That Summer (17 page)

“Not strippers, Lewis,” Ashley said in a tired voice. “They’re exotic dancers, and I didn’t even want to go. It was Heather’s idea.”

“I don’t believe this.” Lewis looked at me, as if I could help, and I looked back at the table. “We promised each other we wouldn’t do any of that traditional stuff, Ashley. You made a vow.”

“Lewis, don’t do this. It was just a stupid thing.”

Lewis crossed his legs, a habit that always made my father cringe. “Did you touch him?”

Ashley sighed. “Not really.”

There was a silence and I thought about making a quick exit, but as I moved to go I felt Ashley’s foot lock around the bottom of my chair, holding it in place.

“Not really,” Lewis repeated slowly. “So that would be a yes.”

“It wasn’t like I
touched
him,” Ashley said quickly, “but he danced in front of me and I had to put money in his... , thing... because it’s rude if you . . .”

“His thing?” Lewis shrieked. “You touched his thing?”

“His underwear,” Ashley said. “God, Lewis, his underwear, for Christ’s sake.”

“The same underwear that was around your neck, right?” Lewis stood up, pushing his chair out. “I don’t want to hear about this, okay? A week before my wedding and my fiancée is out putting her hands on strange men ... I just can’t think about it right now.”

“Lewis, don’t be like this,” Ashley said, too tired and hung over to get into a big fight. “Like I said, it’s just a dumb thing.”

“Well, obviously
that vow
didn’t mean much to you,” Lewis snapped. “So I wonder if any of the others will.”

“Oh, please,” Ashley said, rolling her eyes. “I’m too tired to deal with your dramatics, Lewis. Let’s just forget about it.”

Lewis just looked at her, in his pastels and madras. “I think I need some time away from you, Ashley. I have to go now.” And with that he walked stiffly to the door, opened it, and left with a great flourish of shutting it behind him. Ashley just watched him go, then turned her gaze on me.

“Thanks a lot, Haven,” she said icily. “Thanks a whole lot.” She stood up and slammed her glass on the table, then went out the same door, calling his name.

I sat at the table knowing I should feel bad. But I couldn’t do it. I knew I owed Ashley somewhere for something nasty she’d done to me; there had been enough over the years. It was exhilarating in a way, this feeling of wrongdoing, of making things even. I listened to them arguing outside and thought of Ashley the night before, telling me to remember when things were good. I sat back, listening, and concentrated on this moment, my last act of revenge against my sister, and savored it.

 

It was later that night that I got the call from Casey. I didn’t even recognize her voice at first, a voice I’d heard all my life. She sounded like she was choking, or had a cold.

“I need to talk to you,” she said as soon as I picked up the phone where Ashley had left it dangling on the floor with a glare at me. She was still mad, even though Lewis had forgiven her before he even made it down the driveway. “It’s important.”

“Okay,” I said. “Should I come over?”

“No,” she said quickly, and in the background I could hear baby Ronald hollering. “Meet me halfway. Right now, okay?”

“Sure.” I hung up, found my shoes, then walked to the living room, where my mother, Lydia, and Ashley were watching “Murder, She Wrote” and making lists. “I’m going for a walk with Casey.”

“Fine.” My mother hardly looked up, her mind on the band and the ushers and the flower arrangements. “Be back by ten.”

As I stepped into the thick summer air I heard only cicadas, screaming from the trees around our house. It was warm and sticky and I left my shoes on the porch, walking barefoot down the sidewalk, past houses with their lights burning, the sound of televisions drifting from open windows. I could see Casey coming from the other direction, walking quickly and brushing her hair out of her face. We met halfway, by the mailbox in front of the Johnsons’.

“It’s horrible,” she said to me, breathless. She was sniffling—no, crying—and she kept walking, with me falling into step behind her. “I just can’t believe it.”

“What?” I’d never seen her like this.

“He broke up with me,” she said, sobbing. “That bastard, he broke up with me over the phone. Just a few minutes ago.”

“Rick?” I pictured him from all those packs of glossy three-by-fives, always grinning into the camera, a stranger from Pennsylvania.

“Yes,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I have to sit down.” She plopped herself on the curb and pulled her knees to her chest, burying her face in her hands.

“Casey.” I reached to put my arm around her, unsure of how to act or what to say. This was the first time it had happened to us. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’d been calling so much, but he was never home, right? And I was leaving all these messages....” She stopped and wiped her eyes. “And his mother kept saying he was out, or busy, and finally he called me back today and said she made him call me. Haven, he’d been telling her all along to say he wasn’t home. He just didn’t want to talk to me.”

“He’s a jerk,” I said defensively, hearing that judging tone in my own voice, the one I recognized from Lydia Catrell talking to my mother all those mornings.

“He was hoping I’d just lose interest.... He didn’t even have the guts to call me and tell me he had a new girlfriend. He had his mom lying to me, Haven.” She made little hiccuping noises, bumpy sobs. I kept patting her shoulder, trying to help. “God, I was so stupid. I was going to go up there.”

“He’s an asshole.” I could see Rick, someone I didn’t know, lurking at the end of a telephone line, mouthing the words
I’m not here.
I hated Rick, now.

“It’s so awful,” she said, resting her head against my shoulder and sobbing full strength, while I cupped my arm around her head and held her close. “It hurts.”

I’d never been in love, never felt that surge of feeling or that fall from its graces. I’d only watched as others weathered it; my mother in her garden, Sumner on the front lawn all those years ago, Ashley sobbing from the other side of a wall. I sat curbside with my best friend, Casey Melvin, and held her, trying to shoulder some of the hurt. There’s only so much you can do, in these situations. We sat there together in our neighborhood and Casey cried, a short distance down from halfway.

Chapter Eleven

We were down
to three days and counting. Things around the house were getting crazy, with the phone ringing off the hook and travel arrangements for the incoming relatives and Ashley having a breakdown every five seconds, it seemed. My mother and Lydia had set up head-quarters at the kitchen table, with all the lists and plans and last-minute invitations covering the space entirely. I had to sit on the counter, with the displaced toaster oven, just to get my Pop-Tart in the morning.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world went on, although it was hard to imagine how. Casey was still suffering, having locked herself in her room and refused to eat for three days, until her mother took her shopping, got her hair permed, and signed them up for another tap-dancing class. Life would go on for Casey, with Rick retreating to just pictures in a photo album.

My father and Lorna had returned from a News Channel 5 promotional trip to the Bahamas, where they’d accompanied a group of viewers who’d won a contest involving sports and weather trivia. My father came back with even more hair, a sunburn, and a set of shell windchimes for me, which I hung outside my bedroom window, where it clanged all night until Ashley claimed it was ruining her sleep and demanded I take it down. I did, but I resented it. I resented everyone lately.

It had started soon after Ashley’s bachelorette party and Casey’s dumping. It was a feeling I’d woken up with one morning, a kind of whirring in my ears and an instability of the world, like things were coming to a head. I faced myself in the bathroom mirror and looked into my eyes, wondering if I would see something new in them, something crackling and different. I felt strong, as if every muscle in my body was taut and lean, not creaky and bony anymore. As if I was growing into myself, finally. I heard things differently, the sound of the neighborhood and the cicadas at night and my own breath, even and full. Everything was heightened, from the blazing blue of the sky to the feel of slippery grass under my feet to the sound of my mother’s voice calling my name from across a room. It was both scary and exhilarating, unsettling and amazing.

The day before Ashley’s wedding was also the first day of the Lakeview Mall Hot Summer Deals Sidewalk Sale, which basically consisted of all the stores taking all the junk they couldn’t sell and putting it outside, slashing the prices in half, and then watching as shoppers gobbled it up. I had to be at work extra early, at seven A.M., to help put one half of every ugly pair of shoes from the storeroom on a table out front, where it was my job to stand and watch for shoplifters while my boss, Burt, shuffled back and forth to the storeroom to find the mates for the shoes on the table. It was loud and crazy in the mall, with people digging through all the merchandise and pushing up against me in their mad dash to find a bargain. But even in all this craziness—with Burt saying in my ear that my sock quota was low so Push Socks, Push Socks and the mall Muzak blaring Barry Manilow and all the hands, all colors and sizes, grabbing at the shoes in front of me—I felt that eerie calmness, that floating feeling, that had followed me for the last few days. It was like I was just above it all, hovering, and nothing affected me.

Out of the blue, a woman grabbed my hand and said, “You call twenty bucks for a kid’s shoe a good deal?” She was wearing a bathing suit with shorts over it, flip-flops, and a big straw hat.

I just looked at her.

“Do you?” She picked up a shoe, one that was yellow and blue and pink, with what looked like Smurfs on it. “I’ll give you ten bucks for this pair. If you have a five and a half.”

“I don’t know . . . ,” I said, looking for Burt, who had disappeared for a bathroom break a good twenty minutes ago. “We don’t really bargain on shoes.”

“You don’t, huh?” she said in a nasty voice, like I’d been rude to her. “Well, that’s just fine. Just find me a five and a half, would you?”

Burt appeared next to me now, smelling like the hand soap we used in the bathroom. “Is there a problem here, Haven?”

“Five and a half,” the woman said loudly, shaking the shoe in my face. I watched the Smurfs blur past, blue and pink and yellow.

“Find the woman a five and a half,” Burt said to me, prodding me in the back with one hand. “I’ll deal with the table for a while.”

I went back in the storeroom and climbed up to the discount shelf, looking for the ugly Smurf shoe. There was a six and a four but no five and a half, of course. I went back out to the table.

“Sorry, it’s not in,” I said.

“It’s not in,” she repeated flatly. “Are you sure?”

“I am indeed,” I said, realizing that I was being a smartass and not really caring. Burt was looking at me. I felt that whooshing in my ears, that powerful evenness. I imagined myself floating down the Lakeview Mall, tied to nothing, the silk of those banners brushing my shoulders.

“Haven, perhaps you can interest the woman in another style,” Burt said to me quickly.

“I want this one,” the woman said, shaking the shoe in front of my face again. Behind her, someone else was saying, “Miss? Miss? I need some help with this shoe, please?”

“We don’t have that shoe in, ma’am,” I repeated to her in a singsong voice, my customer-pleasing smile stretching across my face.

“Well, then, I think I should get another shoe at the same price.” She put one hand on her hip and I watched as the fabric of her bathing suit scrunched, folding over itself at her stomach. People just shouldn’t wear beach attire in public. “It’s only fair.”

“Ma’am, it’s a sale item, we’re out of that size, and I’m sorry,” I said, but already my mind was drifting. Burt was busy untying a bunch of shoelaces and the people were all around me and the Muzak in the mall seemed louder, suddenly. I wondered if I was going to pass out, right there in the middle of the Hot Summer Deals Sidewalk Sale.

“Well, that’s just fine,” the woman snapped. I watched as she tossed the shoe at me. She meant for it to hit the pile probably, but it bounced off a stray saddle shoe in the bin and nailed me in the head, a direct Smurf hit. I was hot all of a sudden, the whooshing in my ears loud and calming, and I felt awake, my skin tingling.

She was walking away, flip-flops thwacking against the floor, as I grabbed the shoe, ducked around the table, and went after her. I could still feel where the shoe had hit me, but that wasn’t what spurred me on and made me rush through the crowd of bargain hunters, following the pudgy lady in the straw hat. It was something more, a giant mass of Ashley’s snide remarks and tantrums, of Lorna Queen’s tiny ears and my father’s new hair, of Sumner standing on our front lawn, abandoned, all those years ago. It was the tallness and Casey’s Rick and Lydia Catrell and Europe, and my mother standing in the doorway watching me leave for my father’s wedding. It was the whole damn summer, my whole damn life, leading up to this moment with this stranger in the middle of the Lakeview Mall.