Free Hard Red Spring by Kelly Kerney Page B

up appearances. In letters home to her mother, she insisted that she finally had it all: love and money. This proclamation became increasingly harder to make over the years as she periodically had to write a different kind of letter home, asking for money.
    The things that had convinced Mother to come were not the same things that had convinced Evie. Evie loved bananas. Once Father informed her that they would be living where bananas grew, she no longer cared about leaving her friends, her school. She’d only had one banana in her life, but the pleasure had been vivid enough to stay with her for years. It was winter in New York and her mother had returned home with two bright yellow bananas. They fit in her hands like two door handles.
    â€œI was walking by the pier and they were being brought off a boat! I paid a dollar each. Can you imagine, a tropical fruit making it to us in the middle of winter?”
    The most important thing about bananas was knowing how to eat one properly. On two dessert dishes, Mother laid out the naked fruit and cut them up into small circles. “You must always eat them with a fork,” she cautioned. “Like a lady. I didn’t know that at first. I made that mistake a few years ago. I bought a banana from the docks and peeled and ate it right there, in front of all the longshoremen! Just ate it with my hands. Can you imagine! I had no idea!”
    Evie could imagine it perfectly, but could not imagine what was wrong with eating a banana with your hands.
    Sweet, mild, and soft, her first banana felt like ice cream, if ice cream could be warm without melting. She loved the color, the shape. She loved the fact that her mother would pay a whole dollar for just one.
    â€œYou can eat all the bananas you want!” Father had promised Evie. “We will even make the journey there on one of the banana boats. What do you think of that?”
    This was what she thought: Huge yellow boats shaped like bananas. Curved and fierce as Viking ships. She became nauseous with joy andexpectation, barely able to finish out the year at school. She told adults, her teachers, her friends, that she wanted to work on a banana plantation when she grew up. Her favorite color became yellow.
    But the incomplete Guatemalan railroad made it entirely impossible to arrive on the Caribbean coast. Father even researched an alternate way of traversing the railroad gap, but the sixty-mile stretch connecting the east coast to the rest of the country was impassable. Swamps, malaria, yellow fever. Evie imagined people turned yellow, turned into bananas.
    Instead, they were forced to take the exhausting route they did. On coffee boats.
    But more disappointing than all this, Evie soon learned that bananas were even harder to come by in their part of Guatemala than in New York. Again, the incomplete railroad ruined everything. Nothing could make it across from the Caribbean coast, so it all went up to the United States. More and more bananas were making it up. Mother now read letters from New York in which vendors sold cooked bananas in the streets, their discarded peels becoming a public nuisance. Banana editorials and recipes and cartoons in the newspapers Grandmother sent. There were so many bananas in New York now, whole bunches for sale at the grocer’s, and they had left just in time to miss out on it.
    But even with these disappointments, Father remained committed. On their first night on the mountain, he struck a pose in the open church door and stared up at the wide net of stars cast over their existence.
    â€œThis is all ours, Mattie, can you believe?”
    â€œOh yes,” she reassured him. “I believe it.”
    â€œWe are the richest people on earth.”
    Mother closed her eyes, took Father’s hand.
    â€œEveryone,” he continued, “everyone we know back home has plumbing and electricity and couches. But who in New York can say they own a mountain? Who in the world can say