Where the Watermelons Grow

On summer nights, the moon reaches right in through my window and paints itself across the ceiling in swirls and gleams of silver.

I lay in bed, the sheet on top of me as hot and heavy as a down quilt, listening to the roar of the box fans that weren’t doing a single thing to keep the heat out of my bedroom. I’d gone to bed hours earlier, but it was too hot to sleep-too hot to do anything but lie there watching the moonlight shift across the ceiling, thoughts spinning through my head like the wind on the bay right before a storm breaks. On the other side of the room, baby Mylie snored in her crib.

Only a baby could sleep on a night as hot as this.

I closed my eyes, letting a string of numbers appear against my darkened eyelids. Doubling numbers as far up as I could go: it was a trick Daddy had taught me, and my favorite was to fall asleep-a problem interesting enough to keep my mind focused, but not so hard that I couldn’t drift off when I was ready. One. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four.

I’d made it all the way to one thousand twenty-four times two is two thousand forty-eight when I finally gave up trying to concentrate my way into sleep and slid my legs over the side of the bed, the cool carpet hitting my toes a tiny little shot of relief in all that heat. The clock on my nightstand read 12:03. I tiptoed out of my bedroom and through the dark hallway so nobody could hear I was awake and come tell me off for it.

But I wasn’t the only one awake.

Mama was sitting at the kitchen table, her pale skin strange and greenish in the light from the left-open fridge. A plate of watermelon slices sat on the table in front of her, and she was looking at them with the same look I have when I’m taking a test in English class. She used the tip of a knife to flick the black seeds out of each slice, one by one, not seeming to care that they were landing all over the table and the floor. One seed had stuck itself to her forehead, hanging there like a little bug just above her crunched-up concentrating eyebrow.

“Mama?” My voice was quiet and a little shaky in the silent kitchen, with only the refrigerator hum to back me up.

It was one of Daddy’s sliced-up watermelons on that plate. My daddy grows the sweetest watermelons in all of North Carolina. He grows other things, too, like wheat and peanuts in his big fields and squash and berries in his small ones, but the watermelons are my favorite. Biting into one of those ruby-red slices is like tasting July, feeling that cold juice hitting your tongue like and explosion.