August Isle Read online

  Caleb’s eyes went wide.

  “She’s so big,” Sammy murmured.

  “Hyacinth macaws are the biggest parrots in the world,” Mr. Taylor said, clearing his throat. “Well, the New Zealand kakapo can be heavier, but since the kakapo can’t fly, I think we’ll let that honor stay with Safira and her kind.”

  “Is she yours?” I asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Mr. Taylor said. In the daylight, I saw that the skin above his beard was deeply tanned and flecked with bits of white and red and charcoal. He had wispy hair, with a clump sticking up like a tuft of grass growing from a crack in the sidewalk. He considered me with gray eyes.

  “I met her owner in Brazil. She was my landlord, in fact. In a town called Ouro Preto. It means Black Gold. Most of the world has forgotten it now, but back in the eighteenth century, during the Brazilian gold rush, it was the biggest city anywhere in the Americas.

  “Anyway, Safira’s owner was an old woman, and she didn’t have long to live. She wasn’t a very nice old lady, truth be told, and she had no family or friends left who would care for Safira after she died. She asked me to take Safira with me when I left, and I agreed.”

  “That’s where you’ve been all this time?” Sammy asked. “Brazil?”

  “I’ve been in Brazil,” he said. “And everywhere else, too. Wherever the wind blew me, that’s where I sailed.”

  “You’ve been on a boat?” I asked. “For ten years?”

  “Off and on. The sea can make a very good companion.”

  I pursed my lips. We would have to agree to disagree.

  Then I remembered the big boat I had seen sailing into the harbor my first morning on August Isle. The Albatross. It must be Mr. Taylor’s.

  “Well, I think we’ll make a start now,” he said.

  As we passed by the staircase, we heard a clacking noise and looked up to see the dog from the night before standing at the top of the stairs. Except today it wore a huge cone around its neck, and when it stumbled to the bottom of the steps, it turned and found its cone stuck in the doorway of the living room. Caleb caught my eye, and we had to look away to keep from laughing as the dog started to bark. Mr. Taylor grumbled something and tugged its cone in the right direction.

  We followed them into the living room, where, squashed in among all the crates, were a red-and-blue-plaid sofa, a coffee table, and an armchair. Across from the sofa was a dark fireplace. The walls were decorated with pretty paintings of the beach, but something was missing from the room.

  After a second, I realized what it was. There were no photographs sitting in frames on the mantel, or books on the coffee table. So even though the room was full, it felt empty, too.

  Betsy appeared from a swinging door, carrying a tray with a pitcher, four glasses, and cookies that looked homemade. Sammy clucked her tongue at the dog. But it didn’t even look up. Instead it flopped down on the floor at Mr. Taylor’s feet.

  “He can’t hear you,” Mr. Taylor said. “He’s deaf. Found him on the streets on Kárpathos, one of the Greek islands. I gave him one scrap of fish, and suddenly I had a new shadow. He followed me everywhere I went for the rest of my stay. Including onto my boat when it was time to go.”

  “What’s his name?” Sammy asked. “And what’s the cone for?”

  “I’ve always just called him Skilos. That’s Greek for ‘dog.’ And he had a little operation this morning. The cone is to keep him from licking his wound.”

  Sammy knelt beside him as Betsy set her tray down on the coffee table. “No offense,” Sammy muttered, “but it seems like he deserves a better name than Dog.”

  One of Mr. Taylor’s scraggly eyebrows rose, but he didn’t reply.

  “You have kind of a thing for saving animals, huh?” I asked.

  “Do you have any other pets?” Caleb asked eagerly. “Like a boa constrictor? Or a Komodo dragon?”

  A sound of deep disgust rose up from Betsy’s throat. “I’ll thank you not to give him any more ideas,” she said. “Two strays are plenty. The last thing we need is one with scales.”

  “I did see Komodo dragons when I was in Indonesia,” Mr. Taylor said, considering. “I don’t think they’d make very good pets, though.”

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Betsy said. “I’ll be in the kitchen cleaning out the cabinets if you need anything.”

  “Well then,” said Mr. Taylor, coughing to clear some of the pebbles from his voice.

  “You, reptile boy, what’s your name?”

  “Caleb.”

  “Caleb.” Mr. Taylor picked up a hammer from the top of one of the crates and handed it to him. “Use the hammer claws to pull the nails out of the crate lids.”

  “Cool,” Caleb said.

  “Once you’ve done that, you’ll be in charge of pulling all the books out of them, too. Some of them I’ll be donating, and some I’ll be keeping. You’ll take the keepers into my library and shelve them.”

  Caleb scrunched up his nose, clearly disappointed with the second half of his assignment.

  “And Sammy, wasn’t it?” asked Mr. Taylor.

  Sammy nodded.

  “In each one of these crates, there’ll be a stack of pictures. You’re in charge of pulling them out and putting them into those scrapbooks.” He pointed to a teetering pile of leather binders sitting on a stack of crates. Sammy’s eyes bulged. How many pictures did he mean?

  “What about me?” I asked. “What do I do?”

  He flicked his gaze to me. He was tall and wide chested, and something about him reminded me of the August Oak. He raised an eyebrow. “How are you at typing?”

  18

  “Which one should we do first?” I asked, staring at the infestation of wooden crates.

  “Whichever you like,” Mr. Taylor said. “Pick one.”

  He settled on the opposite end of the sofa from me and opened a notebook. I pointed to the nearest crate, and Caleb began to pry out the nails. At first, all I could see inside was crumpled newspaper. The articles were all written in a different language.

  Then I dug into the box and pulled out a pair of wooden clogs.

  “Aha!” Mr. Taylor barked. “I see we’re starting with Holland. I’ve been missing those.”

  He gestured for me to hand the clogs over, then slid them onto his feet with a contented sigh.

  “Do they really wear wooden shoes in Holland?” Sammy asked.

  “When they’re at home, or working in the garden, certainly,” Mr. Taylor said. “The older generations wear them when they go out, too.”

  An ancient laptop sat between us on the couch.

  “Should I be writing this down?” I asked, gesturing to it.

  “No,” he said. “Not yet. What’s next?”

  Next was a book of very old maps, bound in leather, which I handed carefully to Caleb. Then came a stack of pictures, which Sammy took. Then my hands closed around something tall and narrow in the box. Some kind of framed picture, with more sheets of newspaper taped around it.

  Mr. Taylor rubbed his hands together. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Please. Open it.”

  I tore away the newspaper to reveal a framed picture of an odd flower, striped red and white.

  “Now, this is really quite special,” he said, taking the painting from me. His eyes shone as he studied it.

  “It looks like a painting of a flower to me,” Caleb said. “Is that what’s in all these boxes? Just boring stuff like books and paintings and shoes?”

  Mr. Taylor lowered the painting and stared at Caleb for such a long moment that Caleb’s cheeks began to go red under the old man’s gaze. I took a nervous sip of lemonade.

  “I am not a collector of stuff, young man,” he said. A growl shadowed his words. “These boxes are filled with stories. Forgotten stories, or rather stories that are in danger of being forgotten. Stories that should be remembered.”

  “What do you mean?” Sammy asked.

  Mr. Taylor narrowed his eyes at Caleb, then released him from his gaze.
“I’ll tell you. Just let me find the right page.” He thumbed through the journal in his hand. “Miranda, this is where you come in. As I read, you’ll transcribe, all right? I wrote all the stories out by hand because I’m no good with technology, but now I need them typed.”

  “Okay,” I said, gathering up the laptop. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. “Ready.”

  Mr. Taylor cleared his throat.

  While I was walking through the Dutch countryside one March afternoon, I became lost just as a storm broke overhead. The wind blew so hard that I could barely walk, and the raindrops were like needles piercing my skin. Soon I was soaked to the bone and numb with cold.

  I happened to be passing by a tulip farm, where I spied a farmhouse at the end of a field splashed with the brightest yellows, the most shocking oranges, and the fiercest reds. Seeking shelter, I battled my way to the door and knocked.

  A woman answered who had tulips even in her cheeks. She beckoned me into the house, took my coat to dry against the furnace, and sat me down in a chair by just the kind of roaring fire I had hoped I might find inside. Presently her husband came in, spoke a few words with her in Dutch, and sat down in the chair opposite me. His wife brought us warm bread, smoked cheese, and hot tea.

  We began to talk about his tulip crop, and his farm, which had been in his family for many generations. And finally, he told me the story of the broken tulip.

  “The Dutch have always been—and will always be—crazy for tulips,” he said. “During the Second World War, tulips saved many families from starvation, did you know? They ate the bulbs.

  “But perhaps we never loved them so much as in the seventeenth century. Back then, only the wealthy could afford to plant them in their gardens. And the most prized tulip of all was the Semper Augustus. It was what they called a broken tulip—a tulip that has broken into two colors. In the case of the Semper Augustus, the bloom was striped white and crimson. The country went mad for it. But there was only one man who bred them, and he had only twelve bulbs. He refused to sell any of them, although he was offered enough money to buy a grand house for a single specimen.

  “In the end, the tulip fever died down and the Semper Augustus simply disappeared. Many years later, we learned that its striping was actually caused by a disease. The very thing that made it so beautiful was what would eventually kill it.

  “As a child, I used to think this story very sad. Why would nature offer something so beautiful only to take it away again? But as I grew older, I realized that the Semper Augustus was a reminder that often the most exquisite things are the first to fade away.” Here he pointed up to a painting I had not noticed before, of a tulip with peppermint petals, just like he had described. “And life is the most exquisite thing of all. So we must never take it for granted.”

  Finishing his story, the farmer then asked how I had come to be in Holland. Once the storm passed, I thanked the couple and took my leave. When I looked back at the farmhouse, they were still on the front stoop, waving. Looking over their heads, I caught the last threads of an enormous rainbow before it shimmered away.

  “That’s such a cool story,” said Sammy.

  “It’s kind of sad,” I replied. “I feel sorry for that poor flower.”

  I thought I would rather look at the pretty beach painting over Mr. Taylor’s mantel than the one of the Semper Augustus.

  “I feel sorry for the guy who could have bought a mansion,” said Caleb with a snort.

  Mr. Taylor ignored him. “You see, whenever I met someone on my travels, I asked them to give me a story. Something that they wanted to be preserved.”

  “How did you get them to give you the painting?” I asked. “Doesn’t the man miss it?”

  “As it turned out, the artist was the man’s wife. She had painted the picture from a sketch of the flower she’d seen in a museum. I asked her if she would paint another for me, just like the one over their mantel, and she agreed. I returned for it some weeks later.”

  “Did it cost a lot of money?” Caleb asked.

  Sammy jabbed him in the ribs.

  “It didn’t cost me a cent,” Mr. Taylor said. “Only a story of my own, and a promise that I would make sure the story of the Semper Augustus was remembered.”

  “Can we hear your story?” I asked. “The one you traded them?”

  He shook his head. “Not right now,” he said. “Now, I think we should eat Betsy’s cookies before they get cold and she scolds me for working you too hard.”

  I passed the plate of cookies around and we each nibbled in silence. As soon as I was done, I turned back to Mr. Taylor. “Can we do another box now?”

  When it was time to go, Betsy came out from the kitchen to say goodbye and tripped over the dog. He scrambled up and immediately got his cone stuck between two crates. Sammy giggled as she helped him through. Then he found a sunny spot of rug and went back to sleep.

  “I’ve never seen a dog so lazy,” Betsy said. “He’s more like a slug than a dog.”

  “That’s it!” Sammy said, reaching out and scratching the dog under his floppy ears. He didn’t wake up. “Slug! That can be his name!”

  “Slug the dog?” I asked.

  “It’s quite fitting,” said Mr. Taylor. “Slug it is.”

  He walked us to the door.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Looking forward to it,” he replied.

  “Me too,” I said. And I realized I meant it.

  19

  “Well, that wasn’t quite as boring as I thought it was going to be,” Caleb said, as we walked away from Mr. Taylor’s house.

  “It was actually kind of cool, wasn’t it?” Sammy said.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “And Mr. Taylor isn’t mean like I thought he would be. He’s just a little . . .”

  “Strange?” Sammy finished.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But not really in a bad way.”

  We came to the end of the block and paused. A few seconds ticked by. Then, “Well,” Sammy said, “we need to get home. We have to help my dad make dinner.”

  “What are you making?” Caleb asked.

  Sammy and I glanced at each other. Why did Caleb care what we were having for dinner?

  “Pakora kadhi,” she said. “It’s kind of like vegetable fritters in this yellow curry sauce.”

  I tensed as I waited for Caleb to say something. What if he cracked a joke about the food?

  “I’ve never had Indian food before,” he said.

  “I make it spicy,” Sammy replied.

  “I love spicy food,” he said.

  Sammy and I glanced at each other again. He wasn’t making fun of her. He was trying to score an invite to her house for dinner.

  “Fine,” Sammy said. “You can come. But you have to dice the onion.”

  Caleb grinned, and suddenly I noticed that he had a nice smile. It lifted higher on the left than on the right, and he had this tiny gap between his front two teeth that was kind of cute. He caught me looking at him, and I darted my gaze away.

  Caleb texted his mom as we walked back to Sammy’s to tell her where he was going, and Aunt Clare didn’t seem to mind having an unexpected guest show up for dinner. “The more the merrier,” she said, waving us into the kitchen. “How was the library? You didn’t bring any books home?”

  Caleb looked at us with raised eyebrows but said nothing.

  “We mostly did research on the computers,” Sammy replied smoothly. “We ran into Caleb there, too.”

  We walked into the kitchen just as Uncle Amar finished tying his apron strings. He reached out to shake Caleb’s right hand while Sammy thrust an onion into his left. “Here. I’ll start making the batter for the pakoras.”

  “And I’ll help Miranda with her pie,” Aunt Clare said.

  I took out my phone to pull the recipe up and saw that I had missed a call from Dad and a text from Mom. I must have forgotten to switch the ringer back on that morning.

  Mom’s message was a picture of h
er standing at the top of a mountain, arms outstretched, grinning into the camera.

  Hugs from Argentina.

  she had written underneath.

  “Is that from your mom?” Aunt Clare asked, looking over my shoulder. “She looks like she’s having a great time! Tell her we say hello.”

  She did look like she was having a great time. Just like she had in Aunt Clare’s pictures.

  Trying to ignore how my chest was suddenly tightening, I typed back a quick response and pulled up the pie recipe. Across the kitchen, Sammy and Caleb seemed to be fighting about how finely he needed to dice the onion while Uncle Amar made the dough for the chapatis, a kind of Indian flatbread. Aunt Clare was still waiting for me to tell her what to do.

  “Um,” I said. “Maybe you could start by chopping the peaches?”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Shouldn’t I peel them first?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s what I meant. And I’ll do the crust.”

  “You’re the boss,” she said, handing me an apron.

  While Aunt Clare peeled the peaches, I measured out the flour and salt for the crust. The recipe said to cut the butter into little squares and to mix it into the flour, so I started on that next.

  It took a long time to cut two sticks of butter into squares, and my mind kept straying from what my hands were doing to Mom’s text. I always thought that when I finally made my first pie, Mom would be standing beside me, not on some mountain in Argentina.

  But now I wondered why I’d even let myself imagine such a thing. Mom had never baked anything except cookies from a roll of dough. And when I had asked her if we could make a pie or a cake together, she always had some kind of excuse. Strawberries weren’t in season. She was too tired to go to the grocery store. The oven was on the fritz. Once, we bought all the stuff we needed to make an apple tart, but then Mom took a last-minute assignment, and by the time she got back, Dad had eaten most of the apples.

  Maybe all this time, Mom had been wishing for me to be someone I wasn’t. But what if I had been wishing for her to be somebody she wasn’t, too?