Frankie & Bug

Rule Number Four
TEN DAYS BEFORE SCHOOL let out, Mama announced that summer was canceled.
She didn’t say it straight out like that. But she might as well have. What she did say to Bug was: “What would you like to do this summer?”
This was a dumb question. Mama knew what Bug wanted to do this summer. The same thing she’d done for the last two sum- mers, ever since Danny had persuaded Mama that there was no need to spend good money on the Y camp (which they both hated, Danny quietly so, and Bug noisily) now that he was old enough to watch them both all summer. For free.
“You can buy a new car instead,” Danny had said. Clever of him, Bug thought, because Mama was always complaining about the Datsun and its busted air conditioner.
So, after very elaborate negotiations with Phillip and Hedvig, their upstairs and downstairs neighbors who each sometimes watched Danny and Bug, and yet another consultation with Kip, the always-sunburned lifeguard who manned Tower 19, Mama had agreed to let them spend the summers alone. “With condi- tions,” she said.
Conditions, Bug had soon discovered, was another name for rules. But conditions sounded nicer.
Mama typed the “conditions” onto a piece of thick, fancy paper she used at her job at the mayor’s office. Then she made Danny and Bug both sign it. This, she explained, turned condi- tions into a contract.
The contract promised that Bug and Danny would:
1. Always go to Tower 19 and check in with Kip.
2. Always swim together if they went in past their
knees.
3. Never touch so much as a toe in the water if the riptide flag was up.
4. Always stay together.
Rule number four was typed up in just the same way as the others, but Mama repeated its importance so often that Bug understood it was the most important one of all. Bug was not generally fond of rules, even when they were called conditions, but this one, the idea that she and Danny must always, always stay together, well, she liked that one just fine. It made her feel safe.
The list had been taped to the refrigerator that first beach summer, and all that following fall and winter. In the spring, when Mama was doing her big cleaning, she had taken it down. But Bug had retrieved the paper from the trash and hung it back up. She’d told Mama it was because she might forget the rules this coming summer, but the truth was, the list had become a promise. The promise of summer.
For almost three years, the list had stayed on the fridge, fastened into place with a ladybug magnet. So when in the wan- ing days of fourth grade, Mama asked what Bug wanted to do for the upcoming summer, the answer was obvious: “I want to go to the beach,” Bug told Mama. Mama got a funny look on her face, which in turn gave Bug a funny tickling in her stomach. Mama called this the Gut Voice and told Danny and Bug to listen to it. But Bug didn’t want to listen to her Gut Voice, because what it was saying-even before Mama said, “I think we might need to change it up this summer”-was that summer was about to be canceled.