Free Listening for Lucca by Suzanne LaFleur

to playgroup.”
    Mom had already found a playgroup? She really did get down to things, didn’t she?
    She knelt in front of Lucca to Velcro his sandals. “Maybe you can tell the other kids your name? I’m Lucca. Loo-ka? Loo-ka?” She pronounced it carefully for him, hoping he would repeat it, but Lucca just stared at her.
    I rolled my eyes as she got up, and decided to encourage Lucca in my own way. I held out my palm for a goodbye high-five and pulled him in close. “It’ll be fun, I promise.” I kissed his temple and he squirmed to be let go. He ran out the door after Mom.
    I headed back upstairs with the pen. I was going to try again.
    It was Sunday and Dad told Joshua that he couldn’t go round asking the neighbors to give him work for money even if their lawns were ten feet tall. Which meant thatafter church Joshua had nowhere to go and instead went out on our front porch and took apart our radio
.
    “Why would you take apart a perfectly good radio?” I asked, drooping over the side of the swing in the heat
.
    “Well, it wasn’t
perfectly
good.” Joshua lined up the parts neatly in the cardboard box lid he’d set out so nothing would fall through the cracks in the porch. “I figured we could either spend money on a new radio or I could just see if I could fix it first. It was staticky all the time, so I thought maybe it was dusty inside.”
    That sounded smart. “Static
sounds
like dust. If dust had a sound, it would be static.”
    Joshua was quiet for a minute; then he said, “Dust could also make this sound:
shhh shhh shhh.
Or no sound at all.”
    I lay on my back and repeated, “No sound at all.”
    I closed my eyes but did not hear dust; I heard waves and bugs and the small clinky noises of the parts of the radio as Joshua cleaned them and began to put them back together
.
    “Should we sing a song?” I asked
.
    “Nah, too noisy.”
    “What’s wrong with being noisy?” He was fixing our radio, after all. Someone who didn’t like noise shouldn’t have a radio
.
    Joshua didn’t answer. I sat up to look at him and saw him gazing over the porch railing, out to the end of the water. ’Cept the water doesn’t have an end that you can see, it’s so far away
.
    “Joshie?” I don’t call him that much anymore; that was my name for him when I was little and Joshua was hard to say. “Joshie?”
    “What, Little Bug?” he asked, coming back from wherever he’d gone in his head and choosing another piece to put back in his radio. Little Bug was his name for me
.
    I fell back onto the swing again. “Wanna play with me after you fix the radio?”
    “Yeah, okay. What do you want to play?”
    “Treasure Hunt.” That’s one of our favorite games.… We take turns taking something from the house, something that won’t get hurt outside, and hiding it on the beach, and then we play treasure hunt to find it. The only rules are you can’t hide something where the waves will come in and you can’t bury something deep, if you do bury it
.
    “You go first,” Joshua said. “You can get ready while I finish this up.”
    I went inside and drew the treasure map of the beach and yard, selected my own metal cup as the treasure, and went outside to leave it for him to find
.
    I returned twenty minutes later and handed him the map
.
    “Oh, thanks,” he said, not seeming to quite remember why I was handing him a piece of paper. The radio wasn’t put back together yet. He’d just been sitting
.
    “Come on. Go find my treasure.”
    “Nah.” He sat down on the step and I sat next to him. “You know what I’d like to do?” he asked finally
.
    “No.” I’d gone through all that trouble to get the game ready. Now he wasn’t even going to play?
    “Go dancing. There’s a dance tonight at the community center. Want to come with me?” He suddenly seemed much brighter, like his usual self
.
    “Do they let kids in?” I asked. “You’re old enough, but they might not let me.”
    “But you’ll be