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earrings.
    When I found the most perfect, brightest red cherry of all, I polished it on my shirt, then popped it in my mouth.
    “Ewww!” I winced and spit it out. “Mom, these aren’t ripe.”
    “Yes, they are,” said my mom. “They’re just sour cherries.”
    “Why are we picking sour cherries? Don’t they have any sweet ones?”
    My mom pointed to the next row, which had cherries sodark they were almost black. “You can pick them too. The sour ones are for making pie.”
    “Oh,” I said, and wandered over to the next tree. I picked a dark burgundy cherry and ate it. Mmmm, much better.
    We stayed and picked until we had several full containers of both kinds of cherries. Then we lugged our cooler up a hill and ate sandwiches looking down at other people picking what was left of the cherries. My mom even packed some potato chips, which she never does.
    After we ate, Sam and I climbed the trees at the top of the hill, and for once he didn’t insist that we pretend we were in Batman’s Bat Cave or something dumb like that. Down the hill from us, two big yellow Labs, which I guessed were Jesse and Roxie, ran around with a girl in pigtails. She threw a stick, and the dogs chased after it. Even though she didn’t look like me, I could almost imagine that she was me and that Jesse and Roxie were my dogs.
    My dad sat on the picnic blanket with his back against the tree, reading the newspaper with my mom curled up next to him. Ace sat in a folding beach chair, his lucky fishing hat tipped forward over his eyes, which meant he was probably asleep. Bubbles always said that one of Ace’s great talents was that he could fall asleep anywhere. I pictured Bubbles sitting in a chair beside Ace and using her paints to capture the afternoon light filtering through the trees. Bubbles’ paint set is like a smaller version of the box Ace uses for his fishing gear, but it has paint tubes and brushes packed inside it instead of hooks and lures. It’s one of the only things of hers that I got tokeep, but I don’t like to open it. Seeing all the colors that she’ll never use again makes me sad.
    Walking back down the hill, my mom and dad carried the cooler together, one at each end, walking side by side. Sam ran ahead, so I ended up dragging Ace’s folding chair. I remembered how my dad had said that Ace was sad about Bubbles. I tried to think of some way to let Ace know that I missed Bubbles a lot too. But I didn’t want to make him sadder. So instead, I said, “Today was fun.”
    In response, Ace announced, “DID I EVER TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME IT SNOWED IN CHELM?”
    Chelm?
The made-up town that old Jewish people tell stories about? Chelm is supposed to be a village full of fools, or what Bubbles used to call “noodleheads,” so all the stories involve the townspeople acting like idiots. What did that have to do with anything? And why was Ace talking about snow in July?
    Without waiting for an answer, Ace started up, “IT WAS WINTER IN THE VILLAGE OF CHELM, AND EVERY NIGHT SNOW WOULD FALL AND BLANKET THE VILLAGE IN WHITENESS. EVERY MORNING, IT WAS THE SHAMMES’S JOB TO RUN AROUND THE TOWN, WAKING EVERYONE UP. BUT WHEN THE VILLAGERS GOT UP, THEY WERE DISAPPOINTED. ‘THE SHAMMES MADE ALL THESE FOOTPRINTS,’ THEY SAID. ‘HE RUINED THE PERFECT SNOWFALL.…’ ”
    As Ace rattled on, it dawned on me that I had never heard Ace tell a Chelm story before. The person who used totell me stories about Chelm was Bubbles. In fact, she sometimes teased Ace by calling him “the wisest man in Chelm,” which was sort of like calling him the king of the fools. I wondered what Bubbles would have thought about Ace’s Dumb Old Jug plan. I had a feeling she would have laughed out loud with her big thunderclap of laughter. I was so busy thinking about Bubbles that I suddenly noticed that Ace had finished his story. He stared at me expectantly.
    “That’s … funny,” I said slowly, not wanting to admit I hadn’t been