Sun-Kissed Christmas (Summer) (7 page)

“I’m boycotting Christmas. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Right. That’ll be the day. Trust me, you’ll find a way to make Christmas happen.”

Austin grinned, and once again Summer was reminded of Harris. Something about that pensive smile. Although to be fair, Harris had a much better haircut.

“Maybe you just have the holiday blues,” Austin suggested.

“Who could blame me?” Summer pointed to a flamingo-shaped sign in front of a motel. The bird was outlined in flaming pink neon and sported a tired-looking wreath around his neck. “This is all so … so un-Christmassy.”

“The boat parade tonight should be nice. All the sailboats, lit up with lights.”

“Maybe.” Summer stared out the window. “You meeting Esme there?”

“Yep.”

Summer tried her best to look indifferent, but a
check in the right side-view mirror told her she just looked a little constipated.

“Marquez and Diana are going, I think. Probably Seth too. He’s flying in. You could just drop me off there.”

Austin looked over at her. “How is my old rival doing?”

“Seth’s fine, I guess. We haven’t really kept in touch. He and Diana have been calling and writing each other a lot, though.”

“And that’s … okay?”

“Of course it’s okay. I’d be thrilled if he found somebody.”

“Even if it turns out to be your cousin? Your cousin who secretly had a tryst with him behind your back? Last Christmas, if I recall the details—”

“I recall the details pretty well myself. And yes, that would be fine with me.”

“You’re a better man than I,” Austin said with a chuckle.

Summer opened her notebook, glancing vaguely at her notes in the fleeting light of the street lamps. The warm, sweet-smelling wind flipped the pages. She
was
okay with Seth seeing Diana. It was weird, sure, and seriously awkward. But she was okay with it. So why wasn’t she okay with Austin seeing Esme?

Austin turned right, heading down the long two-
lane road that led to the center of town. The sky was a dark violet-blue, fringed with clouds low on the horizon. The ocean moved listlessly, lapping at the pale sand. Through the darkness Summer could barely make out the shape of a small twin-engine plane as it moved beneath the clouds. She watched it slowly bank, lights twinkling like stars.

The first time she’d seen the Keys had been from a plane. She’d been shocked by the dazzling, too-perfect beauty of it, the islands strung out below her like an endless emerald necklace.

The first time she’d set eyes on Austin had been on a plane too.

“There’s a reason ‘love at first sight’ is a cliché,” Harris had said earlier in the afternoon. “It’s because it really happens. But perhaps you already know that.”

She remembered it so perfectly. She’d been seat 28-A. He’d been seat 28-B. She’d been munching on peanuts. While he was rifling through his backpack, she’d sneaked a glance at him. He had a couple of tiny silver hoops in his ear and a five o’clock shadow. His dark hair did not seem to be operating under any kind of organizing principle. His denim jacket was ripped and faded.

He’d looked into her eyes, and she’d nearly choked on her peanut. …

Summer shook herself from her reverie. “You
know what Harris told me he was doing for Christmas? He said he was going to repot a Norfolk pine.”

“So?”

“So does that sound like a merry Christmas to you?”

“Depends. You have to understand. For a professor of botany, it’s probably the perfect holiday. And back in the old days, when we were kids, Harris and Louise hardly ever came to visit for the holidays. They were always off traveling the world—picking lichens in Ireland or finding medicinal plants in the Amazon.”

“He’ll be all alone, Austin. Why don’t you get together with him? What’s your family doing for Christmas, anyway?”

Austin looked uncomfortable. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “I went home for Thanksgiving,” he said slowly. “And my mom, maybe my brother, are coming down here to visit this spring. They’re all doing Christmas back home. But I wasn’t really up for it.” He swallowed. “We were all going to, you know, maybe go visit my dad in the hospital, do up the whole Christmas thing, even though we knew he wouldn’t have a clue what was going on. There was this big fight about it. I thought it was a good idea, my brother hated it. My mom … well, she wasn’t sure. But then my dad kind of went ahead and made the decision for us. He, um … my dad died, Summer.”

Summer gasped. She touched Austin’s shoulder. “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry, Austin. So sorry.”

“It’s not like it was exactly a surprise. I mean, I think secretly we were all kind of relieved, not that any of us would actually say anything. He was suffering a hell of a lot.”

Summer shivered a little, even though the air was warm. “It must have been especially hard for Dave,” she said. “Because he knows he has the Huntington’s gene, I mean. That’s got to be tough.”

Austin didn’t respond. He slowed to a stop behind a long line of cars heading into a public parking lot near the pier.

“It was hard,” he said at last, eyed glued on the truck ahead of them. “Seeing your future mapped out for you is, generally speaking, not a good idea.”

Summer studied him cautiously, trying to read his mood. It was almost impossible to talk to him openly about his father. He became so remote, it was hard to express to him how much she cared and how sorry she felt.

“I wish I could have been there for you.” Summer hesitated. “I mean, not
for
you. It’s not like I could have done any good. But
with
you, you know? I feel like I should have been there. I wish you’d called.”

Austin reached over and touched her cheek. “Yeah,” he said softly, “I wish I had too.”

Summer’s Bad Idea

I didn’t expect there to be so many people,” Summer said as she and Austin snaked their way along a dark path toward the beach.

Austin paused, surveying the throng. “Give a yell if you spot Esme.”

The marina and the adjacent public beach were brightly lit and filled with people, many of them camped out on blankets or in beach chairs. Vendors in red Santa hats cruised the area, selling everything from red-and-green cotton candy to conch fritters. A high-school marching band was on the longest wharf, playing an off-key reggae rendition of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” In striped tents on the edge of the beach, sellers hawked their wares.

Summer took in the merchandise as she passed. Handmade ornaments, many featuring flamingos in ski caps. Crocheted Christmas stockings that read Merry Key-Ristmas. Black-velvet paintings of Santa on a surfboard. Suddenly she found herself longing for the nice, wholesome tackiness of the Mall of America, back in Minnesota.

They broke through the crowd and headed to the water’s edge, finally locating a patch of sand to call their own. “How about we roost here and hope everybody finds us?” Austin suggested.

Summer nodded, dropping onto the fine white
sand. “When do the boats start?” she asked.

“Nine or nine-thirty, I think,” Austin said.

A small plane buzzed past, towing a sign that read All U Can Eat Fish at Cap’n Joe’s! Xmas Special— 2-for-1 Beer!

Summer smiled. “You know what I was thinking about a while ago?”

“There are no depths to which this country won’t sink to make a buck?”

“Well, that too.” She picked up a handful of sand and let it drift through her fingers slowly. “I was thinking about that day we met, on the plane.”

“You said, ‘Hi, I’m twenty-eight-A,’ and I was instantly hooked.”

“Or was it twenty-eight-B?”

“No, I’m sure it was twenty-eight-A. This is not something I would forget.” He leaned back on his elbows and nodded. “As a matter of fact, what you actually said was, “Hi, I’m your seat-meat, uh, mate. Twenty-eight-A.”

“I was stunned into babble by your incredible charm.”

“Again, your memory is serving you badly. I was your basic butthead. I didn’t want to be on that plane, and I was mad at the entire planet.”

Summer nodded. “You were going to see your dad in the hospital. You had every right to be a butthead.
And you weren’t anyway.” She paused. “You were just really sad.”

“I can’t do this,” Austin had said that day, and there’d been such sadness in his dark eyes that for a brief, insane moment, she’d wanted to reach out and hold him.

He’d flipped open his seat belt, grabbed his backpack, and sprinted down the aisle without another word.

She’d noticed his notebook on the floor and picked it up, wondering if she should go after him. Flipping guiltily through its pages, she’d come to an unfinished sonnet that began:
That I have not yet met your gentle gaze …

She remembered feeling a little as though she were rifling through someone’s underwear drawer. On the final page was a scrawled note:
Testing Thursday, March 21, 2 p.m., Dr. Mitchell. Outpatient clinic.

She’d grabbed her purse and run down the aisle, clutching the notebook in her hand.

She’d run off the plane, letting it take off without her, chasing after a complete stranger, even if he did have the most penetrating, sad, tearful eyes she’d ever seen.

It hadn’t made any sense.

And it had been the smartest thing she’d ever done. …

Austin met her eyes, pulling her back into the present.
“Yeah. I was really sad.” He reached over and took her hand. “And when I ran off that plane just before it took off, you, for some incredible, unfathomable reason, followed me. Even though you’d been on your way to spend spring break with Seth.”

“You left your notebook full of poems. I had to rescue ‘Sonnet to a Girl Unmet.’”

Austin let go of her hand. “Never did finish that.”

“Maybe,” Summer said slowly, “you met the girl.” She turned to gaze at the sky. The stars glowed and throbbed in the darkness. “So you didn’t need to finish the poem.”

For a while Austin didn’t respond. At last he shrugged. “Or maybe I met her,” he said, “but I was waiting to see how things turned out. Maybe it’s time I finished it, after all.”

“Entrant number one,
Escape Route
,” a loud-speaker blared over the crowded beach.

The crowd broke into applause. Close to shore, bobbing slowly past the marina and beach, was a huge sailboat lit up like a Vegas casino. Every square inch seemed to be covered by blinking Christmas lights. The crew, decked out in elf costumes, danced and mugged for the crowd. Atop the foremast, an illuminated mechanical Santa waved jerkily.

“It is kind of pretty,” Summer conceded, resting
on her elbows in the sand, “in a really tacky way. I suppose I have to give them points for trying. After all, Florida is sort of handicapped when it comes to Christmas weather.”

“Snowflake-challenged,” Austin agreed.

“Maybe we should have invited Harris along,” Summer said.

Austin shook his head. “Harris is like you. He would find this unbelievably tacky. Me, I say nobody does tacky better than Florida.”

“You know what just occurred to me?” Summer said. “What would make my paper really interesting?”

“Having turned it in two weeks ago?”

“What would make it interesting,” Summer continued, “would be if I looked up Vera to get her take on Harris’s story. A sort of double oral history. His and hers.”

“Bad idea.”

“It’s a great idea.”

“This isn’t a romance you’re writing. It’s about the effect of war on an individual, isn’t it?”

“But war did affect these individuals profoundly,” Summer said. “I could find Vera, ask her about things, and—”

“And then reintroduce Vera and Harris,” Austin finished. “I know how your mind works, Summer. I
don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

Austin paused as the crowd burst into applause for the second entrant, a fishing boat decorated like Santa’s sleigh. “Because,” he said when the crowd had quieted a bit, “things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to. Because you can’t write other people’s stories for them.”

“A Christmas reunion, Austin. Think of it. It would be so romantic! We could even re-create the whole thing, Harris’s dinner, the ring …”

She could tell by Austin’s dubious expression that he wasn’t buying it. “It could make him really happy, Austin,” she said. “And if it did work out, it would redeem this whole otherwise crappy Christmas.”

“If Vera didn’t want to be with Harris fifty-plus years ago, what makes you think anything’s changed?”

Summer shrugged. “People change.” She looked away. “They make decisions, they change their minds. It happens.”

They fell silent, listening to the rise and fall of the noisy crowd, ebbing and flowing like the waves.

“Is that Diana over there?” Austin asked, pointing. “On the wharf, with Marquez and …” He frowned. “Is she carrying a little girl?”

“I forgot to tell you. Diana and Marquez are adoptive
mommies. Long story.” Slowly Summer stood, brushing sand off her legs. “I guess I should get going. Thanks for today.”

Austin smiled. A girl’s voice called out his name. They turned to see Esme waving as she made her way across the sand.

“Well, good luck with the project, Summer. And if I don’t see you, have a great Christmas.” Austin leaned toward her and gave her a soft, lingering kiss on the cheek.

Summer’s heart ached as she watched him run off toward Esme, darting through the busy crowd. Her throat felt choked, and her vision blurred with tears. She wanted to run after him, to reach out and hold him. To tell him that she loved him and always had.

She couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair. It didn’t make any sense.

But then, the heart was a strange muscle indeed.

The Ghosts of Gifts Past

“There’s Summer” Seth said, and Diana felt his hand slip away from her waist.

He waved. Summer waved back as she inched her way through the crowd. As if they were just a couple of old friends, Diana thought. As if they weren’t two people who’d planned, once upon a time, to make a life together.

“Marquez, could you take Sarah for a minute?” Diana asked.

“Sure. Hop on board the ol’ shoulders, kid,” Marquez said. “You’ll have the best view in the house.”