Luciana in the Summertime

Luciana was the one who taught us how to write our names in invisible ink, how to dip our fingers into bowls of fragrant juice, how to trust that what could not be seen now would soon come to light. She's the one who arranged tiny blue and white bowls—rice bowls, she said, that her mother had bought in Japantown—across the plain pine table that filled her living room. She's the one who squeezed the lemons ceremoniously, the one who set a single delicate sheet of white paper in front of all seven of us, above each bowl, horizontally.

The paper, translucent, was made of onionskin, she said.

We should be careful not to go so fast as to let the paper tear. We should write in cursive as cursive was more elegant than ordinary script. We should concentrate, she said, so we didn't lose our place. Dip the tip of your index finger. Write with the sharpest point of your nail.

We did as instructed, silently writing the letters of our names. When we were done, our pages looked blank. Luciana said let the pages sit, then we'll take them outside to warm them in the sun, which she did an hour later, using wooden clothespins like the kind our grandmothers used to hang wet bedsheets outside, clipping our bright blank pages to the clothesline in her backyard, which was full of weeds and wildflowers, a mix, who could tell which was which.

They looked like bed sheets for tiny perfect dolls, fluttering in the dry summer wind.

Now what? Leah asked.

Now we wait, Luciana said.

________

Luciana had moved to Salt Lake at the start of summer. Our mothers had told us she had only her mother, no father, who knew why, and she was Catholic, which we understood meant we should befriend her, take her in.

I had the impression she was poor because my mother had said Luciana's mother was renting the Caldwells' old house. The Caldwells were an older couple whose kids were all raised, married, and with children of their own. They'd gone on a couples mission to Peru, brought back tiny wooden Christmas ornaments for everyone in the ward, little trees and stars and churches with pointy steeples that didn't look like ours, and shortly after they had returned, they decided they didn't need such a big house anymore. Or Mr. Caldwell did.

Word was, he'd fallen in love with the simple life when they lived in Peru. We knew this because one Sunday afternoon he bore his testimony that he didn't want to take care of a yard anymore, that he was sure the Lord had better plans for him, that he believed everyone else in the ward should be living the simple life too. So the Caldwells moved to a condominium in a high-rise building above Hogle Zoo but kept their house, had it remodeled, and rented it out. My mother said that was Mrs. Caldwell's doing, the renting-out part. The poor thing just wasn't ready to let her house go, my mother told me when I asked why Mrs. Caldwell, who technically wasn't even in the Garden Park Ward anymore, still came to our church and sat in the back row, crying. Sometimes when we drove past the house, which, now that it had renters, always had weeds, my mother said, No wonder Mrs. Caldwell's crying. Look at how her yard has gone to pot.

But when we met Luciana, she didn't look poor.

She had thick black curly hair and tanned olive skin. Her mother brought her to Denise's house. We all stood in the foyer staring at her against a gold-mirrored wall. She was wearing a white dress with brightly colored embroidery at the neck and strappy sandals, the kind Jesus wore in the pictures at church. And earrings. She wore long silver earrings. I'd never met a girl my age who had pierced ears. The rest of us—even Leah, whose family was Lutheran...