Under the Same Sky Read Online Free Page B

mother’s right, Joe,” said Dad.
    I took the bottle of sunscreen Mom handed me and went into the bathroom, where I quickly slapped some on my face. Then I grabbed my baseball cap.
    â€œAll set?” asked Dad, already standing at the door waiting to leave.
    â€œYep.”
    Mom came over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “See you at lunchtime, Joe. Have a good morning.”
    â€œâ€™Bye, Mom.”
    I followed Dad out to the driveway, where a bunch of guys waited next to Dad’s pickup and the big farm truck. One of them stepped forward, saying good morning to Dad.
    â€œMorning,” Dad replied. “Manuel, you know my son, Joe, don’t you? He’ll be setting cabbage with you, like we talked about.”
    Manuel nodded to me, and I got my first good look at his face under the brim of his hat. I stared in astonishment. Manuel wasn’t some old man, which was what I’d assumed for some reason. He looked like a kid, not much older than I was. Sixteen, maybe seventeen.
    â€œI was thinking you’d start in the south field near the permanent pasture,” Dad went on.
    â€œYes. I check the ground out there yesterday,” Manuel answered. “It’s wet, but not too bad. So I left the big tractor and the planter there for today.” Manuel’s English was fairly good, I noticed, although he had a strong accent.
    â€œGood,” Dad said approvingly. “So you’ve got eight workers and Joe. That’ll cover it.”
    Oh, thanks, Dad. Eight workers and Joe. What did that make me?
    Manuel nodded. “No problem.”
    I watched Dad smile at Manuel and slap him on the shoulder in a kind of man-to-man gesture. For a minute, I hoped that I, too, would feel that same comradely hand on my shoulder. But instead Dad turned to me and said, “You listen to Manuel. He’ll show you what to do.”
    Then he headed over to his pickup and started it up. As he pulled away, he called to Manuel that he had to drive to the nearby town of Penn Yan to pick up a part for the sprayer and would probably be gone all morning.
    Manuel addressed the rest of the group in Spanish, and they began walking toward the barn, looking as if they knew exactly what they were doing. Even though I’d grown up on the farm, I really didn’t know much about the day-to-day work. Thanks to Mom, I’d never had to do it. I’d never belonged to 4-H or done a lot of the other stuff most farm kids did, either. This hadn’t ever bothered me before, but at the moment my cluelessness made me feel like an idiot.
    Manuel motioned for me to follow the others. Everybody was picking up boxes filled with baby cabbage plants and carrying them out to the truck, so I did, too. As we walked back and forth, I sneaked peeks at my co-workers. They were older than Manuel, which struck me as weird, since he was clearly in charge. It was hard to tell exactly how much older they were, because they wore hats that hid their faces and they had obviously spent many days out in the sun.
    I tried not to stare at a guy whose left arm was just a stump. It ended above where his elbow should have been. I wondered how he managed to work.
    Another guy smiled at me, showing lots of gold on his teeth. His skin was really dark, with wrinkles that resembled furrows in a plowed field.
    I looked away. My face felt too stiff to smile, and it wasn’t from the early morning chill in the yard. It was everything: getting up at dawn to work on the first day of summer vacation, and then being treated like a little baby by my father while he acted as though this Manuel kid was his big buddy.
    Then one of the other workers passed me and sort of smiled, too, and I realized she was a girl. She had a long black braid hanging out the back of her baseball cap and real dark eyes. Her teeth were very white against her skin as she flashed them at me shyly, before glancing away.
    Was this the Luisa Meg had talked about?