Free Summer of the Gypsy Moths by Sara Pennypacker Page B

her, Angel! You say something about her. Something good you remember about the person. Don’t you know anything about funerals?”
    Too late I realized what my mean, cramped-hearted self had said. Angel knew a lot about funerals.
    Angel glared at me, fury gathering up like a volcano. “Who put you in charge of everything?” she spat. “I didn’t know her. I don’t have any good memories of her. She didn’t care about me, and I didn’t care about her. She’s yours—you say something!” She stormed off down the path and disappeared into the house with a door slam.
    Suddenly, it was so quiet there in the darkening garden, with just a few chirping crickets and the soft rustle of oak leaves beside me. The yellow light spilling from the house seemed to beckon me inside, but the thought of comfort made me feel guilty.
    I turned back to the dark mounds of earth. The grave; it was a grave now. I shuddered at how real that word made things. Under this dirt was the body of my great-aunt. Areal person who had been alive just two days ago. She’d had no idea this was coming; she was just planning on a regular day doing regular things. She had punched the microwave extra hard in front of me Friday morning but then thought about things and dredged up a good memory of my mother and promised to teach me how to make a pie. She had packed us lunches and sent us off to school and stirred cream into her coffee and thought, Good, now I’ve got an hour with the Today show before I have to start my chores, and then had never made it back into her kitchen to put that cream away.
    She had been a real person, and now she was really dead. What made that seem the saddest was that Angel had been right—we had never really known her. I had no good memories to share either.
    I thought back to my grandmother’s service, to how many people had stood up and told stories about her and said how much she had meant to them.
    â€œI’m sorry I didn’t try harder to find any connections between us,” I whispered into the quiet. “I’m sorry about everything, about you dying—I hope that didn’t hurt. I didn’t know about your heart. I wish you’d told me. I’m sorry I didn’t carry all those bags for you—maybe if I had…Well, I’m sorry about you having to be out here like this. But at least it’s in your garden, near your blueberries.”
    I looked over at them then: dozens of bushes that even in the dark were ripening up their berries for Louise’s blue-ribbon pies. And then I knew just what to say.
    I faced the bushes as though they were a crowd of mourners. “When I first got here, I looked out at this backyard from my bedroom window, and I didn’t think much of it. The ground was brown and scruffy, and all that grew for a lawn were a few patches of tough grass that were brown and scruffy, too. It looked to me as if the world’s biggest mangy dog had laid himself out back to catch a little sun, with more bald patches than fur. You wouldn’t see a yard like this in House and Garden magazine, that’s all I’m saying.”
    I glanced up at the house, hoping that Angel would hear me and change her mind and come out. She didn’t, so after a minute, I went on.
    â€œBut Louise was always out here doing something, and when she was inside, she was reading gardening magazines. Friday she told me about her blueberry bushes, and how proud she was of them. Of you. She kept pictures of her pies on her refrigerator, did you know that? I figure someone who cared that much about growing things was a good person.” Then I said “Amen,” because even though my mother never let me set foot in a church, I knew that much.
    I started to head in. But something about those blueberrybushes, huddled together in the darkness, made me pause.
    I was nine when my grandmother died, old enough to read the obituary in the