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even tell me what it was like in the hospital, how scared they were, or how Grandpa was recovering. Or why he let his blood sugar drop so low in the first place.
    It’s almost as if we’re afraid of words. They hang in the air, unspoken, and then seeing that they’re not going to be used, they shrivel and die. It’s no wonder that my mouth opened up this morning and made noise when it wasn’t supposed to. Maybe my mouth is getting tired of keeping things pent up like that and spurted out a couple of words in protest. I can’t blame it for going a little crazy with all the silence.
    As we were finishing up, Dad wiped his lips with his napkin and looked at me. “Don’t go back there, Jewel. It’s not a good place.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œThere are duppies there, like I told you.” He placed his hands on the table and rubbed his thumbnails, which meant he was worried. “The spirit world is not something to take lightly.”
    Mom sighed—almost inaudibly, but I heard it.
    Dad pretended he didn’t hear her. “I am very disappointed in you, Jewel.”
    I looked down at my plate. I’d known he would say that, but the words still gashed through me.
    â€œYou need to get a job,” Mom cut in. “You have too much free time this summer.”
    And that was the end of the conversation. Dad went to check on Grandpa and give him his dinner, and I helped Mom clean up, but even though I scrubbed the table really good, just how she likes, she didn’t look at me. Not once.
    Mom was surprised at how hard it was for me to get a summer job. She kept saying she knew Mrs. Jameson needed help with her bakery deliveries, which I could do by bike, and the Matthews’ had three kids that needed babysitting, and Mr. Perry’s dog, Burger, always needed a walk. For some reason, though, no one seemed too interested when Mom brought up the idea of me helping out.
    So instead, Mom made a list of things for me to do when she and Dad were at work.
    Jewel’s Summer Chores*:
1. Mondays: Pick up around the house
2. Tuesdays: Mow the lawn and weed the garden
3. Wednesdays: Vacuum
4. Wednesdays and Fridays: Visit Mrs. Rodriguez
5. Fridays: Clean the bathroom
    * In general: Go through your closet, throw out your unwanted stuff from the attic, and kill the ants in the kitchen. (They keep coming back.)
    The only chores that I didn’t mind were mowing the lawn, because the riding lawn mower was pretty fun, and weeding Dad’s garden. Dad grows all kinds of flowers and vegetables, and even plants from Jamaica, but they never amount to anything more than a couple of droopy sprouts, as if the Iowan soil only wants to see corn and tomatoes pop up, not coconut and soursop and breadfruit trees. He often lets me help him garden, because he knows how much I love to dig in the earth. I do it when I’m upset—I just go and find some earth, and I dig. It may sound strange, but there’s something about making your arms work harder than they want to, about turning your hands into claws and your shoulders into motors and digging until you find things that you never saw before, things that you wouldn’t have seen unless you dug.
    Like arrowheads.
    Mom doesn’t like it when I find arrowheads. She tells me to stop wasting my time, stop daydreaming, and how can I be a teacher when I waste my brain digging in the dirt like a dog?
    â€œBut I don’t want to be a teacher,” I told her once when we were folding clothes. “I want to be a geologist.” Mom looked at me when I said that, looked good and hard, to see if I was lying. Of course, I wasn’t.
    â€œI want you to have a nice, practical job,” she said.
    â€œGeologists are practical,” I told her. “They’re scientists.”
    â€œDigging in the backyard is not science,” Mom replied curtly as she held Dad’s T-shirt in her hands. “It’s daydreaming, just