Sara Nickerson

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  CIP Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-698-14666-2

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  Version_1

  For my brothers—

  Dan, Dave, Jay, and Jim—

  who still stick together out there

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  One Last Thing

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  MY OLDER BROTHER, PATRICK, CAME UP WITH THE idea. He was nearly fourteen and it was his summer of protein drinks and hundred-a-day push-ups to stop from being so skinny. Something had happened to him, something that made him hide out in the bathroom, examining his thin arms and legs in the full-length mirror. By the end of that summer, I’d know what it was. I’d also know about the blood feud between two farmers, and how it felt to have tiny chunks of gravel lodged in my face. But I’m getting ahead.

  One thing I did know, right from the start, was that my brother was desperate for new clothes, and not the new-to-us thrift store variety we usually wore. So halfway through the summer, when he started searching for jobs that a fourteen-year-old could have, I knew he was thinking ahead to September, and the new school year, and jeans with actual store tags.

  “Look, Mom!” he said. It was a socked-in rainy day, and we’d already spent most of it watching black-and-white Western movies on TV.

  My mother, she loves old Westerns. I’m pretty sure it’s because they are about as far from real life as a person can get. Ladies wear long skirts, horses scramble up rocky cliffs, and fat tumbleweeds bounce across wagon-track roads, making dust fly. Best of all, the good guy always wins and the bad guy gets locked up or chased out of town.

  Mom sat on the couch with her legs tucked under her while Claude, my baby brother, napped on her lap. “Look, Mom,” Patrick said again. He pointed to a small ad in one of those free newspapers, the kind you get outside grocery stores.

  I slid off the couch, pulled the 3-D glasses from my shirt pocket, and settled close to my brother. When I leaned over his shoulder he didn’t tell me to move and he didn’t even snort at my glasses. Instead, he just pointed to where his finger had already made a small black smear in the middle of the page.

  Kids!!! Earn money, have fun!

  Pick berries @Moose G’s Blueberry Farm,

  42 cents/pound

  Best picker wins PRIZE!!!

  “Wow,” I said. It was like we’d stumbled upon the biggest secret in the history of the world. Money! Money for picking!

  In my mind I saw us standing in an orchard, grabbing bills off branches and stuffing them deep into the pockets of our brand-new jeans. “I could do that, too. Couldn’t I, Patrick? Couldn’t I?” I held my breath waiting.

  My brother studied the advertisement again. His finger underlined each word. Earn money. Have fun. He said, “How many pounds do you think we could pick?” And just like that, we were a team.

  I thought about a blueberry, imagined holding one in my hand, small and round and light as air. “They’re not very big,” I said.

  I looked at Claude, wondering how many blueberries equaled his nearly three-year-old body, and if it would be possible to pick that many in a day. It was a math problem I was determined to solve. “How many pounds do you think Claude weighs?”

  Patrick snorted like it was a dumb question, but turned to our mom anyway. “How much does Claude weigh, Mom?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea what you two are talking about.”

  “Blueberries,” I said. “A summer job.”

  Mom pulled her eyes away from the tumbleweeds long enough to squint at the newspaper spread across the floor. She said, “Where did you find that?”

  “What?”

  “That newspaper. It can’t be current. Those berry farms stopped hiring kids years ago. Did you get it at Second Time Around? In one of those free piles by the door?”

  Patrick pulled the paper close to his face. Then he turned it around and pointed to the date on the top. “It’s this year. It’s this week, even. Look!”

  “Well, is it a real newspaper? Or is it one of those strange free things you kids are always picking up everywhere?”

  “I’d watch out for Missy,” my brother said, tucking the strange free newspaper behind his back.

  “And I’d watch out for Patrick.”

  “And it’s a farm. There’s a farmer—”

  “That place is—” my mom shook her head. “I remember back when I was a kid. There was some sort of dispute or something. They stopped hiring pickers, or sold half of the farm. I don’t know the details.” She turned back to the TV. “Anyway.”

  “What does that mean?” I demanded.

  “What?”

  “When you say ‘anyway’ like that. What does it mean? You always do it. And we never know what it means.” I’m not stupid. I knew exactly what it meant, but I wanted her to have to say it. To emphasize the seriousness of the situation, I yanked off my 3-D glasses and glared across the room.

  My mom looked down at Claude, twisting and turning on her lap. He w
as named after her name, which is Claudia. “Mr. Claude is having another dream,” she said.

  She said this out loud, but she wasn’t really saying it to Patrick or me. More like to an imaginary adult—my mother’s own imaginary friend who seemed to have moved in right after our dad moved out.

  I turned to Patrick. He had gone limp. He sat hunched over his newsprint-smeared hands but I could tell he wasn’t seeing them.

  I knew what he was seeing. He was seeing the second half of the summer, dragging on like the first. He was seeing September, when he’d be starting as a freshman at the gigantic high school. He was seeing brand-new clothes from the mall, bought with money he’d earned through work in the blueberry field. He was seeing it all disappear with our mom’s anyway.

  “There’s got to be another job for you,” Mom said, softening a little. “Mowing lawns or walking dogs. Patrick, bring me the paper.”

  Patrick didn’t move and his ears were turning a strange mix of red and purple.

  So I said, “Mom, there’s not,” even though I knew he hated when I spoke for him. But what else could I do? His ears—I was afraid they would pop off.

  I said, “Seriously, this isn’t fair. All we want is to earn money so we don’t look stupid at school next year.”

  “You kids never look stupid.”

  “How do you know? You don’t know how it is. Look at us, Mom. We look as stupid as this ratty old carpet.”

  My voice was so loud it woke Claude, who sat up, stretched his chubby arms, and shouted, “Cats!”

  Claude’s dreams are usually about cats, which is funny because we don’t even have one. When he wakes, we often go searching for his dream cats, peeking behind curtains and underneath chairs. But not right then. Because right then, a funny whistling sound was in the room, and it seemed to be coming from Patrick. I looked him up and down. The noise, I finally figured out, had to do with his nostrils, which were flaring, which led me to believe he was either about to explode or cry.

  I turned back to my mother, expecting to see the People-Are-Suffering-So-Stop-Your-Complaininglook that always followed any sort of conversation about new clothes and summer camps. Instead, I saw something new. She had gone limp, too.

  The room was quiet until Claude made a wet bubbling sound. Usually Claude’s bubbling sounds made everyone laugh, but at that moment, no one moved. Claude looked around, surprised. “But I funny,” he said.

  I felt bad about what I’d said to my mom. I really did. But I knew this: I would have felt a lot worse if Patrick had started to cry, right there on the bad living room carpet.

  I picked up the strange little newspaper and held it out to my mom. “Can’t you at least call?” I wished I still had my glasses on. I couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “No, Missy,” she said. It was one of those times she said my name like it wasn’t my name. Like if I were named Catherine or Gwen, she would still have called me Missy. Little Missy. Missy Smarty. “And you can go to your room.”

  CHAPTER 2

  IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR PATRICK BEING EMBARRASSED by our secondhand look, I never would have noticed. I’m like that, though. Something needs to be pointed out before I see it clearly. Which is why the 3-D glasses come in handy. Plus, I have my two best friends, Constance and Allie, and they don’t seem to care where anyone’s jeans come from.

  Patrick has always liked nice things. My mother says that when he was a baby, he liked to look at furniture catalogs. My dad is like that, too. I, on the other hand, don’t even like sitting on furniture.

  Patrick gets nervous when we shop at Value Village or Second Time Around because he’s afraid we’ll run into someone we know. “Why should we care?” I ask. “They’re doing the same thing we are.”

  He never has an answer to this logic of mine except, “You just wait, Missy. Someday you’ll understand.”

  After I got sent to my room, I sat on my bed for three minutes. Then I decided to make my bed, just in case Mom came in to yell at me. I pulled the sheets up tight and fluffed the pillow. I smoothed the bedspread until it was perfectly flat.

  On the other side of the room was Claude’s bed, which wasn’t a real bed, but something called a toddler bed. Mom hadn’t gotten around to making it yet, so without even being asked, I straightened his sheets and fluffed his pillow, too. I even folded his little kitty-cat pajamas and tucked them in his top drawer. Then I opened the bedroom door, just a crack, to hear what was going on down the hall. But they either weren’t talking or they knew I would be trying to listen, so they were torturing me by whispering. That’s what happens in a family—everyone learns everyone else’s Very Worst Thing.

  My Very Worst Thing was being left out. Left out of the fun or discussion or even the fight. So with nothing to do but stare at my face in the mirror—an activity I endured until my eyebrows started looking creepy—I decided to play Intruder.

  Intruder is a game I invented right after my dad moved out. It goes like this: You are all alone and you hear a strange noise in the house. Intruder! Quick, you crawl underneath your bed and you camouflage yourself to look like a pile of junk. The intruder will come in, searching for stuff to steal. When he looks underneath your bed, he will see junk. He might poke it even but will quickly realize there is nothing worth stealing.

  It’s not so easy, becoming a camouflaged pile of junk, and I had spent months collecting just the right objects:

  My Princess Castle and all its parts, saved from last summer’s giveaway pile.

  My toy horses that I don’t play with anymore but still want to keep.

  This doll I got for my fifth birthday—she hums when she’s happy and cries when she’s hungry, except she doesn’t do either anymore because of no batteries.

  A silk fairy costume, which, due to an embarrassing flying experiment, has only one rainbow-sparkled wing.

  And the most useful item for playing Intruder: Claude’s outgrown baby blanket, the one with the hole in the middle, just right for covering my face and not suffocating.

  The hardest body part to camouflage is feet, because no matter how you try to disguise them, sticking-up feet look exactly like sticking-up feet. I’d finally come up with the best solution ever: my mother’s garden boots. They were big enough to go over my feet and flop down at odd angles, looking exactly like they’d been tossed carelessly underneath the bed. Every once in a while my mother asks, “Has anyone seen my garden boots?” but I usually only feel bad for a few minutes, and besides, it’s not like she doesn’t have other shoes to wear.

  I had just arranged everything in perfect random order, slipped on the garden boots, and placed my feet in their thrown-under-the-bed position when I heard a noise at the door. I quick grabbed Claude’s old baby blanket and draped it over my face, my heart beating so hard in my chest I was sure someone would hear it. That’s the thing about Intruder—even when you know it’s just a game, it sort of doesn’t feel like it.

  “Missy?”

  Through the baby blanket hole I saw Patrick’s feet in the doorway.

  I flung off all my Intruder junk and crawled out from underneath the bed. “What’s happening? Am I in trouble?”

  Patrick shook his head. His ears were still red, but not so purple, and he was smiling. “She did it.”

  “What?”

  “She called the blueberry people.”

  “What? Really?”

  “Yeah, after you left.”

  He stepped into my room with his slight Patrick limp, on account of his right leg being just a tiny bit longer than his left. In his hand was a rolled-up catalog. “She called the number. She talked to a lady.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I know.” He sat on the edge of my bed, and I plopped down next to him.

  “What did she say? The lady?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Mom just listened
and nodded her head for a long time. She asked about the stuff that happened there, years ago. The trouble.”

  “What trouble, Patrick? What kind of trouble?” My spine was suddenly tingly, the way it got before something big was going to happen.

  Patrick shrugged. “Some sort of fight, I guess. Between the brothers.”

  “What brothers?”

  “I don’t know, Missy. The farmers, probably. They divided the farm so everything is all right now.”

  “So can we go?”

  “She said that Bev told her they opened it up to kids last week—”

  “Who is Bev?”

  “The lady she was talking to.”

  “So can we go? Or are we too late? Do they already have all the pickers?”

  “No, we’re not too late. They still need more kids. But they had to postpone because of the weather. The lady said to wait for a few days of sun.”

  I glanced out the window. Gray skies and splats of rain against the glass. “But Mom said yes?”

  “I guess she did, Missy.”

  I still couldn’t believe it. “So did she say a bunch of rules?”

  “That’s the funny thing. She just looked at me the way she does. You know?”

  I nodded. Mom had a look like a laser beam that could burn warning messages straight into a brain. But the laser-beam warning usually came with a long list of words.

  “It was like—” he shook his head.

  “What?”

  “It was like I was a grown-up. And she didn’t need to say all the usual stuff.”

  We sat in silence, trying to understand this new thing. I looked him up and down. To me he still looked like skinny Patrick. The only thing different was the enormous red pimple on his chin.

  “What about me?” I asked finally. “Did she say anything about me?”

  “She said we’d need to stick together out there.”

  I rolled onto my back and kicked my feet in the air. “I did it! And you owe me a big fat thank-you.” When I heard Patrick open his catalog I sat back up. He was looking at the end section, with all the pictures of beach things.