“God, mom! It’s Sunday!”
“Want to go to Wilder with me?”
“No, I want to sleep!” April whines, rolling over to face the wall.
Every weekend Evelyn goes to a beach about 20 miles away to help count Western Snowy Plovers, a small shorebird that was nearly wiped out because their nests of tiny, perfectly camouflaged eggs are built directly on the sand to be trampled.
A few birds were found surviving at Wilder Ranch because its beach forces humans to come by the water, or through miles of crops after crawling under a train bridge and over fences.
So the only people who know about that beach are surfers or banding volunteers like Evelyn, who usually goes to Wilder on Friday mornings when April is at school. But last weekend Evelyn went on a rare overnight trip with her husband to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary, so she was heading out to the beach on a Sunday, when she could drag her daughter out of bed.
“We can go to Ferrell’s for a donut afterward,” Evelyn coos, knowing April can’t resist.
“Alllriiiight,” April grouses, throwing off the covers.
April will do anything for junk food because her mother doesn’t allow anything that tastes good in her house. No sugar, white bread or creamy peanut butter. Except on Halloween or Easter, sweets and junk food came with barfing cousins, neighbors with nose drips or kitchen duty in the school cafeteria.
For a couple of summers when she was younger, April’s cousins began visiting from Denmark and created the childhood of her dreams. Her father drove them to fun places like Disneyland, and her mother couldn’t stop the visitors from buying candy and giving it to April in the back seat of their van.
And she ate everything they gave her, until one cousin threw up her sweets on the winding road to Yosemite, filling the van with the smell of sick for the rest of the trip. Even April didn’t feel like eating candy after that.
Another source of sugar came with a side of snot. The next-door neighbor was a WWI veteran named Bartlett who carefully pulled up his American flag at sunrise and back down at dusk, spending the rest of the day grooming the jungle of fuchsia bushes he won first prize with every year at the county fair.
When arthritis took over his hands, he started bribing April and Hannah with candy to help him prune, using their small, nimble fingers to pluck off most of the fresh flower buds to prevent all but a healthy few to bloom.
April enjoyed pulling apart the leaves and squeezing off the buds, she found it absorbing and satisfying work. But she didn’t enjoy that Bartlett usually supervised, because he usually had a drop of snot water glistening on the end of his nose.
April would be reaching for a bud and see a drop slide to the bottom center of his large nose and became transfixed, watching the drop grow and droop until it became so big she could not believe it would remain on the tip of his nose one more second.
Then Bartlett would finally take out his cloth handkerchief and wipe his nose so April could relax. But it was never long before another drop began forming, and she never would have been able to stand it if she wasn’t so desperate for sugar.
After about an hour in the garden, Bartlett would finally lead April and Hannah into his breakfast nook, a sunny room containing a round Formica table and his smiling wife.
He’d put a large bowl on the table and say, “Now, you can each pick two,” and the girls would look at the bowl, hoping each time he had gotten better candy.
He never had. It was always hard candies like butterscotch or mints, and all colors of small, tart suckers. Never candy bars, chocolates or even fruit chews. But it was still sugar.
The most consistent source of sweets were actually the school lunches April started getting in the fourth-grade.
The day their mother announced the girls would start eating hot lunches in the cafeteria felt like Christmas Eve, with April so excited she could hardly sleep. But instead of seeing presents under the tree in her dreams, she saw the woman in the lunch line refusing to take her money.
“Sorry, hon,” she said. “Your mom called. She changed her mind.”
When no one stopped April from paying the next day, she picked up a tray and stepped up to the counter, feeling like Charlie touring Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory as she gazed at the beautiful mounds of exciting new foods.
When she got her tray safely to a table, she nearly had to sit on her hands so she wouldn’t rub them together as she surveyed her bounty.
In the main section of the tray was a hamburger with a white, fluffy bun that April had only eaten in restaurants, plus some even more exciting french fries to the right. Above the fries were some boring carrot and celery sticks, but in the top left, almost hidden by the bun, was the most exciting thing of all: dessert.
Thinking it was just a weird-shaped donut, she bit into it eagerly and ... Yuck! The outside was good, but the inside tasted like fruit cocktail, only worse, because it was warm and dribbling down her face. Whenever she saw a fruit pie again, she just nibbled the crust off the edges, even though that brought boys she didn’t know to her table asking eagerly, “Are you going to eat that?” Until they saw the teeth marks.
Her favorite dessert was the peanut butter bar, a dreamy square of everything she couldn’t eat at home. One bite made her eat anything in the dessert section first, since Hannah’s habit of grabbing things off her plate taught April to eat whatever she really wanted right away.
Her favorite main dish could have been a Wonka original: A crazy mix of tostada and pizza shaped like a Stop sign. It made no sense, but the soft dough topped with sauce, melted cheese and bits of hamburger meat was delicious and fun to eat. Once she learned its name, she circled every “Fiestada Pizza” on the monthly lunch calendar so she could get to the cafeteria extra early those days before all the other kids gobbled them up.
The magic of those lunches never wore off for April, even after learning she was eating them because of something called Aid for Families with Dependent Children, which required her to work in the cafeteria.
Most days, she just presented a monthly punchcard and picked up a tray with no one but the woman who gave her the card knowing it had been free. But once a week, she had to go behind the counter and spoon up food or wash dishes like the other AFDC kids.
She always asked to wash dishes, because then you worked in a small room near the exit door where hardly any of the other kids noticed you as they hurried out to the playground, instead of facing them as you doled out their food. And you washed alone, free to just focus on cleaning the trays, which April actually enjoyed.
Her favorite part was rinsing off all the food bits by pulling down the hose hanging from the ceiling and blasting the trays with a jet of hot water, smiling as even the stickiest mess slid off. Then she’d stack all the trays on their side in a rack, slide them into the big, square metal dishwasher and push the big red button to scald them clean.
Working in the tray-washing room was like being trapped inside a washing machine, but April found it soothing. All the noises and movements were predictable, unlike the constant chaos created by crowds of kids. And pulling all the warm and clean trays from the machine at the end always gave her a satisfied smile.
Of course she never told her mother how much she enjoyed washing dishes at school, because unless her father installed a hose that hung from the ceiling and blasted hot water, April didn’t want to wash dishes at home.
But April did want sugar delivered with deep-fried dough instead of barf, snot or a hairnet. So she got out of bed and headed to her dresser.
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