If only we’d kept the reunion in Texas, where it belonged! The Giffords had gotten together every summer since before I could remember, but until now our reunions had always been at the ranch. That’s where my mother and her brothers had all grown up, and everyone but us still lived within half a day’s drive. This year, though, for the first time, we were breaking with tradition. This year, my mother had invited everyone to spend the Fourth of July with us here in Pumpkin Falls.
The town didn’t know what had hit it. Giffords had started arriving yesterday morning, and they’d kept streaming in all day. My father had been put in charge of logistics for our reunions years ago, and he organized the weekends like a military operation. This was right up his alley, seeing as how he was a former lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. Everything ran like clockwork thanks to him, with rotating squads of Giffords in charge of transportation, food shopping, meal setup, cooking, cleanup, and more. This year, Mr. Military had rented a school bus, and he and my brother Danny had taken turns running shuttles to and from Logan Airport in Boston, and would now spend the holiday weekend ferrying all of us around Pumpkin Falls.
This morning, we’d all gone downtown and descended on Lou’s Diner for donuts (Dad had called ahead of time to warn them that thirty-seven hungry customers were on their way, to make sure there would be enough). Afterward, we’d given everyone a tour of Lovejoy’s Books, our family’s bookstore, and then stopped by Mahoney’s Antiques for a peek at the big silver pumpkin trophy that would be awarded later this weekend to the winning Fourth of July road race team. Finally, we’d headed to the Pumpkin Falls Library, whose front steps had been selected as the best place in town for our reunion photographs.
As I watched Grandma G looking over the shots that Janet had taken so far, Hatcher spotted the expression on my face and grinned.
“Cheer up, Drooly,” he whispered, calling me by my least favorite nickname. My real name, Truly, was odd enough, but Drooly? Please. “It will all be over soon.”
I shot him a look. Thirty-six more hours hardly qualified as “soon.”
It’s not that I didn’t love our epic family reunions—I did. They were great, when they were in Texas where they belonged. We were invisible on the ranch, and safe from prying eyes. We could be as goofy and loud as we wanted, without the rest of the world looking on. Here? I glanced around. By my calculations, at this very moment fully half of Pumpkin Falls was gawking at us.
“That should do it for this group,” said Janet, after she and my grandmother settled on the winning shot. “How about one with just the grandkids next, and then we’ll go for—what is it you call it? The full Gifford?”
My uncles let out a collective Texas whoop. I scowled, not feeling nearly as enthusiastic. Our upstairs hallway was plastered with “the full Giffords”—group portraits that had started when my mom and her brothers were little, gradually swelling in size to include their spouses, and then us kids. Our parents and aunts and uncles had all looked ridiculously young when they were first married, hardly older than Danny and Hatcher, who dubbed the photos Hairstyles Through the Ages. Most of the men had long hair and mustaches back in the day, and a few had even sported mullets. (“Business in the front, party in the back,” as Danny liked to say.) Not my dad, of course. Mr. Military’s hair was even shorter back then.
The portraits had grown larger each year as more and more cousins and siblings came along. I used to love looking at baby me and toddler me, and all the rest of us as we grew over the years. Now, when he really wanted to needle me, Hatcher called the pictures “the full Truly,” for the way they charted my astronomical growth. I’d been a normal-size kid for a long time, but at the beginning of sixth grade I’d started to shoot up like one of the giant sunflowers in Grandma G’s garden. At six feet tall, I towered over all of my classmates and most of my immediate family, and I was happy not to be reminded of that fact.
“Hey!” said my cousin Mackenzie, slipping her arm through mine. “There’s Cha Cha and Jasmine!”
Cha Cha Abramowitz and Jasmine Sanchez were my closest friends in Pumpkin Falls. They waved at us, grinning hugely. I could tell they were enjoying the Gifford reunion spectacle. Mackenzie and I waved back.
“Ooo, and there’s Calhoun!” My cousin stretched up on her tiptoes to see over the crowd. Mackenzie was petite, like my mother and grandmother. Whenever I was with her, I felt like an ostrich standing next to a chickadee.
I could feel my face flush. I’d been studiously ignoring Romeo Calhoun ever since I’d spotted him at the edge of the crowd. I could only imagine what he thought of this sideshow. I slid a glance over to where he stood talking to his sister Juliet. Seriously, those were their names, Romeo and Juliet, thanks to their father, who was a huge fan of “the Bard,” as he called Shakespeare.
Calhoun wasn’t my boyfriend, but I liked to think that we were more than just friends. Or at least that we’d both like us to be. We weren’t officially dating or anything—my father said I was much too young for that. “When you can drive, you can date, and not before,” was his motto, and when Lieutenant Colonel Jericho T. Lovejoy laid down the law, us kids said “yes, sir” and fell in line. Calhoun and I hung out a lot, though. I’d taken him bird-watching a few times—my favorite hobby—and we went to the General Store for ice cream and stuff with our group of friends. But unlike Jasmine’s brother Scooter, who had
